Countries with french as an official language only have a total population of 434 million people. And a few of them, like canada, has english as an official language as well. Also, most of the francophile countries are small former african colonies which may one day give up french as an official language and move to english or a native language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_territorial_entities_w...
French language's geographical and population reach is smaller than china's. The same applies for arabic and spanish.
> and Chinese (Mandarin) indeed largely useless outside greater China.
Which is true, but greater china accounts for a significant amount of land and people.
French, Arabic and Spanish account for 1.3 billion people. China alone has 1.4 billion people.
But this is a moot point since the french, arabs, spaniards and chinese are all desperate to learn english since english ( for the time being ) is the language of culture, science and business. I don't see chinese, french, arabic or spanish unseating english as the world's language.