Radio sets around the world hourly testify to the dominance of English in the popular music scene today. Many people make their first contact with English in this way. It is a dominance phenomenon, but which is a specifically twentieth-century the role of English in this genre starts much earlier. During the nineteenth century, popular music was embedded within the dance halls, beer halls, and popular theatres of innumerable thousands of songs whose content European cities, producing ranged from the wildly comic and satirical to the desperately sentimental. The British music hall was a major influence on popular trends much more so, it is thought, than the French and German cabarets and operettas of the period.