I concede! I was thinking of things such as the company I used to work for. In our Spanish office the Japanese adn Spanish conversed in English - the 'lingua franca' of today. HOwever, the situation in 1067 and onwards wasn't wuite like that as there was a mass migration. More like French / English colonisation of Africa, and we can see the effects of that today.

Changing the subject, does anyone know how the worldwide numbers of (native) Spanish speakers stack up against either English or Chinese? And how the numbers are changing over time?