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Comment by isolli | Hacker News Reader

English has the advantage of being an easy language to learn (at least up to 80% proficiency): no genders, little conjugation, no declension.

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The fact that it has so lany dialects that are frequently explored in popular media too means its a language that can be spoken poorly and still be understood. The listener bears some of the cognitive load and many other languages arent as advanced in this regard.

A Scottish accent in Parliament: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4k8dR04TzA

A Geordie accent on a British broadcast tv show (Auf Wiedersehen Pet) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY4TT3VtR8o

It took me two years of working with a Scottish colleague to fully understand them.

"can be spoken poorly and still be understood"

That is only something that is easy for native speakers, though. The points a non-native speaker anchors in the speaking flow are completely different to the ones a native speaker does, and depend on the mother language, making the thousand "official" variations of native English quite a challenge.

I find far superior other languages approach of having a "high" form taught in schools that everybody native is supposed the speak and understand, and the dialects are left for home.

To quote Paul Lewis [1]:

"English is the JavaScript of natural languages: easy to begin with, entirely bonkers, but used so widely you can't really avoid it."

[1] https://twitter.com/aerotwist/status/1129820477667586051

Yes, but it has the big disadvantage of a very irregular pronunciation. Other languages, like many southern European ones, seem to me to have much easier pronunciation. I am biased because I am Italian, but I am pretty sure that it is much easier for an Englishman with basically no Italian training to speak relatively correctly an Italian sentence than it is for me, after many years of studying and practising English, to properly pronounce English.

I would like this EU English to evolve in the direction of keeping a simple grammar and going towards a more regular pronunciation. Basically it would become a new form of Esperanto, except that differently from Esperanto it would actually have a viable path for many people to learn it.

I know I like to dream, but maybe...

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