I agree with you, and English is not my primary language (nor is it an official language of my country).
The medievals had Latin. We have English, and people do have incentive to learn English (while still keeping their regional languages) because almost all knowledge is available in English on the internet.
But we see everywhere efforts to "localize" everything from English to other languages, and this is ridiculous. Wikipedia in languages other than English is awful for almost all topics, websites I visit for the first time keep showing me badly-translated versions of their primary English content and I can't get MDN documentation to be shown to be in English, instead of the horrible translations made by voluntary people they automatically show to me.
Wikipedia in French, and Wikipedia in German are very good. They have each of them the third of the articles of the English Wikipedia (in 2012, source: http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/06/13/the-biggest-and-busiest-... ). Note also that the German Wikipedia had as many edits as the English ones, with fewer articles, which could be a good indicator of the (good) quality of the German Wikipedia.
More generally, there are plenty of very high quality websites in other languages than English on the Internet.
The medievals had Latin. We have English, and people do have incentive to learn English (while still keeping their regional languages) because almost all knowledge is available in English on the internet.
But we see everywhere efforts to "localize" everything from English to other languages, and this is ridiculous. Wikipedia in languages other than English is awful for almost all topics, websites I visit for the first time keep showing me badly-translated versions of their primary English content and I can't get MDN documentation to be shown to be in English, instead of the horrible translations made by voluntary people they automatically show to me.