It's a sad thing, really, that in many countries the primary spoken languages are regressing in favor of english. What many people are not realizing is that we are empoverishing our own cultures in doing so. When I use the english language I cannot fully express my thoughts accurately as well as when I use french which is my mother tongue.
In enterprises, it's not that rare to see meetings being held in english when 90% of the attendants speak the local language. The consequences are dramatic, I think.
It's a fact that the US is the dominant nation both economicaly and politically but they also want to dominate culturaly and that scares me a lot.
English may be the new lingua franca of the world but by no way is it the simplest language to learn. English is an extraorinarily complex language to master. That english is an easy language to learn is a myth. What most people think they are speaking is not english but a poor subset of the real one. What they are speaking is 'globish' not english.
Groetjes.