The Nazi reference was unfortunate, but coldtea does bring up a valid point. Languages tend to become dominant because of military conquest or cultural hegemony, not because people want a language other than their own to be the lingua franca. English dominates the West because of the British Empire and because the US was able to exercise overwhelming cultural and economic power after World War 2.<p>Any discussion of &quot;standardizing&quot; the world on a language has to take into account how often attempts to do so have been employed as cultural genocide by colonizing powers, explicitly to separate native people from their culture.<p>To attempt to answer your original question, &quot;why are we putting up with other languages anyway,&quot; we don&#x27;t &quot;put up with&quot; them, because languages other than English are not a burden. Other languages persist because no one has forced their extinction yet.<p>And even if you &quot;preserve&quot; other languages, having a lingua franca means that eventually native languages will die out because they&#x27;re simply no longer useful. How many Irish people actually speak Irish? How useful is Japanese outside of Japan? When those languages do die out, as they probably will, what will be lost when all of their literature and cultural referents are translated into English?<p>I&#x27;m not saying having a global common language wouldn&#x27;t be good for a number of reasons, only that that commonality necessarily comes with a price not everyone is willing to pay.