A small number of languages, particularly English, are becoming dominant in business and education worldwide.

Today English is used in international business, in science and in many universities around the world. In my opinion, this situation has more advantages than disadvantages, but it also creates some risks for other languages.

Firstly, a common language makes communication much easier. A businessman from Japan and a businessman from Brazil can discuss a contract without a translator, and scientists from different countries can read the same research and work together. If everybody used only their own language, international cooperation would be very slow and very expensive.

Secondly, English gives opportunities to individual people. A student who knows English can study in many countries, read millions of books and websites, and find a better job in an international company. For young people in small countries, this is a very important advantage.

On the other hand, there are dangers. When universities teach only in English, scientific words do not develop in the national language, and after some years people cannot discuss science in their own country. Some small languages can even disappear completely. In addition, native speakers of English have an unfair advantage, because they do not spend years learning a foreign language and they always express their ideas better in meetings.

In conclusion, I think the dominance of English is mainly positive because it helps communication and gives opportunities, but governments should protect their own languages in education and culture.

English has become the default language of international business, research and higher education. My view is that this is beneficial where English functions as a shared second language, and harmful where it begins to replace national languages inside a country.

The advantages of a common lingua franca are difficult to overstate. Coordination between people who share no language is slow, expensive and error-prone, and the realistic alternative to a dominant English is not linguistic equality but fragmentation, in which research circulates only within language communities and smaller countries are cut off entirely. For individuals the gains are equally concrete: competence in English multiplies the universities a student can attend, the literature they can read and the employers who will consider them, and this matters most to people from countries with few domestic opportunities.

The serious cost is what linguists call domain loss. When a country's universities teach science exclusively in English, technical terminology stops developing in the national language, and within a generation it becomes impossible to discuss the subject in it at all — the language survives socially but is quietly excluded from high-status use. There is also an asymmetry that is rarely acknowledged: native speakers negotiate, publish and interview in their first language while everyone else operates in their second, which is a permanent advantage nobody earned and which shapes who succeeds internationally.

In conclusion, I regard the trend as positive overall, since the practical benefits of a shared language are enormous and the alternative is worse. The risk to guard against is displacement rather than coexistence: national languages must retain their professional and academic domains, not merely their domestic ones.

Whether the global spread of English is a good thing depends almost entirely on a distinction that most discussions skip: whether it is being added to people's linguistic resources or substituted for them. Additive English is one of the most useful institutions the modern world possesses; replacing English is a slow and largely irreversible loss. My verdict is positive, but it holds only while the first condition is met.

The case for a lingua franca rests on coordination costs, and the relevant test is what the alternative actually looks like. It is not a world in which languages meet as equals — that has never existed and could not be organised. It is a world in which research circulates only inside language communities, standards are negotiated through layers of translation, and speakers of smaller languages are excluded from everything they cannot access directly. Against that, a single shared second language is enormously egalitarian: it is precisely the student in a small country with few domestic options for whom English opens the most doors.

The genuine danger is domain loss, and it operates quietly enough that it is usually noticed too late. Once a country's universities teach medicine or engineering exclusively in English, the technical vocabulary of those fields stops evolving in the national language. A generation later, professionals cannot discuss their own specialism in their mother tongue — not because the language is dying, but because it has been pushed out of the domains that carry prestige. The language then persists for family and popular culture while serious matters happen elsewhere, which is a demotion rather than an extinction, and considerably harder to reverse than it was to cause.

There is also a distributional point worth stating plainly. Native speakers conduct their careers in their first language while their competitors operate in a second, and the advantage compounds across every job interview, funding application and negotiation. Ideas expressed with less fluency are systematically received as less rigorous, which means the dominance of English quietly shapes whose work is taken seriously — an unearned advantage that no amount of goodwill removes.

My position, therefore, is that English dominance is beneficial and should not be resisted as such, because the fragmentation it prevents would cost far more than it imposes. What requires active defence is the status of national languages in exactly the places English is displacing them — universities, professions, technical writing. Coexistence is affordable; substitution is not, and the difference is a matter of policy rather than of inevitability.