The article you mentioned is not actually about languages but scripts. As a example you can represent Chinese in transcription. English is popular due to histo

The article you mentioned is not actually about languages but scripts. As a example you can represent Chinese in transcription. English is popular due to historical, political and economic reasons not for any linguistic reasons. As any lingua franca ever was so far. If the world could agree on using easier to learn and more fair (meaning for all nations) language - we'd be speaking Esperanto or better Lojban.