Yes, I did mean that literally. And I am a girl. Math is an international and universal language.
Sorry for the assumption. I try to watch for sexist language but it creeps in nonetheless.
As for math, the universal language... I don't know about that. A number of cultures never developed math, simply because their languages have no numbers. As I recall australian aboriginals only have the numbers "one" and "many".
As Godel proved, all math is ultimately number theory. Obviously you have to have numbers in order to have math. The utility of numbers is undisputed, but there's no reason to assume numbers are a fundamental constraint on reality or have any existence beyond our culture.
Math, as an axiomatic system, is simply a game of symbol shuffling according to transformational rules. Given number theory you could reconstruct all math from a set of simple rules about the relationships of certain symbols. There's nothing about those symbols that require that they have a real-world referent. I.e. numbers behave the same whether or not they're counting something.