Can I Use Canonicals for Multiple Languages so the English Page Gets All the Benefits?

[WinMore]

I'm just wondering how to optimise the following:
I have a page in multiple languages.
Let's say French, Dutch, English and German.

I would like all of these to get the benefits from the English "link". (Becasue this one is very popular)

I don't mind changing the set up, so it's just one link, and onpage a script decides what language it needs to show or something. I just have no idea how to get started.

This is hypthetical, I don't have a popular page yet. But I was working on the layout and design of my site and this bothers me.

I just seems such a waste to have a website in multiple languages and not being able to transfer the advantages of popularity in one language to the others.

Am I wasting my time here?

 

[Future State]

@WinMore. I don't think that's possible. You could go as far as changing the hreflang tag and everything. At the end of the day, every URL can only have one canonical URL. Meaning Google is going to recognize the English URL as the English URL and not as the other languages. That's a huge problem for you if you're doing this for SEO purposes.

If it's for PPC then carry on, who cares.

For SEO you're better off having sub-folders of the site like .com/fr for France and duplicating everything there. You could set up a redirect script on the English part to send people to the right spot, but this way they'd likely land on the right spot in their own search engine.

 

[WinMore]

I suppose writing a script on the page that allows people to click on a button to see their preferred language doesn't work?

In my mind it would still be the same page... But maybe search engine then only see the default language?
If I can change the setting automatically to the language of the browser, I think this might be plausible?

I guess I won't implement this, because in the end, if I'm correct, only one language will be indexed.
So a Dutch person will only find the English excerpt, click on it and see the text in Dutch. This might be a little weird.