Given that English is one of my native languages (the other is Spanish) and the fact that I can speak the language fluently by virtue of growing up in a predominantly English-speaking country, learning it in school at an early age, and years of immersion and daily exposure, I am going to be biased when I am talking about English as the language by itself and in its features alone.
But since many users here are non-native English speakers who had to take the time of learning it (whether for economic reasons looking to move into an English-speaking country, to chat with people outside your culture, being able to consume a wider amount of content on the Internet, or you're simply an Anglophile or appreciate American culture and values), I want to know what's your opinion on English as a language.
Did you find learning it difficult and do you like speaking and reading the language? Do you think learning the English language has put you into adopting or being influenced by the greater Anglo-Saxon culture or does it exist independently from your native culture and doesn't take away from it? Would you still learn English if there was no economic incentive but still useful for cross-cultural communication or even just because you like English-language literature and media? Do you wish another language became the international language instead or competing with English in that position?
Also for people whose native language is English (especially native Brits and whites in Anglophone countries who are of British descent), how do you feel about foreigners speaking your language? Given that your own language has spread across the world and spoken by people in different continents even outside the Anglosphere, what do you think about the English language no longer being just "the language of England", no longer having a language that is only yours and that most of the world can speak and understand your own national ethnic language?
I wrote my own long as response in the spoiler if you want to read if, since it would take much of this post and I want people here to focus more of my questions, but TL;DR English is somewhat suited for an international language due to its mostly okay phonology and very diverse vocabulary. However due to the history of imperialism by both Britain and the U.S. including the genocide and assimilation of indigenous people within their colonies, it definitely isn't politically or historically neutral. It would be better if a constructed language like Esperanto was used more for the purpose of cross-cultural communication.
But since many users here are non-native English speakers who had to take the time of learning it (whether for economic reasons looking to move into an English-speaking country, to chat with people outside your culture, being able to consume a wider amount of content on the Internet, or you're simply an Anglophile or appreciate American culture and values), I want to know what's your opinion on English as a language.
Did you find learning it difficult and do you like speaking and reading the language? Do you think learning the English language has put you into adopting or being influenced by the greater Anglo-Saxon culture or does it exist independently from your native culture and doesn't take away from it? Would you still learn English if there was no economic incentive but still useful for cross-cultural communication or even just because you like English-language literature and media? Do you wish another language became the international language instead or competing with English in that position?
Also for people whose native language is English (especially native Brits and whites in Anglophone countries who are of British descent), how do you feel about foreigners speaking your language? Given that your own language has spread across the world and spoken by people in different continents even outside the Anglosphere, what do you think about the English language no longer being just "the language of England", no longer having a language that is only yours and that most of the world can speak and understand your own national ethnic language?
I wrote my own long as response in the spoiler if you want to read if, since it would take much of this post and I want people here to focus more of my questions, but TL;DR English is somewhat suited for an international language due to its mostly okay phonology and very diverse vocabulary. However due to the history of imperialism by both Britain and the U.S. including the genocide and assimilation of indigenous people within their colonies, it definitely isn't politically or historically neutral. It would be better if a constructed language like Esperanto was used more for the purpose of cross-cultural communication.
I will be discussion two aspects of the English language: linguistic features, and history and cultural impact.
Linguistic Features
Phonetically, English is alright as it is. Compared to other European languages the phonology isn't too crazy, the only thing "unusual" about it are the dental fricatives (the sounds the digraph "th" usually makes), though the voiceless dental fricative also appears in most dialects of European Spanish for the letters "c" and "z" (though not how it's spoken in my native country, which has seseo and are all pronounced the same as "s"). Also English has a rather large vowel inventory which can also be tricky to get used to and due to lack of diacritics (which is both a pro and a con, we'll get to that shortly) can be difficult to tell how a vowel should be pronounced when you're learning it. But other than that, it's aesthetically alright. General American English in particular sounds pretty neutral and flat (IMO, though it could just be my bias as an American).
Modern English, by virtue of having contact with many other languages throughout its history, has an expansive and diverse vocabulary which makes it decently suited for international communication. Aside from English's Germanic roots, if you ever studied this language's history, you will know that English vocabulary borrowed heavily from Old French dialects and later during the Enlightenment period borrowed more from Latin and Greek. Further contact with the rest of the world when Britain started colonizing and intercontinental trade became possible brought loanwords from more diverse and much more different languages.
Grammar-wise, English is simple in some ways and somewhat complicated in others. Being an analytic language, there is very little inflection. There are only three noun cases: subject, object and possessive, and nouns are only modified to mark plurality and possession. English however does have a large number of verb tenses, usually marked by either verb conjugation, auxiliary verbs or both. It makes the meanings of actions more precise, but can be tricky to memorize and get used to. Most notably, there is no grammatical gender also which makes it nice.
The spelling is probably the most pesky and controversial part of the English language. Now, English doesn't (or very rarely) use diacritics or non-Latin characters (þ, ð, ƿ and ȝ has been thrown down the memory hole) but the current spelling is mostly based on pre-vowel shift Middle English orthography with many digraphs changing or losing its original sound, such as "gh" in night which used to be pronounced with a velar fricative but is usually now silent, although in words like cough it's pronounced like "f" and in words like ghost it's "g" with the silent h. This inconsistent orthography makes reading and writing in English a challenge for learners, and even I mess up in spelling occasionally. Also English's phonotactics and syllable structure can be pretty tricky, especially with words like strengths and twelfths. Now English doesn't use diacritics, whether to mark accents in syllables (no need to since English is stress-timed) or variations in vowels, which makes writing and typing on the computer easier if you as a native English speaker know intuitively how words are properly spelled and pronounced, but can make it harder for learners to pronounce words when reading. The only diacritic mark native in English, but is very rarely used, are double dots above vowels which are placed on the first vowel in a double vowel to indicate that it's not to be pronounced as a single vowel or diphthong (such as in cöoperate and Zöe), but it's very rarely used. I did mention that the lack of diacritics and non-Latin letters make it easier for English text to be written and displayed on computers but do keep in mind that ASCII was adapted to the English alphabet and support for foreign alphabets only came out later with the expansion of character sets.
History and Cultural Impact
Alright, that's enough of what I have to say about features of the language itself but there's another language that I want to talk about and which is also important, and that is it's history and the cultural values attached to it.
Of course, you cannot separate a language from the history of how it evolved and the culture from which it originated. Both are intricately linked to each other.
When you learn a language, you are not just learning the language itself as a system of putting together sounds to communicate an idea, but you also take with you the culture and values of its community of speakers. Language is not only a tool for communication, but a way of establishing a cultural domain and a common identity and kinship within those who share it.
This is the case for English, which is the national language of the people of England and their descendants throughout the world (chiefly in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa). And English carries with it its literary heritage (Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, the works of Shakespeare, the KJV Bible, Harry Potter) and values (Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism, Protestantism, liberalism, etc.). Most importantly, it places the political, cultural, economic and social dominance of the Anglo-Saxon world and especially the United States as the center of of our world and above all other cultures, which makes international use of the language non-neutral and far too dependent on American self-interests.
Also consider the fact that English has been spread outside of England and later by the U.S. through conquest, imperialism, war crimes, genocide, forced assimilation, dollar diplomacy and forcing countries to take on debt, etc. which has lead to the huge decline and even extinction of indigenous languages. In post-colonial nations, this means having to speak the oppressor's language. This doesn't matter much for descendants of English folk in settler countries, but keep in mind there are also native English-speakers who are victims of this colonialism and language erasure (e.g. the Irish, the Welsh, the Manx, the African diaspora in the Americas, Native Americans, Australian Aboriginals, etc.)
Nowadays, the English language is spread throughout the world though the influence of American mass media (whatever the Brits, Aussies, Kiwis and Leafs put out is totally irrelevant in the greater scheme of things nowadays) because that's where Hollywood, Disney, Warner Bros., NBC, Fox, Paramount, and everything are all located. They sell the idea of America being this prosperous and freedom-loving utopia while being a vehicle of globohomo agendas not just with within the U.S. but around the world, with no corner to be left untouched by its grasp.
This spread and global dominance of Anglo-Saxion culture throughout the world has eclipsed and washed out the values of other cultures. Anglo-Saxon culture in today's world has an image of wealth most importantly. Because English and Anglo-Saxon culture has prestige in today's world, other worldviews are being overshadowed and more and more of Anglo-Saxon values are encroaching into other civilizations and more and more people outside the Anglosphere are adopting its values due to cultural imperialism.
Even today, the dominance of American cultural and political influence and the spread of its values throughout the world has included cancers such as globohomo, wokeism, acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights, leftism, feminism, consumerism, and every form of cuckoldry. Not only is that shit being spread through Hollywood but more like force fed into these countries by putting up LGBTQ+ flags on foreign, meddling in elections and military interventions.
Granted, most people aren't learning English because they are Anglophiles but more so for the economic opportunities the language brings due to the economic dominance of the Anglo world and especially the U.S. Now it's not that the U.S. became economically dominant naturally, but through exploiting third world countries including Latin America and also taking over the world financial system with the establishment of the Breton-Woods system and international financial institutions like the IMF and World Banks, which have indebted the developing world. You might asked, then why can't these other nations create opportunities in their own countries and improve their own economies? You see, the same force that has put the West at the top is the same force keeping the Third World down by putting corrupt politicians in power who will siphon whatever money the country produces into their own pockets and work for the interests of the American hegemon; the citizens themselves have little power to rebel or affect the circumstances of their countries, so many migrate into the same Western countries keeping them down.
And finally, I can't finish my discussion without mentioning technology and chiefly the Internet. The Internet has allowed global communications with different people from different cultures around the world, miles across from where you love, who share common interests from the comfort of your own bed. And of course a common lingua franca was needed to facilitate this interconnection and English fell right in. The development of computer technology has largely been (though not entirely) in the Anglosphere (the first description of a modern computer and the first programmer were Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace who were English, Alan Turing who helped decipher encrypted Nazi messages and wrote many concepts like the Turing machine and Turing completeness was also English, Bell Labs was based in the U.S. and things like the transistor and the Unix operating system were developed there, pioneering tech companies like IBM, Apple, Commodore, Intel, Microsoft were founded in the U.S., the precursor to the modern Internet known as the ARPAnet was the project of the U.S. military and American academic institutions, the creator of the World Wide Web Tim Berners Lee is an Englishman and the first website is written in English, etc.), and despite existing websites in many other languages those languages never attained the global scope English has. Many users of English-language sites (such as this very site) are used by many people whose first language is not English, but have learned it to partake in this global community.
Conclusions
I personally don't like the choice of having English as an international language, not because it is impossibly difficult to learn or because it's an aesthetically ugly language, but it's definitely not a politically and culturally neutral language and it's still attached ultimately to a specific national culture and worldview, and which the spread of English has made that worldview dominant and placed in the center of our world. Anglocentrism and an Anglocentrist worldview if you will and also American exceptionalism.
A similar thing can be said for other widespread languages spread through conquest and colonialism and whose nations have also committed atrocities as part of its spread (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, etc.)
I wanted to be able to express myself in a language that was not spread by colonialism. Because I come from a country full of identityless mutts, where the Spanish killed off the original native population and brought over niggers, and these Spanish mixed with these niggers to make us and have everyone speak Spanish, unfortunately my country does not have a language to call its own. We're not as lucky as the Irish, Filipinos, Africans, even the Cape Verdeans, Haitians and Jamaicans who have their own national languages and creoles outside from just having their own slang and words for things. But I have to speak the same Spanish as the Spanish in Spain and every nationality in Latin America, which was spread to them by force due to linguistic assimilation at the cost of the loss of indigenous languages. I hate the Spanish for bringing niggers over and making me a nappy-headed mutt.
Of course, if I refuse to speak Spanish because it was spread by colonialism then I'm a hypocrite for speaking English because it was also spread through colonialism, slavery and genocide. Maybe it's because I am Hispanic and not of Anglo descent so speaking English doesn't affect me as much as speaking Spanish. But still so as to not be a hypocrite I turned to other languages I could use for everyday communication.
At first I tried to learn Catalan, which I chose because it was a regional minority language in Spain and it's a Romance language so it would be close enough to Spanish for me to easily learn and similar enough for a Spanish speaker to somewhat understand. Also, Catalans want to make themselves independent from Spain and since the enemy of my enemy is my friend I wanted to show my solidarity for them. And also since part of the Hispanic identity is your ability to speak Spanish (I hate being called Hispanic because I am not a Spaniard and I want my culture to stand out as its own distinct identity instead of deriving our identity from a different culture), if I spoke Catalan (or any other language that was similar to Spanish but also a different language in its own right) then I wouldn't be considered Hispanic anymore or at least people would stop calling me Hispanic if they notice I speak a related language. Of course, I gave up on learning it due to running out of interest but I might go back into it again because I still think it's an interesting language, being halfway between French and Spanish with some Italian thrown in and being a sister language to Occitan.
Though the problem of using a "minor" or regional natlang like Catalan and Gaelic, apart from the amount of time and practice one needs to invest in them and having to have the interest in learning them in the first place, is the fact that they are still attached to their respective ethnic groups, culture and nation. And if anyone is going to learn a language, they won't just focus on the language itself but they also have to learn about the cultures and histories of where these languages are spoken and originated. I wouldn't learn Gaelic just for the sake of only speaking Gaelic just because it's not English, but to get the full experience I must also be interested in Celtic culture as well. The two cannot be divorced. And another problem is that I can't use these languages to speak with my family or even if I wanted to buy something from the store. Despite living in the most linguistically diverse city in the world, I can't get along speaking a very "minor" language if I can't communicate with the people I am around the most even if there are Catalan speakers or Gaelic speakers in my city. Plus it would be an insult to these cultures if I just blindly took their language, a part of their culture and how they distinguish themselves from outsiders, and disregarded all the culture and history attached to it, and stripped it bear as just words and sounds to be used for my own vain and demented reason. They were never meant to be international languages, but to be used within those ethnic groups themselves.
The other alternative is to learn (or create my own) constructed language and use that as my main mode of communication. In fact a conlang DOES exist that was made for the purpose of international communication, and that is Esperanto! (well, Esperanto isn't the ONLY conlang created as an IAL, there are many others, but it's the only one that has significant widespread use (of about 10,000-200,000 total fluent speakers which is still very small)) Also Esperanto at first glance looks like Spanish and like Spanish has the five vowel system.
Now Esperanto, as an IAL, isn't perfect (it has a mostly European vocabulary base, the voiceless velar fricative is hard to pronounce and that pesky accusative suffix takes time to get used to, but otherwise very simple grammar with no grammatical gender like English and the spelling matches the phonology, the characters with the circumflex or ĉapelo aren't a problem with writing, they were design with the typewriters at the time in mind and even today there's UTF-8 and you can setup your keyboard to use Esperanto diacritic characters) but it's the best option there is in terms of a neutral language that also has an international scope. The point of a language is not to be perfect. Other conlangs people barely speak it outside a core of a very small handfull of speakers, maybe the creator of the conlang and his friends.
And also every culture in the past has endeavored into conquering and assimilating other cultures, even if it's minor countries like Poland and Sweden or even small tribes raiding and taking in people from other tribes.
But whatever, I'm having fun with Esperanto and I want to spread the black pill and other based ideas through Esperanto as an alternative to a language that is non-colonial but also easy to learn. Might learn Catalan and maybe Latin, and other conlangs to like Ido, Toki Pona, Lojban, maybe even Ithkuil if I have the time and once I'm done with my current projects. And hey guys, I guess that's it.
Linguistic Features
Phonetically, English is alright as it is. Compared to other European languages the phonology isn't too crazy, the only thing "unusual" about it are the dental fricatives (the sounds the digraph "th" usually makes), though the voiceless dental fricative also appears in most dialects of European Spanish for the letters "c" and "z" (though not how it's spoken in my native country, which has seseo and are all pronounced the same as "s"). Also English has a rather large vowel inventory which can also be tricky to get used to and due to lack of diacritics (which is both a pro and a con, we'll get to that shortly) can be difficult to tell how a vowel should be pronounced when you're learning it. But other than that, it's aesthetically alright. General American English in particular sounds pretty neutral and flat (IMO, though it could just be my bias as an American).
Modern English, by virtue of having contact with many other languages throughout its history, has an expansive and diverse vocabulary which makes it decently suited for international communication. Aside from English's Germanic roots, if you ever studied this language's history, you will know that English vocabulary borrowed heavily from Old French dialects and later during the Enlightenment period borrowed more from Latin and Greek. Further contact with the rest of the world when Britain started colonizing and intercontinental trade became possible brought loanwords from more diverse and much more different languages.
Grammar-wise, English is simple in some ways and somewhat complicated in others. Being an analytic language, there is very little inflection. There are only three noun cases: subject, object and possessive, and nouns are only modified to mark plurality and possession. English however does have a large number of verb tenses, usually marked by either verb conjugation, auxiliary verbs or both. It makes the meanings of actions more precise, but can be tricky to memorize and get used to. Most notably, there is no grammatical gender also which makes it nice.
The spelling is probably the most pesky and controversial part of the English language. Now, English doesn't (or very rarely) use diacritics or non-Latin characters (þ, ð, ƿ and ȝ has been thrown down the memory hole) but the current spelling is mostly based on pre-vowel shift Middle English orthography with many digraphs changing or losing its original sound, such as "gh" in night which used to be pronounced with a velar fricative but is usually now silent, although in words like cough it's pronounced like "f" and in words like ghost it's "g" with the silent h. This inconsistent orthography makes reading and writing in English a challenge for learners, and even I mess up in spelling occasionally. Also English's phonotactics and syllable structure can be pretty tricky, especially with words like strengths and twelfths. Now English doesn't use diacritics, whether to mark accents in syllables (no need to since English is stress-timed) or variations in vowels, which makes writing and typing on the computer easier if you as a native English speaker know intuitively how words are properly spelled and pronounced, but can make it harder for learners to pronounce words when reading. The only diacritic mark native in English, but is very rarely used, are double dots above vowels which are placed on the first vowel in a double vowel to indicate that it's not to be pronounced as a single vowel or diphthong (such as in cöoperate and Zöe), but it's very rarely used. I did mention that the lack of diacritics and non-Latin letters make it easier for English text to be written and displayed on computers but do keep in mind that ASCII was adapted to the English alphabet and support for foreign alphabets only came out later with the expansion of character sets.
History and Cultural Impact
Alright, that's enough of what I have to say about features of the language itself but there's another language that I want to talk about and which is also important, and that is it's history and the cultural values attached to it.
Of course, you cannot separate a language from the history of how it evolved and the culture from which it originated. Both are intricately linked to each other.
When you learn a language, you are not just learning the language itself as a system of putting together sounds to communicate an idea, but you also take with you the culture and values of its community of speakers. Language is not only a tool for communication, but a way of establishing a cultural domain and a common identity and kinship within those who share it.
This is the case for English, which is the national language of the people of England and their descendants throughout the world (chiefly in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa). And English carries with it its literary heritage (Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, the works of Shakespeare, the KJV Bible, Harry Potter) and values (Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism, Protestantism, liberalism, etc.). Most importantly, it places the political, cultural, economic and social dominance of the Anglo-Saxon world and especially the United States as the center of of our world and above all other cultures, which makes international use of the language non-neutral and far too dependent on American self-interests.
Also consider the fact that English has been spread outside of England and later by the U.S. through conquest, imperialism, war crimes, genocide, forced assimilation, dollar diplomacy and forcing countries to take on debt, etc. which has lead to the huge decline and even extinction of indigenous languages. In post-colonial nations, this means having to speak the oppressor's language. This doesn't matter much for descendants of English folk in settler countries, but keep in mind there are also native English-speakers who are victims of this colonialism and language erasure (e.g. the Irish, the Welsh, the Manx, the African diaspora in the Americas, Native Americans, Australian Aboriginals, etc.)
Nowadays, the English language is spread throughout the world though the influence of American mass media (whatever the Brits, Aussies, Kiwis and Leafs put out is totally irrelevant in the greater scheme of things nowadays) because that's where Hollywood, Disney, Warner Bros., NBC, Fox, Paramount, and everything are all located. They sell the idea of America being this prosperous and freedom-loving utopia while being a vehicle of globohomo agendas not just with within the U.S. but around the world, with no corner to be left untouched by its grasp.
This spread and global dominance of Anglo-Saxion culture throughout the world has eclipsed and washed out the values of other cultures. Anglo-Saxon culture in today's world has an image of wealth most importantly. Because English and Anglo-Saxon culture has prestige in today's world, other worldviews are being overshadowed and more and more of Anglo-Saxon values are encroaching into other civilizations and more and more people outside the Anglosphere are adopting its values due to cultural imperialism.
Even today, the dominance of American cultural and political influence and the spread of its values throughout the world has included cancers such as globohomo, wokeism, acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights, leftism, feminism, consumerism, and every form of cuckoldry. Not only is that shit being spread through Hollywood but more like force fed into these countries by putting up LGBTQ+ flags on foreign, meddling in elections and military interventions.
Granted, most people aren't learning English because they are Anglophiles but more so for the economic opportunities the language brings due to the economic dominance of the Anglo world and especially the U.S. Now it's not that the U.S. became economically dominant naturally, but through exploiting third world countries including Latin America and also taking over the world financial system with the establishment of the Breton-Woods system and international financial institutions like the IMF and World Banks, which have indebted the developing world. You might asked, then why can't these other nations create opportunities in their own countries and improve their own economies? You see, the same force that has put the West at the top is the same force keeping the Third World down by putting corrupt politicians in power who will siphon whatever money the country produces into their own pockets and work for the interests of the American hegemon; the citizens themselves have little power to rebel or affect the circumstances of their countries, so many migrate into the same Western countries keeping them down.
And finally, I can't finish my discussion without mentioning technology and chiefly the Internet. The Internet has allowed global communications with different people from different cultures around the world, miles across from where you love, who share common interests from the comfort of your own bed. And of course a common lingua franca was needed to facilitate this interconnection and English fell right in. The development of computer technology has largely been (though not entirely) in the Anglosphere (the first description of a modern computer and the first programmer were Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace who were English, Alan Turing who helped decipher encrypted Nazi messages and wrote many concepts like the Turing machine and Turing completeness was also English, Bell Labs was based in the U.S. and things like the transistor and the Unix operating system were developed there, pioneering tech companies like IBM, Apple, Commodore, Intel, Microsoft were founded in the U.S., the precursor to the modern Internet known as the ARPAnet was the project of the U.S. military and American academic institutions, the creator of the World Wide Web Tim Berners Lee is an Englishman and the first website is written in English, etc.), and despite existing websites in many other languages those languages never attained the global scope English has. Many users of English-language sites (such as this very site) are used by many people whose first language is not English, but have learned it to partake in this global community.
Conclusions
I personally don't like the choice of having English as an international language, not because it is impossibly difficult to learn or because it's an aesthetically ugly language, but it's definitely not a politically and culturally neutral language and it's still attached ultimately to a specific national culture and worldview, and which the spread of English has made that worldview dominant and placed in the center of our world. Anglocentrism and an Anglocentrist worldview if you will and also American exceptionalism.
A similar thing can be said for other widespread languages spread through conquest and colonialism and whose nations have also committed atrocities as part of its spread (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, etc.)
I wanted to be able to express myself in a language that was not spread by colonialism. Because I come from a country full of identityless mutts, where the Spanish killed off the original native population and brought over niggers, and these Spanish mixed with these niggers to make us and have everyone speak Spanish, unfortunately my country does not have a language to call its own. We're not as lucky as the Irish, Filipinos, Africans, even the Cape Verdeans, Haitians and Jamaicans who have their own national languages and creoles outside from just having their own slang and words for things. But I have to speak the same Spanish as the Spanish in Spain and every nationality in Latin America, which was spread to them by force due to linguistic assimilation at the cost of the loss of indigenous languages. I hate the Spanish for bringing niggers over and making me a nappy-headed mutt.
Of course, if I refuse to speak Spanish because it was spread by colonialism then I'm a hypocrite for speaking English because it was also spread through colonialism, slavery and genocide. Maybe it's because I am Hispanic and not of Anglo descent so speaking English doesn't affect me as much as speaking Spanish. But still so as to not be a hypocrite I turned to other languages I could use for everyday communication.
At first I tried to learn Catalan, which I chose because it was a regional minority language in Spain and it's a Romance language so it would be close enough to Spanish for me to easily learn and similar enough for a Spanish speaker to somewhat understand. Also, Catalans want to make themselves independent from Spain and since the enemy of my enemy is my friend I wanted to show my solidarity for them. And also since part of the Hispanic identity is your ability to speak Spanish (I hate being called Hispanic because I am not a Spaniard and I want my culture to stand out as its own distinct identity instead of deriving our identity from a different culture), if I spoke Catalan (or any other language that was similar to Spanish but also a different language in its own right) then I wouldn't be considered Hispanic anymore or at least people would stop calling me Hispanic if they notice I speak a related language. Of course, I gave up on learning it due to running out of interest but I might go back into it again because I still think it's an interesting language, being halfway between French and Spanish with some Italian thrown in and being a sister language to Occitan.
Though the problem of using a "minor" or regional natlang like Catalan and Gaelic, apart from the amount of time and practice one needs to invest in them and having to have the interest in learning them in the first place, is the fact that they are still attached to their respective ethnic groups, culture and nation. And if anyone is going to learn a language, they won't just focus on the language itself but they also have to learn about the cultures and histories of where these languages are spoken and originated. I wouldn't learn Gaelic just for the sake of only speaking Gaelic just because it's not English, but to get the full experience I must also be interested in Celtic culture as well. The two cannot be divorced. And another problem is that I can't use these languages to speak with my family or even if I wanted to buy something from the store. Despite living in the most linguistically diverse city in the world, I can't get along speaking a very "minor" language if I can't communicate with the people I am around the most even if there are Catalan speakers or Gaelic speakers in my city. Plus it would be an insult to these cultures if I just blindly took their language, a part of their culture and how they distinguish themselves from outsiders, and disregarded all the culture and history attached to it, and stripped it bear as just words and sounds to be used for my own vain and demented reason. They were never meant to be international languages, but to be used within those ethnic groups themselves.
The other alternative is to learn (or create my own) constructed language and use that as my main mode of communication. In fact a conlang DOES exist that was made for the purpose of international communication, and that is Esperanto! (well, Esperanto isn't the ONLY conlang created as an IAL, there are many others, but it's the only one that has significant widespread use (of about 10,000-200,000 total fluent speakers which is still very small)) Also Esperanto at first glance looks like Spanish and like Spanish has the five vowel system.
Now Esperanto, as an IAL, isn't perfect (it has a mostly European vocabulary base, the voiceless velar fricative is hard to pronounce and that pesky accusative suffix takes time to get used to, but otherwise very simple grammar with no grammatical gender like English and the spelling matches the phonology, the characters with the circumflex or ĉapelo aren't a problem with writing, they were design with the typewriters at the time in mind and even today there's UTF-8 and you can setup your keyboard to use Esperanto diacritic characters) but it's the best option there is in terms of a neutral language that also has an international scope. The point of a language is not to be perfect. Other conlangs people barely speak it outside a core of a very small handfull of speakers, maybe the creator of the conlang and his friends.
And also every culture in the past has endeavored into conquering and assimilating other cultures, even if it's minor countries like Poland and Sweden or even small tribes raiding and taking in people from other tribes.
But whatever, I'm having fun with Esperanto and I want to spread the black pill and other based ideas through Esperanto as an alternative to a language that is non-colonial but also easy to learn. Might learn Catalan and maybe Latin, and other conlangs to like Ido, Toki Pona, Lojban, maybe even Ithkuil if I have the time and once I'm done with my current projects. And hey guys, I guess that's it.
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