Government intervention to accelerate, er, globalization? - NYT

Mongolia's prime minister, said in an interview, his own American English honed in graduate school at Harvard. 'We see English not only as a way of communicating, but as a way of opening windows on the wider world.'

Its camel herders may not yet be referring to one another as 'dude,' but this Central Asian nation, thousands of miles from the nearest English-speaking country, is a reflection of the steady march of English as a world language. Fueled by the Internet, the growing dominance of American culture and the financial realities of globalization, English is taking hold in Asia, and elsewhere, just as it has in many European countries.

In South Korea, six private 'English villages' are being established where paying students can have their passports stamped for intensive weeks of English-language immersion, taught by native speakers from all over the English-speaking world. The most ambitious village, an $85 million English town near Seoul, will have Western architecture and signs, and a resident population of English-speaking foreigners.

In Iraq, where Arabic and Kurdish are to be the official languages, a movement is growing to add English, a neutral link for a nation split along ethnic lines. Iraqi Kurdistan has had an explosion in English-language studies, fueled partly by an affinity for Britain and the United States, and partly by the knowledge that neighboring Turkey may soon join the European Union, a group where English is emerging as the dominant language.

Here in the Emirates everyone speaks a bit of English, right done to the Urdu speaking worker from the janitorial service earning less than $150 a month. Sometimes communication is quite (!) poor, but English is what we all have in common.
I've not checked any sources, but my guess is there is no language group (grouping people by their first language) which constitutes a majority unless it is Urdu. Signs are in English and Arabic.