From Beijing to Brussels, the chattering classes are learning English in their millions. Second-language speakers now outnumber native tonguers. Do you talk Chinglish, Manglish or Singlish? Eric Enno Tamm deciphers the new dialects of our lingua franca and the future for a standard “World English.”

From its humble Anglo-Saxon beginnings in the British Isles around 450 AD, English has become civilisation’s most spectacular vernacular; a lingua franca the earth has never experienced on such a scale before. Worldwide, more than 1.4 billion people live in countries where English has official status and about a third of the world’s population is routinely exposed to the language. It’s the main parlance of books, newspapers, air travel, international business, academia, the Internet, diplomacy and pop culture. One forecast projects that every second person on the planet could have some level of competency in English by 2050.

When you’re prancing through as many international airports as Wallpaper* does, you come to appreciate that no matter where you touch down – Lagos, Luxembourg, Kuala Lumpur – someone will be able to speak English. But don’t misunderstand us: we aren’t monolingual, Anglophile triumphalists. On any given day, Wallpaper’s London HQ is buzzing with Swedish, German, French, Italian, Spanish and an occasional smattering of Estonian. It’s just that English is the language of convenience for cross-cultural communication whether we’re chatting up our Munich photographer, a Stockholm architect or that handsome Latin thing lurking around the pool on a sojourn in Majorca.

Indeed, the sun never sets on the English language. So why then, despite its global success, has the Queen’s English been dethroned? Why has one London publisher even called it “an outmoded and backward looking concept?”

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