Air traffic controllers, then scientists, then internet users. As each increasingly large technical community adopted English, the momentum grew. Whole countries—some containing hundreds of millions of people who have never attended a scientific conference and may not even use the internet often—were dragged into the vortex. This process now appears inexorable, but it took a while to become so. In 1969 a prominent linguist at Columbia University noted that a world language was probably inevitable.
