339mn native EN (4.52%/7.5bn and falling).
Up to 1bn inc L2. The other speakers that learned the language but hardly use it, I think are not counted.

It was estimated that EU (& the world) would save billions/year if Esperanto was used.
Isn’t this the right time to refocus on Esperanto as much more effective solution?

Another point: while the Chinese government does promote the Chinese language overseas, would it really want it to become a “World Language”? That would imply, given currently scholarly and artistic norms, the existence of an autonomous academic and artistic sphere, free of major political interference. I doubt they would want that. So, either Chinese doesn’t spread as World Language or those scholarly norms change to disallow serious discussion of “sensitive topics” (for the Chinese government now: Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen)

I would analogize with the CNY, the Chinese currency. The government will often make noises about “internationalizing” the Yuan, which produces breathless articles about “End of the US Dollar/Empire” and such. They do so because it signal the (re-)arrival of China as the preeminent power of the world. But to do would mean giving up control of things like the USD-CHY exchange rate and such, something that the CCP is reluctant to do.

“if the greatest number of colleagues speaking a particular language
were the main reason, you’d be publishing in Chinese; or, at least, we
would see a transition to Chinese as the language of science.”

Apart from inertia, we would indeed be seeing such a transition, and you’re right that we’re not. But I think this has different reasons. Existing speakers of (any kind of) Chinese are clumped geographically, while English was already scattered widely before science became monolingual (again); China has only invested serious amounts of money in science in the last few years; and the limiting factor in learning enough Chinese to read (let alone write) a scientific paper is the writing system. If you don’t sit down every day and write a line of every character you know, you’ll forget most of them pretty quickly; and you need more characters for reading a scientific paper than for reading a newspaper. So, as you say, China invests in teaching everyone English instead. (At present, a lot of science is actually published in Chinese and hardly gets out of China.)

Hi David,
No one can doubt that US imperialism also had a major role to play in the spread of English. However, while the US have not declined as much as GB, it has probably passed its zenith, too. What I was asking is what happens to a language that has spread with empire after the empire (or, in this case, two empires …) goes into decline.

I think you are mistaken as to why global scientists publish in English: if the greatest number of colleagues speaking a particular language were the main reason, you’d be publishing in Chinese; or, at least, we would see a transition to Chinese as the language of science. That is not happening because the numbers of non-native speakers of Chinese are relatively modest.

The numerical advantage of English at the present moment is this: the number of people who speak English as an additional language and use it to communicate transnationally (such as yourself) outnumber native speakers five times (ca. 400 million native speakers vs. ca. 2,000 million L2 speakers). I’m arguing that, as Anglophone core countries become increasingly isolationist, L2 speakers will become not only the quantitative inheritors but also the ideological possessors of English …

I’m a biologist. I’ve never lived in an English-speaking place. All my publications so far have been in English. How come? Because the USA has the greatest number of my colleagues and the most research funding, making the English language the easiest way to be understood by the greatest number of people.