Why forbidding French ? Many of the minority languages selected are for users that cannot understand English but would more likely read French (notably in Africa, but also in Canada), and could translate from the French base (or at least read the French version in case of ambiguity)
English is frequently a very ambiguous language (absence of orthographic distinction of nouns vs. verbs, frequent ommission of prepositions, many terms with multiple meanings, abuse of capitalization...). English is not the only "lingua franca" of the world, you can safely add French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Hindi and Chinese. But French, Spanish, Russian and Chinese are... forbidden here!
In all the listed languages allowed, these are spoken by very small communities with very few contributors on Wikimedia, and even less ones that are translators: if you restrict them to be able to read and understand English, you'll get almost no translation for many of these languages where English is not a **major** secondary language.
Take an example: translating to Breton (Brezhoneg), not a lot translators for this language, but almost all of them use French as their primary language (Breton is almost always a secondary regional language understood now by a minority in its native region), English is much less understood by these translators and they would appreciate having a good quality French version at least to check what they more or less attempt to read in English.