Language promotion is in crisis: are we heading towards global linguistic harmonisation?

In March 2025, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso walked out of the International Organisation of La Francophonie (OIF). A few weeks earlier, the British Council had announced that it could cease to exist within a decade without intervention from the British government. The Goethe-Institut is closing its branches in Bordeaux, Lille, Strasbourg and Trieste. Several dozen Confucius Institutes (Chinese) have been closed since 2019. Across the globe, the linguistic showcases that the major powers had patiently built up since the Second World War are faltering or being scaled back. Yet never before have so many people spoken, written, translated or consumed content in so many different languages. Nearly 5.5 billion people are now connected to the internet, where English accounts for nearly half of the content, but where algorithms translate in real time into hundreds of languages. This tension between institutional decline and an explosion in usage is shaping a new geopolitics of languages, where cultural diplomacy is losing ground to demographic, technological and cultural forces that no power truly controls.