How American is Globalization?

Tyler Cowen reports:

Extending the analysis to 1999, we see that the percentage of the world's population who are native speakers of English actually declined from 9.8 to 7.8 percent. The percentage of native speakers of the world's leading language, Mandarin, also declined slightly, from 15.6 to 15.2 percent...The language groups that have increased dramatically as a percentage of the world population are Arabic and Bengali, which each accounted for 2.7 percent of the world's speakers in 1958, but rose to 3.5 percent and 3.2 percent, respectively, in 1992. Hindi speakers rose from 5.2 to 6.4 percent, and Spanish speakers from 5.0 to 6.1 percent. English as a first language has fallen from its mid-century position of second place to fourth as the millennium ended.

Probably not the happiest news for those who want to establish an empire.