Maybe there is more to the dominance of the English language than just British and American pop music, movies and empires. Relatively high functionality at low

Maybe there is more to the dominance of the English language than just British and American pop music, movies and empires. Relatively high functionality at low skill levels should be the main quality metric for a common secondary language. English ranks terribly in consistency between spelling and pronunciation, but maybe selecting the wrong mapping rule for a word isn't quite as damaging to communication as over might expect. But I'm biased myself, as a native speaker of German I am clearly on the winning side of English dominance: just add the French half of the vocabulary, the rest is almost a dialect.