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Originally Posted by All Systems Go
In the UK the charts are made almost totally out of records sung in English. there will be the occasional novelty record or some kind of freak like Rammstein, but generally you never see bands which do not sing in English.
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Some possibile theories for why this is the case:
1. Language education. People in England and America generally have poor relationships to foreign languages compared to how well people in other countries tend to understand English. Therefore English speaking music will largely be understood in most European/Asian countries whereas the converse will not be true.
2. Musical education. The UK and America tend to have appallingly low standards of musical education at school level which results in people who focus only on one aspect of music (mainly the lyrics) rather than on deeper aspects. As such, music in a foreign language is more likely to be thought incomprehensible than it would be to someone who listens primarilly to things other than the lyrics - the relationship that the man-on-the-street has to a German-language pop song is likely to be different than that which a lover of opera has to Wagner.
3. Pop music and commercialism (related to 2.). Youre asking exclusivity about popular charts .rather than music in general. These charts are dominated almost exclusively by pop music which tends to be focused on lyrics and imagery rather than on musical content. As such you would expect tracks with lyrics sung in a non-understood language to be less successful than they would be in other styles of music.
4. Singing ability (related to 2. and 3.). Most pop musicians arent very good singers by any objective standard. The voice of someone like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or a good opera singer has the ability to transcend words and make its meaning and emotional content clear through the delivery and phrasing even when the language used isnt understood (the reaction that the opera singer received on Britain's Got Talent recently is a good example of this). Since most popsingers have nowhere near this level of ability, it follows that their work is going to be less able to cross linguistic boundaries.
5. Rock/pop as anglo-american. Ever since the 60s rock/pop have been perceived as being an English language movement, since thats where the most important early figures came from and have continued to come from. Even a lot of the great German rock bands (eg Can/Faust/Kraftwerk) released their music with English rather than German lyrics since that was the done thing at the time (although Kraftwerk actually released both English and German versions). Hip-hop continues this trend, by being a fundamentally 'American' music style.