Dominant languages can spread even without coercion (opens in new tab)

There is an enormous economic incentive to do business in English as it gives you access to these huge markets with wealthy customers. Additionally, a lot of content is published by English speakers, which re-enforces the need to learn English. Finally because pretty much every country does at least some business in English, it's also the most common language for any two countries that wish to engage with each other.

I'm actually Dutch but I live in Germany. While I speak a little bit of German, my English is far better. I don't actually need German to do business in Berlin; so I don't use it a lot I have no economic incentive to learn it. There's a critical mass of foreigners here that mostly speak English far better than they speak German. And while some Germans don't like that, a lot of them don't mind it and actually move to Berlin because they speak English and because is so international. You see this dynamic in a lot of economically important cities across the world. As soon as you get any concentration of foreigners living in them, English becomes an important language to the point where the locals start using English to be able to keep up.

This isn't the case for, say, the Netherlands, or Sweden. And I'd specifically cite the need to import English-language cultural works as driving the use of English in those countries. There's plenty of other countries' whose languages never really had a literary culture to begin with, too - although usually at that point you can find some kind of forced cultural erasure rather than mere economic need to learn English.

>Multilingualism (both in countries and individuals) lessens the zero-sum nature of language competition. But it is costly, in both time and money. Ultimately, some societies may have to put a price on a cultural inheritance that, once lost, is nigh-impossible to recover.

That being said, this is peak anglobrain. The EU bloc is already a deeply multilingual society, and people are perfectly willing to dabble with multiple language proficiencies. Ironically, this is because much of the EU just falls back to English - like, to the point where the EU has it's own dialect of it[0]. French, German, and Spanish are also commonly learned and used as second languages, too.

This "languages are hard to learn" meme is, more than anything, the product of bad educational practices, lack of student motivation, and difficulty in finding speaking partners. For some reason, the entire anglosphere[1] is just plain bad at language education[2]. That's not to say that learning a new language is easy, of course. It's just that we aren't even really trying. The anglosphere is perfectly willing to just sit and make the rest of the world speak our language.

[0] This is known as Euro English.

[1] And, arguably, Japan.

[2] The UK is so bad at it that it was probably the deciding factor in Brexit. Nobody wants to immigrate to countries they can't speak the languages of. This meant that the UK had a uniquely lopsided ratio of immigrants to emigrants, and that much of the UK simply didn't get the benefits of being allowed to leave.

Now the "language of inter-nationality communication" is so entrenched, that Ukrainian needs government support to incentivise media and businesses to use it. As everyone understands Russian nowadays, and few people know English, companies that serve the CIS market actually promote Russian better than the government promotes Ukrainian.

To talk about the elephant in the room, note that the politics don't correlate perfectly with the language situation on the ground - on one hand there are quite a few Russian-speakers that don't want Russian as an official language and also plenty of pro-Western people want Russian to be co-official.

But dominant languages have plenty of advantages.

First of all just by being spoken by lots of people make then a "de facto" common language, and sometimes people change to the dominant language in a conversation just because one person spoke in that, EVEN when all the people can talk and understand the same non-dominant language. I've seen it happen, and this may be a leftover from times when it was persecuted to speak the non-dominant one.

Second there's lot of non-aggresive coercion. You may have less job opportunities if you don't use the dominant language, your works less promotion, not considered serious, ... . I'm sure that (except for the novelty) a punk-rock Navajo band singing in Navajo would have less media exposure that the same band using English.

And third, there's lots of remanent coercion. People being agressive because you are using the "wrong" language, not being able to use the language in a trial (in the same country that contains the dominant and dominated languages), ... .

If you add all three it's clear that without some organized help the dominated languages have a hard time. And when a language is lost some of the knowledge is lost, because a language is not only a means of communication, it's also a way to see the world. The expression the language holds gives us a unique view on different ways of thinking.