English has unarguably become the world's dominant language. And languages die out every decade. But what is the future of today's languages? Is it simply more of the same? Are languages doomed to lose much of their local flavour? Are 'creoles' - or merged languages, such as 'Spanglish' - merely a by-product of colonialism, and destined to die out? Or could they even become threats to 'English' one day? In Mark Abley's fascinating new book, he seeks out and listens to individuals. He visits a school in Toronto where the children speak more than 140 different mother tongues; investigates how African American Vernacular English, also known as Ebonics, is spreading out of American inner cities and into the suburbs; he asks what the unmistakeable slip toawards informality and the growth of acronyms tell us about the lingusitic future; and he explores the new languages of mobile phone texting and online chat rooms, asking if they can really be considered to be an enrichment of language. Future Language argues that the best reason to fear for language is not a supposed decline in grammatical standards but rather a rise in mutual incomprehensibility. While English has far more speakers than any other language, it also has many more words, which are often abbreviated, corrupted, or otherwise privatised to create registers understandable to the few, rather than the many. The result is an irresistable journey around the linguistic globe, stimulating, provocative and intelligent, and constantly open to the vitality and playful invention that make languages what they are.