English Teaching and Learning

This week the president of the European Commission,  Jean-Claude Juncker, declared that  “Slowly but surely English is losing importance in Europe”. Despite Brexit, the statistics tell us that more and more people in Europe and worldwide are studying English. Regardless of your standpoint on the UK's exit from the European Union, Brexit is not going to affect the trajectory of English-language learning.  In a couple of years people who travel to and from the UK and Europe, or do any sort of business between the two may or may not be speaking in English to each other. Regardless of this English will still be the dominant worldwide language because it is the language of business, science, all aviation and the de facto language of the Internet, which I hear is getting quite popular nowadays.  This is not, however, a defense of English as a lingua franca. But it does remind me that English does not belong to the people of English-speaking countries but to anyone who uses it.