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You are right. However, what makes a language even more important, socio-economically, is if it's spoken in a neighbouring country or a country you have great trade relations with. Ultimately English is the global lingua franca anyway and languages serve the purpose more as a means of education as 'cultural languages'.
I'm glad Belgium has a fairly thorough education for French and still offers Latin and Classical Greek classes (as a means of classical education, but only for the elite students).
Even for an American learning foreign languages is useful not only socio-economically, but also culturally. English itself uses many terms from foreign languages like German and French and it aids in expanding one's sense of civilisation.
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