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This tremendously helps international airspace where English is not native. I have once heard Narita tower kept interpreting comm from plane as a statement as opposed to request, until finally other plane clarified the tower that the plane is actually requesting it.

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It is more the necessity of working around frequency congestion and all those other voice via radio related problems eg ("to","two","victor","vector",unameit) than a convenience change of a good working system.

Great read about that "my stetement is meant as a question" topic in the AVWeb Series "Say again". It boils down to "inflection does not work (well) via radio, add 'request' as prefix to your request".

Probably a stupid question, but is English the de facto flight control language everywhere? Or is it just the safest fallback between otherwise incompatible language backgrounds?

Defacto it is, but spoken with many a accent. Try listening to some for yourself to get a feel for it - http://www.liveatc.net/

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