On my way from the Prague airport to the city of Prague, I sat on a bus next to a man wearing a suit and tie.

“Here for business?”, I asked.

“European Space Agency meeting”, he replied.

Those were the days of Brexit, so, I had to ask, “What’s the language of ESA now?”.

“English”, he replied unequivocally.

That’s when it hit me that there are only two approaches to business languages that the world will follow.

One is the Chinese approach, where you create a big geographical entity that speaks your language.

The other is the European Laissez-faire approach of respecting a plethora of languages with few speakers which is worthless for most foreigners to learn, all of your mini languages die and get replaced by English.