English anyone?

One of the joys of being English speaking is that we can almost travel anywhere and expect to find the local people fluent to some extent in English.  The summer of 2008, we visited Austria, the Czech Republic, and Hungary and had not issues talking with people (well, actually we had a little communication problems, but nothing major).

Now, we were not just whisking off to Europe as solely English speaking, between the two of us, we speak some German and a little French and Spanish.

We ate in small mom and pop restaurants and we ate in gourmet 4 star restaurant in all three countries and had little to no problem order food.  Riding the trains were a little more complicated especially en route to Prague and Hungary … English was scarce.  A couple of tour companies also sparsely spoke English.  All the tour guides spoke English quite well.  Of course, all the hotels had fluent English speakers.

Despite the criticism of being arrogant, because we speak English in non-English speaking countries, I remember (actually, I was not born) that prior to English, there was another international language … French.  We have hundreds of dialects throughout the world and dozens of major languages.  It makes sense that we have an unifying language, and right now, it is English, but lets not get too arrogant … there have been other standard languages in the past.  By the way, who speaks Latin these days?