Re: travel

LGs had many good points, but consider a few more:

Many Europeans want to be able to talk to other Europeans - not just people from one of the countries next to theirs, but people from many other countries. It is difficult to learn many foreign languages, so each learns English. Thus, I have been able to join in conversations in which Romanians, Ukrainians, Italians, Germans, French, Scots, Greeks, Turks, etc. all wanted to speak to each other. They weren't about to have an 8-language conversation with multiple layers of translation, so they simply all spoke English.

Of course, one interesting thing is that they are creating their own English. As one Italian girl told me, often they don't know the correct English word for something, so they just make something up. She was a little concerned that that was not really the correct thing to do. I assured her that us English speakers do it all the time, and the important thing was to be able to communicate.

LGs mentioned places like South Africa, Nigeria, and India, but he did not mention that - although imposed on them by outsiders - most Africans prefer to use English as a national language, and would prefer it even if it were not the international language. (In the same manner, many African countries still use French, despite its declining global importance.) This is because there is sometimes a great deal of competition between ethnic or tribal groups, and speaking English sort of levels the playing field, without giving preference to any of these groups.