Nicholas Ostler
Nicholas Ostler is author of three books on language history, Empires of the Word (2005), Ad Infinitum (on Latin - 2007), and The Last Lingua Franca (2010). He is also Chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, a global charitable organization registered in England and Wales. A research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, he has also been a visiting professor at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, and L.N. Gumilev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. He holds an M.A. from Oxford University in Latin, Greek, philosophy and economics, and a 1979 Ph.D. in linguistics from M.I.T. He is an academician in the Russian Academy of Linguistics.
12/09/2018
Nicholas Ostler responds to Lane Greene's article that defended the idea that MT cannot win the race against English to become the new lingua franca. The growth in populism that has been evident all over the world in the last few years suggests that, if there is a change in demand it has not been towards international, often multilingual, communication, but for a retreat to emphasis on local – monolingual – communication.