@haskal @cwebber I feel like it’s how being the lingua franca like, isn’t it?

Let’s say a you’re a French person who wants to talk to a German person. English being a lingua franca means you are more likely to be able to talk to them in English than forcing them to learn French or vice versa. The problem explodes if you also have a Japanese person in your group, without the lingua franca you’re wasting O(n^2) time learning all the languages to communicate…

Now English being the lingua franca doesn’t mean an Englishman would understand every native language; you’re giving everyone some pain for the forementioned benefit. Even worse it’s not equality, an Australian just has to unlearn some accent words while Japanese people would need to learn a new alphabet, new sentence structure, … But is it worth it? Yea, if you tend to work with other people…

Finally I don’t think that English being the lingua franca means you should be living in the UK (teaching wages suuuuck I’m sorry); being elsewhere has its own benefits, with an obvious downside of having to pick up English…