This reminds me of two conversations I've had.
About a decade ago, I attended a wargaming convention in Seattle. One of the speakers was a former CIA codebreaker who translated Chinese transmissions during the Cold War. When someone asked him if the Chinese language would dominate worldwide media one day like English currently does, he just laughed. He explained that Chinese writing was extremely complex because the nobles wanted to keep the commoners from understanding it; this also made it hard for it to gain any traction outside of native-speaking Chinese.
A year ago, one of my guildmates moved to Japan to work as an English teacher. Among his numerous tales, he's been exasperated by his students complaining about learning 50 symbols (upper- & lower-case letters) of the English alphabet when they have to memorize over 5,000 Japanese symbols to read a newspaper competently. When we got to talking about the complexity of Asian languages, he brought up the nobles-did-it explanation and said, more or less:
"Japanese and Chinese were invented as practical jokes on the peasants."
In comparison, I think English is simpler to learn and also has a habit of swiping additional words from other languages as necessary, meaning foreign speakers already have a foot in the door. Combined with the sheer number of local English dialects and broken English still being pretty understandable, I suspect part of English's popularity is it doesn't give a f*** how mangled or cobbled together it is.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." -James Nicoll
Granted, I'm not a linguistic expert, although it would be interesting to hear one chime in on the reasons for English's spread other than "the British spoke it".
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