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Comment by firethief | Hacker News Reader

Esperanto isn't intended to be anyone's native language (it's an "international auxiliary language") so that's a weird way to compare speakership.

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However, we already have English as a de facto world language. Aviation is in English, if a Chinese person and a German are in a meeting, often English is the bridge language. Hundreds of millions of people speak various regional languages in India, yet English is often common. Scientific literature is also heavily in English. Some notion that Esperanto is going to replace the international utility of English is just a fantasy.

You could argue that at one point French used to be the international language but lost its dominance over time so English might lose it too in the future.

However I don’t think Esperanto has a shot at becoming a major language.

It has as few as 63k speakers, native or otherwise. The language is barely spoken compared to languages of similar difficulty.

the very point of esperanto is that nothing is of “similar difficulty”, so even comparing to spanish is disingenuous

There are other languages of similar difficulty (all constructed), but they are spoken even less than Esperanto.

That's a bit of a strong claim to make, considering that there are thousands of languages with more speakers than Esperanto, most of which you probably never heard of. My guess is that some contact language has similar difficulty, while having more speakers.

Pichinglis [1] seems like a good candidate: 70,000 to 100,000 speakers in Equatorial Guinea; formed as a creole from English and various languages of Western Africa, so you should get a high number of cognates similar to Esperanto and a simplified grammar. It might even help you learn other languages of the region faster.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pichinglis

Is that still a good choice for someone who doesn't plan to go to equatorial guinea?

About as good a choice as learning Esperanto is for someone who doesn't plan to go to an international Esperanto conference, i.e. not very.

It's probably better to learn a language when you think it'll help you with something you're already planning to do, rather than pick a language and then try to find opportunities to use it. (Also applies to programming languages.)

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