Where everyone speaks your language and you speak no one’s

Spending a summer in continental Europe, I never got used to the ubiquity of English in a place where it’s no one’s mother tongue

A few years ago, a friend (let’s call him Johannes) suggested to me that the world would be better off if everyone exclusively used English in any international context. The idea shocked me, all the more given that his first language wasn’t English. Why should my native tongue be privileged above all others? We would…