Languages and Travel
The language is one of the things that sometimes discourage a person from travelling to another country. There is always the danger of misinterpretation, plus there is also the chance that offences to the culture could be committed if the travelling knows little about the customs of the locality.
To counter this, some tourists make the point to study common expressions of the locality that they are visiting days or weeks prior to the planned holiday. For example, people who travel to Paris can easily avail of phrase books where they can learn the commonly used phrases in French just in case they find it difficult to deal with the locals. In short, knowledge of the local language can help extremely when the tourist lost in a foreign land gets in a tight pitch.
That is why there is the need for a universal language. Currently, the lingua franca is English, which replaced Latin as the commonly spoken lingo in the modern world. Curiously, English is merely a mutation of Latin and most of the words in the language are derivatives of the original Latin pronunciation. Thus, if you are able to speak English that means you can get by in most situations when you are travelling on a holiday to a foreign country. Because it is the lingua franca, majority of the world's population can speak passable English.
Because of the necessity, there are tutors that speak English to those who do not have it as a native tongue. In the old days, to learn English you have to go to a school that teaches ESL or English Second Language. Nowadays, there are online tutorials available for those that cannot afford or does not have the schedule flexible enough to take formal classes in English academies.