But British language scholar David Graddol says English will probably drop in dominance by the middle of this century to rank, after Chinese, about equally with Arabic, Hindi, and Urdu, a south-Asian tongue closely related to Hindi.

• 但是英国语言学家戴维·格雷德尔认为到本世纪中叶英语的主导地位很可能有所下降，位居汉语之后，与阿拉伯语、北印度语和乌尔都语（一种与北印度语十分相近的南亚语言）的地位相差不多。