Judebert

If you're running a "race around the world", you're going to find yourself in a foreign land where they don't speak English. You'll need directions, or you'll want your taxi to go faster. How will you get your message across?

Previous Racers have tried pantomime, wordless noises, and drawing. Generally, these aren't very helpful: some people aren't good at charades, different cultures use different noises, and pictures are easily misunderstood.

You'll want to speak the local language.

You can't be expected to learn every language on the globe, but each member of your team should understand at least one other language. English is the lingua franca of business, science, diplomacy, and aviation, but it's not an advantage over other teams.

To cover the majority of the globe, you'd also need French, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese (Spanish is similar), Italian, German, Afrikaans, Swahili, Arabic, Russian, and Hindi. There's an interesting set of language lists that could help you decide which ones you want to take on. In particular, the "number of speakers" and "number of countries" lists would be most useful.

Since you're just traveling, and not actually planning on settling down to live in one of these foreign countries, you don't need to be conversationally fluent with any of these languages. In fact, I've heard that just 100 words is enough to be functionally fluent in any language... but I've never been told what the words are, specifically.

Here are the words I think you should learn for functional Racing.