 Re: Is it possible that Chinese would take the palce of English?
It depends what you mean by 'take the place of'. If you mean it in a strict geographical sense, probably not - unless there's a pretty radical change in geo-political realities; Chinese is unlikely to become the lingua franca of, say, Londoners.
But if you mean 'take the place of [in some measure of 'usedness']', almost certainly 'Yes'. I read somewhere that quite soon (my source was more definite - it said 'within X years', where X was either 5 or 10 or 20 [I've forgotten which]) Chinese will be used in more web pages than English.
Chinese also has demographics on its side, I think. I expect the number of Chinese mother-tongue speakers will ultimately become greater than the number of English mother-tongue speakers.
I don't think Chinese has much of a future as a second language though.
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