The future of polyglottery looks bleak at least in the corporate world according to this CNN article:
This isn’t exactly a new story, Friedemann.
2000 years ago people would have said pretty much the same things about Ancient Greek and Latin that have been said in more recent times about English. But where are Latin and Greek in the modern business world today? hehe 
In fact, I think that English could be at high-tide now; in the future America is going to slip slightly down the table, and China (and possibly Brazil) are going to become ever stronger. This shift of power may very well bring about a different linguistic power balance even within the next 30 years or so…
(And is America still going to be a largely monolingual English-speaking country in 50 or 100 years time? Or are there going to be as many or more Spanish speakers?)
World languages change, but they change over times that are long compared to a human life. As you know there is this Mandarin fad in the west now but I am skeptical whether Mandarin will be used between non native speakers anytime soon. And that is really the main feature of the universality of English, the fact that non natives use it among them to communicate.
One thing that I find so annoying about working in a global setting and about the pervasiveness of English in general is that one is constantly surrounded by poor English, both written and oral. I doubt, that this is a good natural learning environment.
So, polyglottery is really something we should do out of personal interest and not because we expect any payback in our professional careers, except for some niche applications like interpreters etc.
@Friedemann: “…One thing that I find so annoying about working in a global setting and about the pervasiveness of English in general is that one is constantly surrounded by poor English, both written and oral.”
Yes indeed.
As a native speaker of English it can be a little odd to hear it spoken by so many non-natives. The quality is, as you say, often somewhat mixed…
(I guess I know how those Roman dudes must have felt!)
And this Italian university
Even in countries which are permeated with English, like Sweden, the local language survives quite well, and I have no trouble using Swedish there. It will be a while before the Japanese, Italians and Chinese reach the Swedish level in English, so the knowledge of those languages will remain useful.
People learn languages to communicate, with people and with cultures, not just for their employers.
BTW I find the term “polyglottery” a bit jarring.
No, not crockery nor pottery, just polyglottery. No one has heard of the word, and I do not think it will survive as a word. On the other hand multilingualism is probably easily understood.
Knowledge of multiple foreign languages have opened up plenty of opportunities for me in the world of engineering. I have come to discover that polyglottery (or multilingualism or whatever we want to call it) is very useful for one’s professional life, but it must be combined with another technical skill, such as engineering, or computer programming for example.
Steve, we should just stick to “linguist,” that’s if certain people don’t have a hissy fit and start posting YouTube videos about it, claiming it’s wrong.
As regards the Italian university switching to English for most of its courses, I can’t help coming back to my earlier point: there was a period in history when all education was done in Koine Greek, and in those days it would have seemed entirely strange to use local languages for anything serious or ‘intellectual’.
More recently in history, all university education (in the West at least) was done in Latin - and here again, it would have seemed quite unthinkable then to use local languages.
But where is Latin now? Where is Koine Greek?
Historically it has never been the case that one single language has dominated for ever - and there is no very good reason to think that English will do so.
Latin “evolved” into the modern romance languages we have today. In another 2000 years perhaps there will be a variety of post-modern “anglophonic” languages based on English diffused throughout the world.
Or, because of the digital age, since we have an absolute wealth of media in the English language, and the fact that the world’s literacy rate is the highest it has ever been, English will hold on for a wee bit longer than any of its predecessors.
I categorize “polyglottery” with such words as “comic-bookery”
I also don’t like the term hyperpolyglot. Hyper, in Greek, means “over” “excessive”. What’s excessive about speaking 15 languages?
Also, we have hypoglossia, a condition where people have short underdeveloped tongues. We could use polyglossia for the practice of speaking many languages, if we want to stay with Greek origin term? But it all starts to sound like a medical problem after a while.
@Odiernod: “…Latin “evolved” into the modern romance languages we have today”
That’s true. However Latin remained the language of higher education and intellectual discourse throughout Europe right up to a time long after the modern spoken dialects - the Romance languages - had arrived on the scene.
In the 1500s, for example, you had Martin Luther giving his lectures at a German University in Latin (we know this because some of them were written down and recorded for posterity.) His writings were partly in German and partly in Latin - so things were perhaps starting to change by then. But even so, for at least another 100 years after this time, there was a large amount of European academic discourse taking place in Latin!
But…where is Latin now? :-0
As late as the beginning of the 19th century Latin was used as a language of education in parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
However, it is not necessarily useful to compare a language with no native speakers, and which was spoken only by a small elite, to the presence that English has today.
Still, I believe that regional languages will grow in importance, and that learning languages will become easier (LingQ). There is no question, in my view, that the benefits of learning several languages are enormous, in terms of business, culture, friendship etc.
@Steve: “…it is not necessarily useful to compare a language with no native speakers, and which was spoken only by a small elite, to the presence that English has today.”
That’s a fair point. However, the further back in time you go, the more native speakers of Latin there were. And in the case of Koine Greek, I believe that this was a widely spoken lingua franca for much of Southern Europe, the entire Middle East and some parts of North Africa, from the time of Alexander the Great up to about 300 AD (at least.)
@Steve: “…There is no question, in my view, that the benefits of learning several languages are enormous, in terms of business, culture, friendship etc.”
Yes, I would certainly agree with this. Although many people might consider it an utter waste of time to learn Swedish, for example, in order to do business in Sweden, I am certain that (all other things being equal) a person having a good functional command of Swedish would have a distinct advantage over a business rival who didn’t.
If nothing else, a Swedish speaker would be much more “plugged in” to the situation on the ground - i.e. would have a greater understanding of the context in which he/she were operating, and would not be continually reliant on others for help, etc.
(Of course, the actual business is always going to be done in English, I suppose…)
Yes, declaring a company’s working language to be English is one thing, achieving it is another. From what I hear, there’s a tremendous amount of discontent in Rakuten about that decision. And Rakuten is an IT company, where English is a huge advantage. I just don’t see it happening in society at large. There’s no shortage of people coming to Japan to learn Japanese, and I know the situation is the same in China, so I don’t expect a global takeover by English. English is, no doubt, the dominant global language, but I think it will just be the first among many runner-ups and regional languages. Multilingualism will continue, despite what many Anglos might wish for 
I don’t think that English will push out other large languages until the societies where those languages are spoken start to prefer English for communicating with one another in every domain, rather than just in business and science. And I don’t think that will happen in my lifetime (fortunately!).