English isn't unique by any means in that people from different countries speak different dialects which can sometimes be marginally difficult to understand. In

English isn't unique by any means in that people from different countries speak different dialects which can sometimes be marginally difficult to understand. In fact, this is how new languages are created in the first place. At one point Italy, France and Romania all spoke Vulgar Latin. And French used to be considered the lingua franca to such and extent that it's in the damned name of the thing. But no one complains that the Portugese have difficulty understanding the Spanish who can't understand the French who can't understand the Italians who can't understand the Romanians. I've been to a few different English-speaking countries now and I can understand everyone's English just fine unless they're from a rural area. Doesn't matter if it's rural Ireland or rural Georgia, I'll have to ask them to put on a fake accent, no matter how poor it is. English is not particularly strange or unique on most measures. Phonetically it has a few unusual sounds, but every language has one or two (and our most odd sound "th" is found in everything from medieval Japanese to ancient Greek). Grammatically English approaches an analytic language, though nothing quite like Chinese. That means we have fairly sophisticated syntax (meaning attributed to the order of words), but our morphology (the actual words changing according to grammatical meaning like for tense or plurality) is very simple. People from countries where the speak languages with all sorts of genitive and ablative cases with verb agreement on prepositions with an animacy hierarchy (I'm exaggerating here, obviously) seem to see English as simple. Of course, English isn't particularly well-suited to be a lingua franca. If anything our shift toward analyticism is more of a result of England being repeatedly conquered in it's early settlement by Germanic tribes followed by English speakers repeatedly conquering everyone else, while embracing multiculturalism. But like most lingua francas, they gain status because of their economic importance and then you have to learn them simply because they've become the lingua franca. I am not optimistic on the idea that a language should emerge that is actually well-suited and designed to be a lingua franca. Esperanto has been around for, what, over a hundred years now or something? And I'm sure Amiga was technically superior to IBM and in a thousand other format wars the technically superior option never took hold. I'm just glad that I don't have to learn the bastard version of Latin that has grown up in academia and instead my own native language is the standard. There's very little you can do to convince me that an 8-syllable compound word formed from the roots of a language that did not allow compounding using word meanings that are grossly different from their original meaning for a common, everyday concept or thing for the sake of "universal standard" is a superior method of doing things.