[Worldwalker]

@Mike, I know. It's buried in one of my overly-long posts, but I mentioned that (and Sir Walter Scott's explanation in Ivanhoe) as the reason I became interested in languages.

I don't think the central control, or lack thereof, of a language really matters for its adoption and adaptation in any given place. Look at Haitian Creole, for instance, which is derived from -- but certainly not -- French. While I'm sure L'Académie française is horrified, there's nothing they can do.

I think the reason that English supplanted French, which in turn supplanted Latin, which very, very long ago supplanted Greek, as an international language is more than just the British Empire. We have all heard how English, with its irregularity, its non-phonetic spelling, and its reputed million-word vocabulary, is hard to learn. We forget, though, how easy basic English is to learn. English abandoned many of the more complicated aspects of its parent languages. English threw out gender, it threw out declension (except for plurals and some pronouns), it adopted a strict word-order syntax, etc. It lost the phonemes that caused pronunciation difficulties in its parent languages. It is, really, a language designed for non-English-speakers to use, because that's exactly what it started out as: a way for speakers of totally different Romance and Germanic languages to communicate.

Within a limited domain, such as air traffic control, or currency trading, a speaker of another language can rapidly acquire enough English to function, because they're generally not dealing with the weird stuff. They might not be able to discuss linguistics on MobleRead, but they don't need to; they just need to land their airplanes, complete their trades, or whatever else their specialty requires. And those specialized uses, in turn, drive more generalized uses. Just as people once learned French (or Latin, or Greek) just because it was a trans-national language -- it was a sign of an educated person -- even though they as individuals were unlikely to need it for that purpose, English has picked up the same cachet. In other words, people learn English because other people learn English.

Modern technology has influenced this, too. Just as the works of ancient scholars were in Greek, then the writings of the Church, and later of science, were in Latin, and then much great literature was in French, a lot of things people want to understand are in English today. First radio, then TV, and now the Net, have had enormous amounts of content in English. While each of them in turn changed, and the languages became more diverse, that front-loading with English helped further drive the popularization of English as an international second language.

As I understand it, the reason many countries adopted the languages of their former colonial masters as their official/government languages is a matter of simple practicality: Prior to the advent of modern transportation, and for that matter before any real need to go anywhere, since "there" was pretty much the same as "here", languages and dialects were very localized. New Guinea and its thousand languages is the usual example, but similar situations occur worldwide (including in England itself not all that many centuries ago). Choosing one of those languages as the country's official language would have caused political trouble among those whose languages were not chosen, aside from all the practical issues. The colonial language (usually English, French, or Spanish) was relatively neutral, or at least everyone disliked the colonizers equally, and those people most likely to make up the new government and bureaucracy after independence had often been a part of the colonial government, so it was the natural choice for a national language in linguistically fragmented countries.

Of course, some of those former-colonial forms of English have continued the language's tradition of adopting new words, even new structure. This upsets some people who think that "English" is something that can be pinned on a board and put in a display case, unchanging and unchangeable. However, the English of India or Singapore or anywhere else is as legitimate (or illegitimate) as the English of England. They all come from the same roots, and they'd all horrify Geoffrey Chaucer equally.

P.S. Note that the latter does not excuse sloppiness, laziness, or ignorance on the part of people who don't know "flaunt" from "flout", or "comprise" from "consist". That's ignorance, not linguistic change.