Dominant languages can spread even without coercion
What&#x27;s already happening is that languages that aren&#x27;t tied to their own unique literary cultures are slowly shrinking. The countries that don&#x27;t have their own media import it, and will often learn other languages to access it rather than waiting for translations of varying quality. France, Germany, South Korea, Japan, and India all have enough unique, untranslated culture to get people to consider learning the languages that culture is written in.<p>This isn&#x27;t the case for, say, the Netherlands, or Sweden. And I&#x27;d specifically cite the need to import English-language cultural works as driving the use of English in those countries. There&#x27;s plenty of other countries&#x27; whose languages never really had a literary culture to begin with, too - although usually at that point you can find some kind of forced cultural erasure rather than mere economic need to learn English.<p>&gt;Multilingualism (both in countries and individuals) lessens the zero-sum nature of language competition. But it is costly, in both time and money. Ultimately, some societies may have to put a price on a cultural inheritance that, once lost, is nigh-impossible to recover.<p>That being said, this is peak anglobrain. The EU bloc is already a deeply multilingual society, and people are perfectly willing to dabble with multiple language proficiencies. Ironically, this is because much of the EU just falls back to English - like, to the point where the EU has it&#x27;s own dialect of it[0]. French, German, and Spanish are also commonly learned and used as second languages, too.<p>This &quot;languages are hard to learn&quot; meme is, more than anything, the product of bad educational practices, lack of student motivation, and difficulty in finding speaking partners. For some reason, the entire anglosphere[1] is just plain bad at language education[2]. That&#x27;s not to say that learning a new language is <i>easy</i>, of course. It&#x27;s just that we aren&#x27;t even really trying. The anglosphere is perfectly willing to just sit and make the rest of the world speak our language.<p>[0] This is known as Euro English.<p>[1] And, arguably, Japan.<p>[2] The UK is so bad at it that it was probably <i>the</i> deciding factor in Brexit. Nobody wants to immigrate to countries they can&#x27;t speak the languages of. This meant that the UK had a uniquely lopsided ratio of immigrants to emigrants, and that much of the UK simply didn&#x27;t <i>get</i> the benefits of being allowed to leave.