In the forties, FDR and Churchill expected that they’d have to drastically alter English to turn it into a global language. Decolonization, by placing men like Manuel Quezon in power, only worsened English’s prospects. Yet English surmounted these obstacles and became a true world language. How? Part of the story, some linguists have insisted, is the foreign policies of the United States and Britain. Even as Anglophone powers lost political control over much of the world, this explanation goes, they found ways to impose their language on weaker countries. They did that in large part through
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