[skrebbel]

> English is far from the best candidate.

It's also the only candidate. English is the most commonly learned foreign language by far[1], and I don't foresee any major economic movement to change that.

English has a momentum no other language have ever had. There is no language that has a larger body of knowledge online than English. Virtually all cross-border hobbyist communities, expert platforms, etc (eg Stack Overflow) are in English. People all over the world use English to communicate, even when nobody in the group has English as their native language. I was a member of a European student network called BEST, which had 0 member universities in English-speaking places and still the entire thing was in (bad) English. The entire EU is running on English informally, and I bet formally too a few decades from now (and not because we like the Irish so much). My startup has some customers in the UAE, in India and in Pakistan - their sites main (and sometimes only) language is English. The list goes on and on.

Chinese would've had a chance if they weren't so isolationist. Call me when the first Chinese language TV show gets popular outside China and Taiwan. I bet English language TV shows will be popular in China long before then (if they aren't already - I honestly don't know).

Like it or not, English has won.

[1] There's a bunch of sources, I liked this Duolingo post: http://making.duolingo.com/which-countries-study-which-langu...