> 20% of the world speaks Mandarin Chinese (not all as a first language tho). And, about the same % as speak English natively, speak Hindi (+ dialects) natively, and again about the same amount speak Arabic, and again about the same amount (all above 300 million) speak French, tho a greater % of those have le français as an nth language.

What are your sources for this because cross checking with wikipedia, which uses Ethnologue as a source, I find several discrepancies. For example the number of people who speak french isn't "the same amount" as native english speakers, it's 53% and that's if you include 2nd language speakers. You make it sound like Hindi and English are comparable but Hindi has very few 2nd language speakers.

In fact looking at [1] the choice of english looks a lot more logical than I would have thought.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...