On my way from the Prague airport to the city of Prague, I sat on a bus next to a man wearing a suit and tie.
“Here for business?”, I asked.
“European Space Agency meeting”, he replied.
Those were the days of Brexit, so, I had to ask, “What’s the language of ESA now?”.
“English”, he replied unequivocally.
That’s when it hit me that there are only two approaches to [business] languages that the world will follow.
One is the Chinese approach, where you create a big geographical entity that speaks your language.
The other is the European Laissez-faire approach of respecting a plethora of languages with few speakers which is worthless for most foreigners to learn, all of your mini languages die and get replaced by English.