Author and historian David Northrup, who taught in the History Department at Boston College for some 40 years, has published a new book that looks at the rise and global spread of the English language. Publisher Palgrave Macmillan calls How English Became the Global Language (2013) “the first [book] written about the globalization of the English language by a professional historian.” In a Q&A with Muscat Daily, Northrup discusses how the collapse of the Soviet Union and the spread of higher education were factors in the globalization of the English language.