Comment Actually... not really (Score 1) 535
You see, By speakers there's 330 million Spanish speakers and 330 million English speakers, there's also 240 Million Hindi/Urdu speakers. That's more then the 800 Million Mandarin speakers in itself, but that doesn't matter. Because if the Spanish want to talk to the Hindi/Urdu speakers, or the Chinese to the Spanish, they'll just use English. That is of course to the delight of everybody else who also speaks English (either natively, or as a second language, or because their countries official language is English (even if their everyday language isn't).
The question that really addresses this wrong assertion is: Why has English become the lingua franka of the internet, and not say German, Spanish, French or Chinese? The answer is pretty simple: English (as opposed to German, French, Swedish etc. of the indo-germanic/latin root) is relatively simple to learn for anybody natively speaking indo-germanic/latin root language (really many people). Chinese on the other hand is anything but simple. People who do not speak it by far and large (in terms of percentage) will never be able to gain any substantial reading/writing proficiency in it, or pick it up drive-by style (as many do English). Chinese (written) is also pretty much a dead language. It has been honed over something like 5000 years by the Chinese into the near perfect albeit ludicrously verbose set of glyphs, and as such is not amenable to pidgin (although spoken it is another story).
The question that really addresses this wrong assertion is: Why has English become the lingua franka of the internet, and not say German, Spanish, French or Chinese? The answer is pretty simple: English (as opposed to German, French, Swedish etc. of the indo-germanic/latin root) is relatively simple to learn for anybody natively speaking indo-germanic/latin root language (really many people). Chinese on the other hand is anything but simple. People who do not speak it by far and large (in terms of percentage) will never be able to gain any substantial reading/writing proficiency in it, or pick it up drive-by style (as many do English). Chinese (written) is also pretty much a dead language. It has been honed over something like 5000 years by the Chinese into the near perfect albeit ludicrously verbose set of glyphs, and as such is not amenable to pidgin (although spoken it is another story).