If a Malay meets a Mexican in Madagascar, mooting mining in Mongolia --

English. Though the denizens of Punkin Center may have trouble following it.

I tell my foreign friends two things:

First, and most important, English is the language where everyone has an accent. No purity here, no Ecole Nationale to specify what's English and what ain't. Bar a few individual cases where it implies low class, an accent in English just means you ain't from around here. Who you callin' a bumpkin, boy? :-) So you don't know English well? Tackle it anyway. If somebody won't try to follow, it says much more about them than it does the earnest experimenter.

Second, it's not haute cuisine, it's mulligan stew. Listen a while, and you're likely to hear your own, native language in there someplace -- maybe in the minority, but it'd be pretty unusual to fail to find something. And if you don't -- use one of your own words! If it catches the fancy of the general population of English speakers, you might hear Jennings say it someday.

I'm blanking on the name, but a SF writer once wrote a novel in which the central idea was that the races in this neck of the Galaxy were only partial; that a precursor race, faced with an enemy it couldn't defeat, split itself into multiple parts using genetic engineering. Then think back on "Indo-European". Sometime in the dim dead past, there weren't that many humans, and it stretches the imagination to consider that they had multiple languages. Maybe English is the way you put it back together again, the Ur-tongue of the hunter-gatherers (or scavenger-gatherers, if you like that picture better). Reassembling the Tower of Babel, with steel reinforcement [and Kodak ads, more than likely, not to mention sponsorship from Coca Cola].

It don't bother me, but then I'm a native English speaker, and a gap-toothed redneck to boot. Just don't be so sure about the cultural imperialism bit. I'm still not convinced that it's not simple: we (English speakers) figured out the most efficient and effective way to live. Proper thing to do is steal it from us... this is not to say something better won't come along someday. But when it does, we'll debate it in English, at least at first.