Universally Speaking

That is a song name, however it has absolutely nothing to do with today's topic. I have this theory, you see, about the course of the world. I noticed some trends, and I believe over the course of quite a long time, this will come to be.
Many discussions travel the topic of the popularity of languages. It's said English is the number one most spoken language, followed by Spanish. However, French is supposed to be the number two in business and diplomacy. Essentially what this means is there is more people speaking Spanish, they're just not doing too much internationally with it. I was once told that Mandarin Chinese was the fasted growing language, which I thought was a funny way to measure things, because it was in comparison to itself, implying that if I were to create a new language and teach it to ten people by the end of the day, my language would've increased 1000%. However, what this means in terms of my theory is essentially nothing.
Maybe I thought of this before, though it was catalyzed during a conversation with someone in a German class, someone in a Japanese class, and someone else in a French class. We were talking about pizza. Fun fact: it's the same in English, French, German, (I think Spanish) and we can safely assume Italian. This all makes sense, European languages frolic hand in hand frequently. What gets me is Japanese. As we've seen, Japanese - from the little I understand of it and its rules - is the most to have adapted to this merger.
Oh, yes, I haven't explained my whole point. I believe that all languages are slowly merging into one, universal language. I would definitely get marked down for putting the thesis this far down.
Japanese, as we all know, has certain attributes different from European languages (by the way, I am placing English in this category too, because it started in Europe. Also I don't know about Russian, I don't think it follows the same rules though). For example, the calligraphy in place of our familiar alphabet. In fact, let's talk about this a moment. If Japanese was entirely self-contained and was not being inducted into this one world, one language program (not an actual program), then why would a chart such as this exist? Perhaps it's to write things like this: They then started to use Chinese characters to write Japanese in a style known as man'yōgana (from Wikipedia). That word there is a Japanese word, written in a language that is not Japanese. Also, did you know URLs in Japan are in this same form? Excuse my lack of knowledge on the subject, but it looks to me as if Japanese writing system has an entirely new form, which makes it more adaptable to the Western world. That is Japanese being inducted into this system.
We see it also as concepts move from one culture to another; without already having a word existing for it, the new culture will simply adopt the already existing word. For example: "internet," or pretty much anything Japanese (ninja, samurai, manga, pocky, I could go all day with this), "week-end" and "stop" are both common words in French. Let's take a closer look at just English and French, because I haven't spent a couple months in Japan, nor couple years in a class of the language, so I should leave it alone for now. They practically grew up together and both heavily influenced by Latin, therefore it's no surprise that about 30% of the English language is the same as the French translation. Much of the time, when I'm stuck on not knowing how to say a word, I try just saying it in a French accent and it works. Honestly, most English speaking people could probably handle their own at least ready French (it gets tricky with the accent). Take a look at my SVT notes if you want proof. Let's look at one line in particular: "une planète: c'est un corps céleste qui n'emit pas lumière."
Breaking it down we find planète=planet, corps=body (like core, corpse, or in the military), céleste=celestial, emit=emit (and that n' and pas looks pretty negative...), lumière=light (like illuminate, or the candle from Beauty and the Beast). What do we have? A definition of a planet as a celestial body that does not emit light (as opposed to a star, which does). Wasn't that fun?
I could keep going with all these examples, but I figure you get my point. This is essentially how I think it's going to go down: English will become the solvent to this language solution (science pun!), considering it stands as the lingua franca of much of the world already, not because I'm an arrogant American. Also, according to Wikipedia, it's already accumulated words from over 50 different languages. However, I do not believe "English" will become the "dominate" language, or the one and only. What I believe is that English will continue to spread, such as through schools built in third world countries, internet, video games that don't get translated, English-based companies that go international. Though as it grows, it feeds - words from all the languages it slowly replaces get drafted in, and the languages themselves aren't necessarily replaced, but changed to fit certain grammatical structures. As all languages grow as the world becomes more interconnected, they share words, they adapt to the voice of their speaker and the ears of their audience. And slowly, we're all speaking the same language.
Either that, or instant online translator (courtesy of the Google machine) becomes like the babel fish from The Guide and renders every learning a second language completely useless. You know, whatever happens first.