If you were born in a non-English speaker country like the majority of the global population, you may already have heard, at least one time, how important is to learn this language. Essential for commerce, politics, academia and science, it's unbelievable to realize that just 4.9% of human inhabitants on this planet are native English speakers. It's a huge number, though. Almost 400 million, a higher count when added to the amount of people who learned english, totalizing two billion. Differing of common sense, this is not a modern phenomena. Choosing an easy, more straightforward language for business between diverse nations is a strategy used since the Mesopotamian era. 

The akkadian culture was a shared background in all Crescent Fertile, gaining shape with the development of sumerian cuneiform script from First Sumerian Empire (4500-4000 B.C) to Neo-Sumerian Empire (2110-2004 B.C). Between the fall of a king and the rise of another, in 3100 B.C, the first pieces of the oldest linguistic record had been written. At that time, sumerian had a difficult lexical structure of monosyllabic words, with similar phonemes and wide options of meaning for only one term. These terms, combining with each other, creating other ones, would turn sumerian into a chaotic morphological labyrinth.

A good kind of artistic language, by the way, teached for high priests — not even the emperor was alphabetized, needing a copyist to read and, of course, write his messages. It was useful for poetry and religious storyline, but handling a range of empires unified in one scientific, religious, artistic and literary tradition for 2.500 years claimed for more practical ways of communication. Time after time, sumerian was substituted by akkadian and at last, aramaic. They lose words in the process, and suddenly this new language has new phonetic symbols, and determinative symbols — their function was just to tell the meaning of other term, like a map. 

Today, 4.000 years after, the internet plays a core in the expansion of self learning. A substantial percentage of english speakers as a second language learned by themselves, consuming cultural production from US and Europe. They find a mirror of never spoked ambitions in books and movies untranslated for their native languages, new visions about politics, economics, art and religion far from home. Many of the best MBA programs are taught in english, many of the most important books of modern history are written or translated in english, making this language a tool for spreading data across the world. Understanding english is an open door to the best training, credentials and employment opportunities. 

Apart from dialectics, a global language was a strong contributor for the longevity and success of mesopotamian societies. Akkadian and english worked as a thread linking relations between centralized states, the division of labour, law, marriage agreements and divorce settlements; it creates an identity of ideas and beliefs brought into concrete reality of contracts, stories and prose. It is a deal signed by dozens of countries. It helps to build peace or create more organized wars, both of them important for growth. 

Good communication is the first step for consensus. Humans learned fast the best way of acknowledging it; make people write it down.