One of the legacies of the British Empire is that, in many countries, access to English remains part of an elitist social process. In the old, modernist model, English proficiency acted as a marker of membership of a select, educated, middle class group. In a globalised world, English is much more widely distributed, as is access to education generally. The increasingly important role that English is now playing in economic processes, in providing access to the kind of global knowledges available in English and the jobs which involve contact with customers and colleagues for whom English is the only shared language, has brought with it the danger that English has become one of the main mechanisms for structuring inequality in developing economies.
Lack of English in some countries now threatens to exclude a minority rather than the majority of a population.