Babel

Where it once appeared

The whole-world-speak-English future may be a mixed blessing. Despite all sorts of problems aroused related to culture, identity, minorities education and rights, language shift and death, bilingualism and diglossia... all of these studied by sociolinguists with hefty works, it creates, however, the possibility that people who speak different mother tongues can work together at all. A biblical imagination, not long after the story of Noah's ark:

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land... and they dwelt there.
...
And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven...
And the Lord said, 'Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language... and now nothing will be restrained from them... '
(Genesis 11:1-6)

God apparently was not happy about this, and probably afraid of the power of one language.

'let us go down, and confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.'
So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: And they left off to build the city (Genesis 11:7-8)

so the project of the city and the tower was over. This is the origin of the name 'Babel', because God scattered us all over the earth.

Believe this story or not, it gives you a piece of Christian mind of the world. While many of our ancestral Chinese fought desperately to guard the country, and attempted to approach the world just by influence of merits, Missionaries came, centuries ahead of navy troops. Believing the world didn't use to be multilingual (perhaps), they were willing to learn our language and translate religious texts, and converted many to Christian.

References

The Holy Bible, authorised King James Version with an introduction and notes by Robert Carroll & Stephen Prickett, 1997, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0192835254

Romaine, Suzanne, 2000, Language in Society: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (2nd Edition). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198731922