Bills and Thongs

Since World War II the dominance of the English-speaking peoples in science and technology and in international commerce has led to the recognition of English as the major international language in the world of practical affairs, with more and more countries making English the first foreign language to be taught and thus producing a vast expansion of English-language-teaching programs all over the world. Those whose native language is English do not sufficiently realize the amount of effort, by teacher and learner alike, that is put into the acquisition of a working knowledge of English by educated first speakers of other languages.

As an alternative to the recognition of particular natural languages as international in status, attempts have been made to invent and propagate new and genuinely international languages, devised for the purpose. Of these, Esperanto, invented by the Polish-Russian doctor L.L. Zamenhof in the 19th century, is the best known. Such languages are generally built up from parts of the vocabulary and grammatical apparatus of the better-known existing languages of the world. The relationship between the written letter and its pronunciation is more systematic than with many existing orthographies (English spelling is notoriously unreliable as an indication of pronunciation), and care is taken to avoid the grammatical irregularities to which all natural languages are subject and also to avoid sounds found difficult by many speakers (e.g., the English th sounds, which most Europeans, apart from English speakers, dislike). These artificial languages have not made much progress, though an international society of Esperanto speakers does exist.