Any intelligent organism would at the very least need the ability to locate the position of objects in space. So the ideal interstellar lingua franca would be haptic.
That is, how did English gain the present status of popularity? There are in fact a number of interlocking reasons for the popularity of English as a lingua franca.
For example, it became a lingua franca in India where a variety of indigenous languages made the use of any one of them as a whole country system problematic.
The 1993 South African constitution named no less than eleven official languages, of which English and Afrikaans are but two, but English is increasingly recognized as the lingua franca.
In fact, French used to be the go-to language for diplomacy and business when communicating between entities that didn't share the same language, otherwise known as a lingua franca.
This was welcomed by some (particularly in the Dravidian speaking areas of southern India, who preferred English as a lingua franca to the Hindi alternative), but opposed and derided by others.