“Speak or write in English, and the world will hear
you. Speak or write in Tamil or Portuguese,
and you may have a harder time getting your message out...some languages with
large populations of speakers, such as Mandarin, Hindi, and Arabic, are
relatively isolated in these networks. This means that fewer communications in
those languages reach speakers of other languages. Meanwhile,
a language like Dutch—spoken by 27 million people—can be a disproportionately
large conduit, compared with a language like Arabic, which has a whopping 530
million native and second-language speakers” https://www.pnas.org/content/111/52/E5616
