Instead, they were condemned to silence.However, Johnson's one-man police force had no chance of baton-charging popular non-native words from the vocabulary. English has always been an inclusive language: 80 per cent of its words - from chocolate to banana, wigwam, outback, gorilla and tea - are of foreign origin. Unlike French - which has the Academie Francais on gendarme duty - it has no xenophobic door policy. Most of the expressions that Johnson so despised have remained de rigueur. Today, British schoolchildren have absorbed swathes of Australian slang, imported into currency via Neighbours and Home and Away.Bloomsbury's Nigel Newton observes this process every day "We're watching American TV shows and Hollywood movies American is the language of Internet and software Indian movies are growing in popularity I'm half English and half American. We're very aware of kinds of English like black American street language My kids use that, without really even knowing why. It's permeated their sensibility."Are other vocabularies under threat from the world's new favourite language? Encarta's editor Dr Kathy Rooney contends that the growth of World English need not silence other tongues: "Having one language that is spoken in various countries, that is an international medium of communication, should in many ways be a comfort to other languages English is not trying to force other languages out.

If you look at India or South Africa, the multiplicity of languages is preserved by having an international alternative language."Should we remember what happened to Irish and Welsh, and treat this with scepticism? Or should we learn to stop worrying and love World English?Oddly enough, Dr Strangelove provides an insight into the current success of World English. After the end of the Cold War, the machinery by which English was promulgated for propaganda reasons began to run down The Voice of America mellowed, losing its lunatic edge. In turn, the forbidding radio stations of the East faded into silence. The excitingly stern announcer of Radio Tirana stopped telling the world in boastful phonetic English that the number of Albanians in higher education had risen to 1 per cent. And at the moment this battle ended, the new democracies of Eastern Europe embraced the English language with a voracious, goggle-eyed enthusiasm.As a beneficiary of this process, this is an issue upon which I find it difficult to take a detached stance. In 1990, without a single reference or teaching qualification, I managed to get a summers' employment in a language school in Poznan, in north-west Poland. My pupils were the children of new capitalists, kids whose parents sent them to be schooled in the only commercial language that mattered.

In one class I taught the son of Poland's largest lingerie manufacturer, placed there in the hope that he would, one day, be able to broker those girdle deals in perfect RP. In another, there was the son of a crisp magnate, whose completely inedible product - like hyperinflated Cheesey Wotsits without the cheese flavouring - would only gain a foothold in foreign markets if young Boleslaw (or whoever) could be trained to produce nibble hard-talk in the language of Shakespeare and Milton. This ethos was everywhere.As capitalism spread through Eastern Europe, World English continued to grow, boosted by the Anglophone nature of the Internet. Business conducted in the English language began to produce $7,815bn annually The number of people learning English topped a billion. So for Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates and me, the good times rolled. When I was doing postgraduate study at university, I supplemented my British Academy funding with two World English-related jobs.

The first involved teaching English to the children of Russian mafiosi in a wood-panelled crammer college. The second found me compiling articles for the Encarta CD-Rom Encyclopaedia. I did Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, WB Yeats, Dylan Thomas, DH Lawrence, HG Wells, and a handful of others. Without World English, Microsoft and the odd Muscovite Mr Big, I wouldn't have got through college.According to the Encarta World English Dictionary, World English is "the English language in all its varieties as it is spoken and written over the world" The nearest comparison comes from the Ancient World. During the period of the Roman Empire, Latin was the language of administration, government, literature and scholarship in Europe, Asia and Africa.