I remember reading somewhere a couple of years ago that the number of non-native speakers of the English language across the globe will soon be larger than the number of native speakers, as well as that this proportion is likely to continue growing in the future. In addition, the non-native speakers are ever more likely to perceive English as their second language. As the native speakers are widely dispersed around the world, and as their versions of English vary widely, the non-native speakers are ever less at a disadvantage when it comes to the mastery of the language. To wit, it is ever less meaningful to speak of someone’s “good English.” The old standards are melting away and he new ones will not necessarily benefit the British, the Americans, the Irish, the Australians, the Canadians, or the New Zealanders. This is especially true of writing, which is transparent to accent, for instance, but it also applies to speaking to some extent at least. For instance, my English is nearly always perceived as better—that is, more easily understood—by international audiences than the English of my British or American colleagues, who, as academics, are generally competent when it comes to speaking. Of course, as a non-native speaker I understand my non-native audiences much better than my native colleagues do. Returning to writing, a non-native speaker, and especially one who has travelled the English-speaking world, is perforce closer to a universal English—English as such, that is, English as an emerging lingua franca—than to any one of its many “dialects.” In a world of English as a second language this is an advantage, as well as a growing one. In fact, the existing versions of English are ever more likely to be perceived as its provincial variants, rather than English pure and simple. I can thus imagine an ever-larger number of writers, whose native language is not English, switching to English as their main writing language both because of its growing universality and because of the promise of global readership. An enticing prospect, too.