This was accompanied by a proprietorial admission that French has decisively lost the battle for status as the worldlanguage and that Englishis now the established global means of communication, for practical matters and for a growing range of cultural ones.
Mr Bellos shows that the worldis very eager to familiarise itself with English, both as a vehicular language, (routinely used in the corridors of the EU, and in academia for example) and as a literary language.