English is the universal language, or as close as we have. When I was in Morocco, we were told that high school students there can choose a foreign language to learn, but that they are encouraged to learn English because “it is the language of business.” And there’s a reason that English is used worldwide as the official language for air traffic control communications (although some foreign air carrier crews butcher it so badly it’s charitable to call their utterances “English). Uniformity and consistency are crucial in aviation, a classic case where diversity is most certainly NOT “our strength.”
When I was young we all learned French as a second language as an international language. Many people also learned the language of nearby ethnic groups. Not unusual to be trilingual in northeast