Calling your own language "THE language" are perhaps not the best way of meeting the rest of the world!? In France "the language" is actually french! Coming from Norway, I can`t go far outside my country before I must speak other peoples launguages. Coming from a small country, you just know that that`s the way it is. You just have to manage with your different foreign languages your english, your german, your french, your spanish .... Walking for five years on different Caminos, I have found it one of the great pleasures to make people understand me, or understand other people in one language or another. It`s sort of a pleasure each time you are able to communicate with someone. From time to time I have met people having english, german or french as their first language, who take it for granted that all others speak their language. Sometimes it is irritating, other times I have felt sorry for them. We loose something if we do not respect the fact that the world is full of languages and we have to do a job to understand eachother. Then may be we also will discover that we are different in more ways than our languages, and that we even have to do a bit of training to understand and respect each others cultures as well.
.... and this is NOT perfect english, I am sure, but if I should wait untill then, I would never be able to speak with people outside my own country....