There need not be a major global event for English to lose its status. There are a number of possible scenarios, which may take centuries or millennia. For exam

There need not be a major global event for English to lose its status. There are a number of possible scenarios, which may take centuries or millennia. For example, Latin persisted as the language of the church and academia centuries after the collapse of the Roman Empire - if the US were to collapse tomorrow (however unlikely) English will likely persist out of convenience for a while. It need not even be a collapse - sometimes languages can be adopted for other reasons. For example, upper class Romans spoke Greek (the language of a conquered people), upper class Russians in the 19th century spoke French (if you read War and Peace, it's strange to see so much French dialogue - when the French were the enemy !). Could it be possible that perhaps a century hence, upper class Americans use Chinese among themselves and English to speak to the peasants ? A more likely scenario is fragmentation into new languages - just as Latin broke up into French, Spanish etc. Often this happens with the influence of local languages. While a collapse in global communications - due to war, resource depletion, or other disaster - would accelerate the process, it can still happen over a longer period of time. Another new possibility is that advances in technology render the concept of a lingua franca obsolete - a "universal translator". This is unlikely without some major advances in AI but not impossible.