So much so, that I can't imagine a present-day professional scientist or software engineer surviving without a decent command of English -- interested to hear from LanX or other European monks on this topic BTW.

I'm from Austria, so my native language is german*. Most of my software is developed in English and then translated into german when needed. Most of the bigger projects have integrated multi-language support. I reasoned that in case we need to support some foreign language, it would probably be easier to find someone that can speak that language and english that it is to find someone who can do the translation from german to the foreign language.

You can find people who can speak english in nearly every country. The german language is much harder to learn, and it fell out of favour in many regions of the world. The fact that two World Wars were started by people speaking german also didn't seem to help. So instead of eating Sauerkraut, the U.S. is now eating liberty cabbage.

* Well, technically, it's "Austria german". We have our own official dictionary and quite a few regional words and phrases.