English, here to stay.

"I recall an incident that Crystal describes in his book Global English — it happened in India some years back, involving a street protest in support of Hindi. The banners were largely in Hindi, but there was one very prominent banner that read ‘Death to English’. The event was filmed on world television and of course it was this banner that reached more people around the globe than any of the others. You can see the quandary facing the people — write your message in English and you compromise your identity, but you do connect with a worldwide audience! (Just as an interesting aside, you could compare here the predicament of early English writers. John Wallis wrote about the growing significance of English in the 1600s — yet, his grammar of English Johannis Wallisii grammatical linguae anglicanae was in Latin. Even into the 18th century, Latin continued as the language of scholarship and by writing Principia Mathematica (1687) and Arithmetica Universalis (1707) in Latin, Isaac Newton reached a wider audience — besides, English still wasn’t deemed respectable enough for such learned and technical texts!)"

- Excerpt from here by Kate Burridge, prominent Australian Linguist.