【单选题】

It is nothing new thatEnglish use is on the rise around the world, especially in business circles. This also happens in France, the headquarters of the global battle againstAmerican cultural hegemony. If French guys are giving in toEnglish, something really big must be going on.And something big is going on.　　Partly, it’’s thatAmerican hegemony.DidierBenchimol,CEO of a French e-commerce software company, feels compelled to speakEnglish perfectly because the Internet software business is dominated byAmericans. He and other French businessmen also have to speakEnglish because they want to get their message out toAmerican investors, possessors of the world’’s deepest pockets.　　The triumph ofEnglish in France and elsewhere inEurope, however, may rest on something more enduring.As they become entwined with each other politically and economically,Europeans need a way to talk to one another and to the rest of the worlD、And for a number of reasons, they’’ve decided uponEnglish as their common tongue.　　So when German chemical and pharmaceutical company Hoechst merged with French competitor Rhone-Poulenc last year, the companies chose the vaguely LatinateAventis as the new company name ― and settled onEnglish as the company’’s common language. When monetary policymakers from aroundEurope began meeting at theEuropeanCentralBank in Frankfurt last year to set interest rates for the newEuroland, they held their deliberations inEnglish.Even theEuropeanCommission, with 11 official languages and a traditionally French-speaking bureaucracy, effectively switched over toEnglish as its working language last year.　　How did this happen One school attributesEnglish’’s great success to the sheer weight of its merit. It’’s a Germanic language, brought toBritain around the fifth century

A、D、During the four centuries of French-speaking rule that followed NormanConquest of 1066, the language morphed into something else entirely. French words were added wholesale, and most of the complications of Germanic grammar were shed while few of the complications of French were addeD、The result is a limguage with a huge vocabulary and a simple grammar that can express most things more efficiently than either of its parents. What’’s more,English has remained ungoverned and open. to change ― foreign words, coinages, and grammatical shifts ― in a way that French, ruled by the puristAcademie Francaise, had not.　　So it’’s a swell language, especially for business.But the rise ofEnglish over the past few centuries clearly owes at least as much to history and economies as to the language’’s ability to economically express the concept win-win. What happened is that the competition first Latin, then French, then briefly, German ― faded with the waning of the political, economic, and military fortunes of, respectively, theCatholicChurch, France, and Germany.All along,English was increasing in importance:Britain was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, and London the world’’s most important financial centre, which madeEnglish a key language for business.England’’s colonies around the world also made it the language with the most global reach.And as that former colony the U.S. rose to the status of the world’’s preeminent political, economic, military, and cultural power,English became the obvious second language to learn.　　In the 1990s more and moreEuropeans found themselves forced to useEnglish. The last generation of business and government leaders who hadn’’t studiedEnglish in school was leaving the stage. TheEuropeanCommunity was adding new members and evolving from a paper-shuffling club into a serious regional government that would need a single common language if it were ever to get anything done. Meanwhile, economic barriers betweenEuropean nations have been disappearing, meaning that more and more companies are begining to look at the whole continent as their domestic market.And then the Internet ca