Re: English was the second language of the US for centuries. Now Spanish overtaking i
Relax. Travel the world sometime. When you go to many different places as I have, you find that just about everyone speaks at least a little English. I had no problem communicating in Hong Kong, Singapore, Shenzen, Dubai, Mombasa, Nairobi, Manila, Busan, Seoul, Paris...or even London. The only place I had a problem finding someone to communicate with in English was Japan. On the other hand, trying finding anyone in any of those places (other than London, Paris, and Manila) who speaks Spanish. Good luck with that!
And this is why there are more people learning English today in China than there are Americans learning English here today - English is the new lingua franca, as it were. That's also why all pilots on international flights today are required - required! - to communicate in English, and the airports they serve must have English-speaking air traffic controllers.
So...yeah, the proportion of Americans speaking Spanish is growing...and the demographic trend pretty much makes any kind of reversal of the trend next to impossible. So if there's nothing you can personally do about it, the wisest thing to do is to learn Spanish. Here's a joke my wife once told me: a person who speaks three languages is trilingual, a person who speaks two languages is bilingual, and a person who speaks only one language is...American (which is simply pointing out in humorous fashion that most of the world's people speak at least one language). Ever since she said that, I've tried to learn her native language of Tagalog, and I can communicate to a
very limited extent in Spanish, French, and German. And I learned two great lessons: one, there ARE words and concepts in other langauges that simply cannot be translated into English (I'm not kidding!), and two, with all our verb conjugations and exceptions-to-the-rules-spelling, English is a stupidly, horrendously complex language. With Tagalog, you can learn
how to pronounce nearly every word in their language in five minutes flat. What's more, give yourself a couple days, and you'll know how to spell almost every word in their language when you hear it. It still takes years and years to learn the vocabulary, but the pronunciation and spelling are much, much easier than English. This doesn't mean the language can't have complex concepts as English does - Tagalog certainly does. It's just that it's so much simpler to learn the spelling and pronunciation.
One more thing - the overwhelming plurality of the one thing that is enabling communication between countries and cultures to an undreamt-of extent - the internet - is English. The overwhelming plurality of the programming is in English.
So relax. English is going to remain the world's lingua franca throughout our lifetimes. But do yourself a favor and learn some other languages. Hopefully, you'll find out - as I did - the truth behind the old saying that to learn a culture's language is to learn the soul of that culture.