It may be hard for those who were born into one of the world's mega-languages, like English, Spanish, Arabic or Chinese that are spoken by 50 million or more people, to imagine what it must be like to feel one's way of speaking die, to lose the natural voice of one's thoughts. But none of these dominating languages is immune to change. No living language can stand still for long, lest it lose its umbilical connection to the world that sustains it. Even as it assumes global mastery, English itself is too busy jitterbugging to maintain any standard form for more than a few decades. Renowned for its ability to absorb new elements from other tongues, English is itself morphing under the pressure of globalization.
More people today speak it as a second language than as a native tongue.
In this way, no doubt, English eventually will go the way of Latin, which once held sway as the language of empire and a universal church. But exactly what constitutes a natural death for a language today is open to argument. To be sure, it is a principle now properly part of law that no majority should oppress a minority language. Few would argue today with the right to be bilingual. In Los Angeles, where more than 120 languages are spoken today, these questions of language diversity are anything but academic.