Could the English language die? For now it is dominant-but as the Romans could tell you, nothing lasts for ever

Given that a staggering 1,500 languages could vanish by the end of this century, by some estimates - close to a quarter of the world's total - some may find it obscene to even ask whether the English language could die. English is certainly not on the endangered list.

- Laura Spinney

As the one truly global language, it is more often labelled an exterminator, a great lumbering titanosaur that unwittingly crushes hapless smaller languages underfoot - or undertongue.

The fact is, though, that no language has yet proved eternal. Subjects of the Roman or Egyptian empires might once have assumed that their languages would last for ever, like their hegemony, but they were wrong. Latin and Egyptian were eventually transformed into languages that would have been unintelligible to Augustus or Ramses the Great. "English could of course die, just as Egyptian died," says linguist Martin Haspelmath, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The more interesting questions are: when and how?

Predicting the future of any language is an exercise in speculation. Homo sapiens has been nattering for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years, but we only thought of recording our pearls of wisdom about 5,000 years ago.