One of the three themes of The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way is the role of English in the world. In recent years, English has become a world language due to being so widespread across the globe. Bryson notes that “more than 300 million people in the world speak English”—but this number has increased to more than 1 billion since The Mother Tongue’s publication in 1990 (1). The reasons behind the spread of English are varied, but it is rooted in British imperialism and the contemporary roots of American economic power. Bryson explores another reason why English is so widespread in Chapter 12, where he writes that “Most people speak it not because it gives them pleasure to help out American and British monoglots […] but because they need it to function in the world at large” (207).

Bryson discusses the role of English most prominently in the book’s opening and closing chapters. In Chapter 1, he lists a variety of facts concerning the use of English in other countries to drive home the point of how widespread it is. Some English is frivolous, comprising daily American terms and phrases, while some English appears in the important matters of global corporations and international trade associations.