I'm betting this is going to flip around in the next eighty years or so, and not towards Spanish.<p>If China's economy doesn't crash and burn (and, if it does, if it does not fail to rise again from the ashes like ours did after the Great Depression), Chinese is likely to become an important trade language. It's a difficult language, but then again - for different reasons - so is English.<p>I'm placing my bets that within a century, there will be two primary trade languages (Chinese, probably Mandarin but also likely Cantonese), and English. And perhaps, a century or so after that, simply a pidgin of the two.<p>The way global communications is bringing people closer cognitively will effectively starve out other languages. People will still speak them - likely limited to their local social groups (family, friends, et cetera), but fall to a global trade language (pidgin of English+Chinese) for nearly every other encounter.<p>In some ways, this may be extremely interesting from a linguistics standpoint: Everyone will speak a common language, but there will be more and more language-isolates, as individual social circles become more insulated from each other by the global trade language.