Challenge: Make English majority language

Make recognizable English the mother tongue of 51+% of the world's population in 2012 without ASBs.
Note that to be recognizable, the PoD should probably be no earlier than the 16th Century.
If you can't do it, what is the best you can do?
 
Make recognizable English the mother tongue of 51+% of the world's population in 2012 without ASBs.
Note that to be recognizable, the PoD should probably be no earlier than the 16th Century.
If you can't do it, what is the best you can do?
OTL is the best you could do.
 
OTL is the best you could do.

You could get a simultaneous Ameriwank and a federal British Empire.

Of course, then America would start becoming Spanish earlier, and the British Empire would be more tolerant and thus have Hindi, Maratha, Xhosa, etc. as official languages. But still net increase of English over OTL.
 
during the whole trade thing with china, you could have the british devestate them harder, forcing them to not only open up and stop badgering the british, but also take more port cities from them and perhaps entire regions...this way china, whichd still go indpendent (though wheather under comunisim is anyones guess), would have more anglophone areas and english would be more commonplace in asia
 
You could get a simultaneous Ameriwank and a federal British Empire.

Of course, then America would start becoming Spanish earlier, and the British Empire would be more tolerant and thus have Hindi, Maratha, Xhosa, etc. as official languages. But still net increase of English over OTL.

Federal British empire is impossible and like you said, an Ameriwank will result in Spanish gaining more importance, not English. OTL has English as the main language of the world with communication between countries, and it has an especially large importance in commerce. And those who have it as their mother tongues won't really increase
 
Today English is the main language employed for international communications in the fields of politics, commerce, science, transport etc. There were various possible time lines in history where this situation could have changed. If some other power like France or Germany had been successful in establishing their superiority on the European continent and building a larger empire, the French or the German could have taken its place. If Spain was successful in annexing Portugal and bringing all the Portuguese possessions in S.America, Africa and Asia under it, later powerful Spanish speaking countries could have risen in many places, enabling Spanish to become the most important language. If Islam had spread into more areas and become the foremost religion, Arabic would have been the world's main language. So, it was Britain's fortune in OTL that it could build the largest empire in history and make English lingua numero uno. OTL is the best conceivable time line for the English language.
 
This is impossible if you're talking about mother tongue, and still pretty damn difficult if you include those with English as a Second Language. Perhaps the Spanish fail in their conquest of the Aztecs and Incas, but the English still settle North America and the Southern Cone, leading to English becoming the lingua france across all of the Americas. Add to that the British dominating China a lot more, and still doing what they did to India in OTL. Finally, add an earlier invention and spread of the internet.
 
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