English is the language of science and trade on the whole, which I think can be a good thing for the aforementioned reasons in your comment. Makes it much more universal.

I was on a trip in Spain, where students from all over the world came to learn Spanish. There were Americans, Japanese, Germans, etc (others I may have forgotten since this was during highschool!), but the gist of it is that everyone spoke their mother tongue, but the only unifying language there was Spanish. It was incredibly interesting speaking to someone who only knew Japanese and Spanish, where I only knew English and Spanish. People would talk to their friends in their native language, then relay what they said in Spanish for everyone else. It was mindblowingly cool to have a universal language to an otherwise insurmountable language barrier.

This also happened, somewhat annoyingly, in other parts of Spain. You'd be eagerly trying to practice Spanish, and spanish people would hear your accent, and would automatically switch to English for you. Same thing happened all across the world whenever we traveled. I always marveled at just how many people would switch to English whether we were in Germany or Zimbabwe.