[cooper12]

I respectfully disagree that vernacular makes contributions somehow substandard. It's still language and still affords a full range of expressibility. You're only saying that because in your mind you connote English with "professional" and whatever other niceties while vernacular is vulgar, uneducated, etc... But vernaculars have rich histories in many countries and by virtue of being used by the populace, have deep utility. Yes, they're not international, but English has only gained the status of lingua franca by virtue of its expanse; it could very well have been Chinese. They're nothing inherent to English that makes it superior and if we're solely basing our justifications on business use, like I said Chinese would be a better choice if you're looking towards the future. By the way, I highly recommend trying to learn about other languages, some of them have really beautiful systems, both verbal and written and some language features are really nice like phonetic alphabets.

Regarding France, I think you're conflating language with law. The only thing allowing France to police but the UK not to is the law, not the language itself. You think these countries aren't already capable of getting translators to look at comments reported to them? The language isn't protecting anyone, it's being in another country that has freer speech laws. Better advice would be to move to the US. (but in actuality isn't better advice because our government isn't really any better what with all the surveillance going on and our own terrorism hysteria)

There's a concept in linguistics called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis [0] that I think you subscribe to—that language determines thought. It's failed to gain consensus by linguists but still isn't a closed matter. I think if we consider how people all over the world use language, we can find that they're just the same as us. The only thing preventing us from understanding them is our own implicit biases, our prejudices, our looking down on them. This sort of evangelizing of English isn't really that far off from the spread of Christianity through imperialism, though America's own "Manifest Destiny". We should think twice before imposing our will on others because we think it's by default better. At the end of the day unless you're working in an international market or planning to live elsewhere, you don't really need to know English specifically. I think everyone should learn another language, but instead focus on what languages interest you and which one you actually need, not just whichever is the top dog or has a sense of superiority attached to it. (similar to how white skin is now considered beautiful in a lot of countries, to the point where people are getting their skin bleached)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity