There's a good introduction by Michael Rosen to the role of English as a world language in the BBC News magazine this week. He looks at the role of Latin as one of the first "world" languages (sort of...) before moving on to think about the ways in which English and its various Englishes have spread around the globe.
Some of the most recent debates around this issue have centred around the existence of a standard form of the language (Global English) or different versions of it (Global Englishes), or more recently around a phenomenon called ELF (English as a Lingua Franca). Anyway, Michael Rosen's article is a good start if you want to find out more about the background to the debate, and you can find some more discussion on this blog post.
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