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Arguably English became the default by a very large historical chance: that Napoleon sold off his North American colonies - a huge swathe of what is now the United States - to finance his wars in Europe. At the same time that both France and England were sniffing around Australia, France again was distracted by its wars.

Both the United States and Australia could very easily have been French speaking, and if they had been, I suggest we'd be having this discussion sur internet en français

Sure maybe, but French, my native language btw, is inherently more complex, less rich in vocabulary, idiosyncratic in its habit to follow latin in writing but deviating from it in spoken form, it's just not as good as English so we're quite lucky at least.

I feel it's hard for me to make spelling mistakes in English, which is not my native tongue, but VERY EASY to make them in French, that I studied and used for decades: there is an inherent beauty to English, in its simplicity, we should not dismiss. (yes I'm re-reading three times to make sure I didn't spell anything wrong lol)

If you're arguing from simplicity, Mandarin actually has very simple grammar - much simpler than any of the other languages you mention (no gender, no inflections, no declensions at all), and learning to speak it is not as difficult as people seem to think. Learning their ridiculous writing system (which is morphosyllabic, not ideogram-based) is another question.

The reason Mandarin is not an international language and English is, is because learning English as your L2 gives you the ability to speak to people in the United States and England and Australia and New Zealand and India and lot more besides, where learning Mandarin gives you the ability to speak to people in ... China (and even then, historically, only one small part of China).

Yes, I live in Hong Kong now and I know the Chinese languages have ridiculously simple formal grammar (that doesn't mean their brain doesn't have to do complex inference - is it better not to say what you meant or simpler to just write it ?).

The ridiculous writing system is indeed my problem with it - and the ridiculous variations in tones too but they swear it's easy if you're born in it... which is ofc the problem: a lingua franca works if adult merchants can learn it.

>>There is nothing unfortunate it became default, there is simply no better lingua franca today. We could try Japanese or Chinese, Hindi or Spanish, but they all have way more quirks and way less qualities !

All of this is secondary, the real deal is more knowledge, especially useful knowledge is generated, and has been generated in the English language for a while now.

If you want access to the knowledge ecosystem of the world, want to learn skills, trade, want jobs, want to do business you have to learn english.

The other cultures just never caught on with this one simple thing. You have to make rationality, scientific temper and coherence the very foundational basis for your society. And then you need run these processes for long. Decades to centuries for your language to now become the carrier of knowledge. Until then other arguments are irrelevant.

What are the other languages you speak fluently ? You're right of course, the diversity of English knowledge (and entertainment, sometimes as important) is dizzying and that's why I even learned it in the first place.

But there's something strange with English knowledge: it's never quite deep. I find French materials are always a bit deeper, a bit more complex, we don't try to explain to 5 yo all the time, we don't always insist so much on the high level introductory stuff - we have a way to explain extremely complex concepts to more people I find. Just a feeling: when I want to explore I use English but when I want to dig I find more interesting stuff in French.

It's very frustrating because I live abroad now, in Hong Kong, and only use English with my friends, partners etc. And sometimes I want to explain to them, give them something to read, but it's only in French because no English speaker ever tried to think to dig deeper, to give more perspective, to ask the right questions etc :D

> nouns have no gender !!!!

English nouns have a person/nonperson gender distinction that requires agreement by relativizers.

Compare:

1. The girl who I met yesterday

2. *The burger who I ate yesterday

This gender distinction is hazily applied to the third-person pronouns he (person), she (person), and it (nonperson), which is why different people may see referring to babies with it as normal usage, or as grossly offensive.

That's not grammatical gender. Most people can distinguish between persons and nonpersons and map that onto the correct pronoun or relativizer to use.

But in German the girl you met yesterday is neuter, and the burger you ate yesterday is masculine, and you need to know that to form a grammatically correct sentence about them.

That is grammatical gender. Grammatical gender is a property inherent to words that requires agreement by other words. There's no other definition. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Inanimate_gender .

You failed to distinguish the concepts even in your own terms; a girl is a person, and a burger isn't, and you need to know that to form a grammatical sentence about them.

The point is: grammatical gender (noun classes) are arbitrary.

Even though a girl is a person the gender of a girl (das Mädchen) is neuter in German. You need to know that grammatical gender to form a grammatically correct sentence - you do in fact need to say "it" ("er") in your sentence referring to the girl you met yesterday.

A girl is person and a burger isn't, but in German a girl is an "it" and a burger is a "he".

Noun classes aren't arbitrary in general. Conflation of random objects with male and female life forms is arbitrary. But it's more arbitrary than is typical for noun classes.

Taking sex-based gender distinctions for our example, we can observe that Chinese speakers aren't able to correctly choose between the English pronouns he and she, despite the fact that this distinction isn't arbitrary in the slightest (and Chinese speakers routinely make it themselves in other contexts!). The reason is simply that their native language doesn't make the distinction, not that the distinction is theoretically difficult to make.