I feel powerless in the face of this language, this so-called easy language, which I consider more difficult than any other language I have tried to learn.
Louis Hjelmslev (on English)

Why the English ever left their dreary island to inflict their exasperating language on the rest of the world is a question millions of schoolchildren must ask themselves each morning. The short answer is bossiness. Bored with pushing around the other inhabitants of the British Isles, the English turned their attention overseas. Eventually they were obliged to return home, but by then the mantle had been taken up by the Americans, who possessed just as much hubris and even scarier weapons.

Some people argue that only the fittest languages survive. Weak, primitive ones, like Dharuk or Choctaw, inevitably give way to strong, sophisticated ones, like English. This theory tends to ignore little historical details, such as the extermination (by English settlers) of the Dharuk population, whose speech unsurprisingly disappeared with them.

All the same, the oracles continue smugly, English is here to stay. Not only is it the international language of air traffic control, arms dealing and paperclip bending science, but it is rapidly becoming the lingua franca in faraway places like Mongolia and the Andromeda Galaxy.

Its unsuitability for this role is plain to anyone who has tried to teach it. There are far too many phonemes, several of them difficult to tell apart or pronounce. It is written in the wrong alphabet. Children learning other European languages become literate within a year, whereas English takes two and a half. The tenses are complicated, a sore point in those countries whose languages have none at all.

Proselytizers for English boast that it has the biggest vocabulary. This is hardly an advantage for learners. If I tell my students to shut their books, they look baffled, puzzled, perplexed, mystified, lost, stumped, dazed, confused, bewildered, bemused or nonplussed. Not to mention flummoxed. They know only how to close them.

The fact that it has absorbed countless foreign words is also held up as a selling point. You can find a unit about this in most ELT coursebooks. The teacher excitedly urges the class to guess the origins of boomerang and bayou. Show me a language that does not absorb foreign words, and I might be interested.

All in all, it would be much simpler if everyone learned Esperanto or Interlingua. But then I would have to find another job.