It has little to do with politics but much to do with language families. All of the top languages are from the Indo-European family[1], the family to which Engl

It has little to do with politics but much to do with language families. All of the top languages are from the Indo-European family[1], the family to which English belongs to. In other words, these languages are genetically related, and therefore easier to learn for an English speaker. Some are very closely related (Germanic languages, e.g. Dutch, Norwegian), and some are more distantly related (Persian, Urdu, Hindi are also Indo-European but very distantly related to English). Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean are outside the Indo-European family. Sometimes, there's also a misconception that the top languages are at the top because they're objectively "easier" than the bottom languages. It's not true, it really depends on the language(s) you already speak. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages