Eli5: Why is the English language most common in this world?

Question

Eli5: Why is the English language most common in this world?

In: 41

Answer 1

The short answer is money.

What everyone had been saying about cultural domination and empire is correct, but when you boil it all down, if you wanted to make money for the last few hundred years, you were probably doing business with the British until World War 2, then you were doing business with the US. They were/are the biggest economies. Everybody wanted to do business with them, so everybody learned English.

Now everybody assumes that everyone else knows English (even if neither side speaks English natively), so if you want to speak to the most other countries, you speak in English.