Perfect translation is going to be hard. For an everyday most common 5,000 words that may be ok but anything outside of that would require the invention of many new words when English likely already has them. They don't really mean anything in English either - for example "quantum mechanics" are just two words, and have to be learned even for English speakers. When coming from another language you may as well use whatever words others are already using. You can see that happening when other language speakers adopt English words.

There are other factors - English speakers readily adopt words from other languages as needed. This makes it a lot easier to expand. Compare with the Académie française: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise

Look at what people all over the world are constantly bombarded with - Hollywood's output is shown (and popular) everywhere. As are words like Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Nike and Apple. Even Bollywood is including increasing amounts of English in its output. Popular entertainers in various countries have also taken to singing some or all of their songs in English.

Look at generating input. There is a bias to a reasonably small number of symbols. A 500 key keyboard isn't practical (although variations exist). Having many modes and switching amongst them isn't that pleasant either. We already see people dropping case from English where is it mostly cosmetic. (Of course voice recognition is always around the corner but isn't practical in many environments and has always been around the corner.)

It is acceptable to speak English "badly" - did I tell you about the time that: the mat cat sat upon? I've heard from speakers of other languages that just getting the gender wrong in a sentence is enough to make it extremely hard to understand.

My prediction is that the number of speakers of English as a second language will continue to climb since it is the most friction free way of communicating in many circumstances, and that will rapidly lead to their kids adopting it as a first language. Heck all the people I know who have a non-English language as their first language have their kids speaking English as their first language.

TLDR: English makes a very good lowest common denominator

There needs to be an international version of English designed so that it is simple to learn. For instance: one sound = one letter and all verbs conjugate the same.

You would enjoy Bill Bryson's book Mother Tongue. At one point (several hundred years ago) English was going through a period of simplification and rationalization but it was also during that period that dictionaries, newspapers etc become popular. Consequently some words had already become consistent and some hadn't and we are somewhat stuck with poor timing. http://www.amazon.com/The-Mother-Tongue-English-That/dp/0380...

Esperanto is an attempt at a equal international language for all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

Because English and English speakers are happy to adapt and change, the simplification is happening. Look at text messaging where superfluous extra words and letters get dropped, as does case. Even Hollywood is careful to keep language simple in their popular movies aimed at a worldwide audience.

Thank you for the recommendations. How do you think English speaker would respond to a version of English which had changes like: Each sound had its own letter and all spelling was phonetic?

There have been lots of attempts to reform English. There is also Simple English Wikipedia which just simplifies structure not pronounciation https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

The idea is glorious but if you skim random pages ("Show any page"), most of pages are neigher complete nor about important topics nor written in simple language.

An incompatible variant of English would have none of the network advantages, at which point you might as well use a fully designed conlang like lojban.

An alternative, phonemic alphabet for foreigners might have more hope, though even then the use case is narrow.

I was thinking it could be designed initially to be 80% compatible with English, in order to gain a high rate of adoption. then introduce changes every 5 years.

> did I tell you about the time that: the mat cat sat upon?

I'm not getting it. What was the bad English speaker trying to say?

I'm not sure if Google Translate is cutting edge but I would imagine it's pretty close to that. For Finnish atleast it's not really any better than BabelFish was 10 years ago. You can get the gist of things most of the time but there are still huge errors and misunderstandings in anything that's not super-basic.

Although much changes with technology, much remains the same. People have had the technological ability to communicate solely through telephone/computer for many years which easily beats face to face communication in terms of efficiency in a geographically diverse group, but people are still shelling out money for plane tickets. There is something to be said for the ability to chat to someone about a ball game without speaking and hearing through a machine.

Although I'd say human to human and human to computer communication are very different, I'd agree with you that some languages are objectively better. There are ancient tribes that don't have words for numbers above two. Esperanto seems to be one of the easier languages to learn, at least for those already fluent in european languages. But when it comes to adoption, culture and ubiquity seem to be the most important factors.

>If any English that you hear, see, or read is instantly and perfectly translated to your native language, and vice versa, then all languages get equal footing. (Except perhaps for some primitive languages.)

Well, not only that. English usage will also drop because of long term economic and cultural effects. English had commerce, hollywood and popular music going for it.

But billions of people in emerging middle classes now, e.g in China and India, get their own "hollywoods" and music on, and they also get at least equal footing in the world trade-ways (commerce).

With a large cultural industry and commercial opportunities, they'll be just like Americans that could not care less about non-english speaking content (movies, books, series, webpages, songs, etc).

> ... get their own "hollywoods" and music on, and they also get at least equal footing in the world trade-ways (commerce).

And the way they do that is by including English. For example see the second paragraph of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollywood or consider the recent Korean pop success "Gangnam Style".

I foresee a world where everyone speaks English, but with a regional accent.

Less and less as their regional and peripheral economies take the lead.

The english are a byproduct of the American cultural dominance in the pop field that is slowly corroded.

The "cultural" enterprises will segment and diversify, but business, tech, and science will all converge on English. Anyone from those other "hollywoods" will have to use English to reach a global audience.