Interlingua is an international auxiliary language developed by the International Auxiliary Language Association with financing from the Rockfeller Foundation, The Carnegie Corporation, the Research Corporation and principally the family of the heiress Alice Vanderbilt Morris and her husband and children, who were deeply interested in the problem of international communication.
The idea of Interlingua is that its vocabulary is not an invention but an objective extraction and standardization of the international vocabulary in the major European languages. English, French, Italian, and Spanish/Portugese were initially chosen as sources for international words because these languages are major centers of radiation and absorption of words to and from other languages and are extensively involved in economic, scientific and cultural exchange between nations in the world. German and Russian were later added as alternative sources.
source
wikipedia.org,
omniglot.com &
ethnologue.com