At first glance the last major language headline of 2004 looks like good news. English to be spoken by half of the world's population within 10 years, announced the Independent, marking the occasion with a celebratory graphic. Pats on the back all round, I'd say, and if we can't quite run to Havana cigars then at least a Café Crème to pass round. It is Christmas.
That's what we want, isn't it? If an ambitious young dance teacher learned that all the world would be able to dance in 10 years, wouldn't they feel just fine?
But it doesn't take a world champion second glancer to see that this might actually be rather bad news.
The rubric to the graph explains why the figures are projected to drop off, and indeed the line representing the predicted number of English language learners does drop off, rather sharply, like the return you can expect from your pension if you don't take it out on the day you leave school. The graph more or less runs out at the year 2050, but from the way it plummets from 2010 it doesn't take too much imagination to see that by 2060 there will be around 70 learners of English left on earth.
Of course it is only a projection, and it could be wrong. People may find that they simply can't stop learning English, and will start courses all over again just to experience the kick of relative clauses all over again. Or the world's exam boards may regroup and announce plans for the post-proficiency, just to keep people in school.
One way that language schools might help the cause - and it strikes me that help may be needed - would be to downgrade all their levels as of January 2005, with proficiency rebranded as advanced, upper intermediate as intermediate, and so on. Beginners would thus become pre-beginners, which is just the sort of level the publishers have been inventing for years.
And if your school won't help, you can do your bit by just slowing down a bit. Frustration there may be, complaints even, but you know it's improving your job prospects. See it as personal development.
Directors of studies may in turn choose to take a kindlier view of the teacher whose students never seem to improve, and those rare students who, in their turn, progress from entry level to advanced without making perceptible progress (yes, that student - every school has them) will become a very valuable commodity indeed.
The only good news to be garnered from the article is that maths and science are being taught in English at secondary schools in Malaysia, but as we would have been drawing attractive salaries in the pharmaceutical or arms industries if we had understood a word of maths or science, this is little consolation.
No, it is a bleak outlook for English language teachers this Christmas - or at least for our children (always dreamed they would follow in your footsteps, haven't you?). Thinking about it, we'll probably just about get away with it in our lifetime, just as we imagine we will with the ozone layer, petrol supplies and so on.
David Graddol is the man behind the report, and he's been looking far beyond next year's summer bookings for the best part of a decade. My headline for the occasion, should anyone be interested in renting it, is Graddol takes bradawl to ELT's future. What Mr Graddol has never done is to massage any sense that an English-speaking world will mean an easy payday for the UK's native English speakers. On the contrary, our increasingly feeble language provision at school is likely to leave Britons less privileged in a labour market that will reward bi and multilingualism.
Oh, and it makes the British crap in bed too. Those of us who speak more than one language are sexier, according to dating agencies surveyed on the subject, although probably only because we can say "oh, sorry, that's never happened to me before" in a number of different ways.
Chinese, Arabic and Spanish are all likely to become super-languages in their own right, while French will fade as a world language force - although I imagine that every word on its demise will have to be translated into French to avoid diplomatic incidents.
So rather like fishermen who have found over-effective ways of trawling the seas, we teachers find that our gap-fills and running dictations have been just a bit too bloody successful. And, as with fishing, I predict that quotas will be introduced. Only so many adjectives to be taught per month, and excess stocks of information gaps to be poured into the world's rivers like so much excess information gap stock.
You heard it here first, and when the European Union language commission tells you in a few years' time that you have to halve the size of your chunks or lose your licence to teach, don't be too surprised.
In the meantime, ride the rollercoaster, surf the wave, crank up the photocopier and put out the tinsel (seasonal reference). Looking back in our dotage, we shall see that we lived in the golden age of English language teaching, at a time when all the world wanted to speak English, and just before all the world did.