You have a point. I took a foreign language in school but don't practice it because I don't have to, so I'm the furthest thing from fluent it's possible to be. Maybe other countries needed to standardize more than the US did, so the country just took the path of least resistance. In the days when this decision was more hotly debated, I didn't pick up on the same sort of America-First attitude some parts of the country have today.