SomeProgrammer_

I think the _idea_ of a global audience was in mind, but when looking at who was a part of the discussions & how the language exists, it's pretty clear that a lot of cultures, nations, languages, and speech varieties weren't a part of the design process.

Maybe it could be said that Zamenhof's conceptions of "global audience" were those who were closest to hegemonic and/or supernational influence, which I think I'd agree with.

But I wouldn't call his design nor process particularly culturally inclusive.

Personal thoughts, Esperanto is designed & spoken with notable allophony to help accommodate different regional usages. For example, the <r> in Esperanto can be pronounced allophonically as the "French R", "American R", "Spanish R", etc.

However, a lot of conlangers have noticed that there are a lot of consonant clusters and basic phonemes that don't seem to have nice analogues in many languages - like Esperanto's affricates, affricate & fricative clusters, etc.

On top of that, the language is phonemically regular in the sense that there are no natural-sounding phonemic irregularities that one might normally expect.

In my view, Esperanto sounds fine. It has it's own aesthetic. Though at the same time, I find that because a lot of Esperanto was designed without a global audience in mind, there are a lot of "approximations" to what Zamenhoff, the original creator of Esperanto, maybe had anticipated that the language would sound like.