ответ: the great jakob grimm, the founder of comparative philology, hazarded the guess more than a century ago that english would one day become the chief language of the world, and perhaps crowd out several of the principal idioms altogether. “in wealth, wisdom and strict economy,” he said, “none of the other living languages can vie with it.” at that time the guess was bold, for english was still in fifth place, with not only french and german ahead of it, but also spanish and russian. in 1801, according to michael george mulhall, the relative standing of the five, in the number of persons using them, was as second. and he was true. english language is using now in all structures as political, economical, technology, science, art and etc.
this enormous increase in the american population, beginning with the great immigrations of the 30’s and 40’s, quickly lifted english to fourth place among the languages, and then to third, to second and to first. when it took the lead the attention of philologists was actively directed to the matter, and in 1868 one of them, a german named brackebusch, first seriously raised the question whether english was destined to obliterate certain of the older tongues. brackebusch decided against it on various philological grounds, none of them particularly sound. he was an own figure, whos dissertation shows, were rather against him.
the next estimates, for the year 1900, he take from jespersen. the statisticians responsible for them he did not know.
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