Eli5: Why is the English language most common in this world?
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To add what others have said, the BBC World service had a more significant role than people realise. In dozens of countries many people didn’t trust the news in their country and so used to listen to the BBC World service to get ‘the truth’. No other country had such a global reach except, to a lesser extent, Voice of America.
The global language of shipping was English because of the British Empire & Royal Navy. This made global interactions in English become common. This extended to flying, albeit this time it was in part because it borrowed from sailing and part because the US led the way in aviation. In the 1800’s the language of money was split between English and French. After World War One France had no more money. Then after World War Two neither did Britain. However, the US did so they hooked into the prexisting English speaking structures and expanded them from about half the world to just about all of it.
The big cultural shift happened in the ‘60s when the popularity of the Beatles led to kids in European countries singing in English. There was a concurrent spread of American rock and roll to expand this trend and then the global Hollywood explosion took this into the stratosphere. Now most of the cool music and most of the cool films globally were in English. Without a real competitor language this was now set as the lingua franca as for the first time people from two different countries, neither of which spoke English as a first language, started to use English between themselves.
At this point it became very much a generational thing. If you were older than X then you didn’t speak English but if you were younger than X, you mostly did. The final catalyst was of course the World Wide Web, a solution created ironically by an Englishman onto the American infrastructure of the internet that took English into every home with a computer across the globe.
Caveat: This is a highly abridged simplification. There are of course many countries where few people speak English even now etc.
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