While the global financial crisis has given weight to predictions that the Pax Americana is on its way out, to be replaced before long by a Pax China or multilateral control by powers such as the G20, the status of English as the global language seems likely to prop up U.S. power for some time to come.

"Half the world's people are projected to be speaking English by 2015. And so long as English is on track to become the world's unofficial language, the United States will likely be center stage," writes Ali Wyne, a junior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in the journal Foreign Policy.

"English is a first language for 400 million people, and a fluent second for between 300 and 500 million more," he quotes the International Herald Tribune. "Add on top of that the 750 million who have studied English as a foreign language and you have well over 1 billion members of the English-speaking world." Most of world's influential newspapers do have English editions, and more than 90 percent of the major science magazines in the world are published in English.

The driving force behind the growing influence of English is the quest for economic betterment, Wyne says. "In China, America's putative superpower replacement, learning English is considered a gateway to middle-class security; 300 million people speak it there, and another 350 million people speak it in India." He predicts that English will become the second language in China, Japan, South Korea, Africa and Latin America.

"Language quite literally anchors human progress -- it allows children to learn, authors to write, consumers to buy, companies to produce, leaders to negotiate, people to travel, and enables just about anything else that you can imagine," he concludes. "Whether it's Latin during the first century or French in the 18th, great powers and global lingua francas tend to go together. So while the unipolar moment may be over, the growing influence of English will ensure that the United States doesn't fade into the sunset anytime soon."