I can’t agree with your statistics.

There’s no info on the CIA World Factbook about esperanto. The language is not listed on the languages page at all (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2098.html). In fact, it’s not listed in the Ethnologue table of 172 languages of more than three million speakers (http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=size) which includes such minor languages as Tsonga (South Africa), Aceh (Indonesian) and Jamaican Creole English (Jamaica). Therefore, it is cannot be listed in the top 100 languages.

The idea that it is the 22nd most used language on Wikipedia says more about Wikipedia and its users than it does about esperanto or the state of any current lingua franca.

The EU’s only concern about esperanto is avoiding the complaint made against it for language discrimination by the Universala Esperanto-Asocio (http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=EO/04/13&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en). The current EU policy is “Mother Tongue Plus Two: – that is that every EU citizen should learn two languages to at least a basic conversational level as well as their native language.

This is a policy I can support (or could support, if I were a citizen of the EU).

During a short period of 122 years Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800 worldwide, according to the CIA World factbook. It is the 22nd most used language in Wikipedia, ahead of Danish and Arabic. It is a language choice of Google, Skype, Firefox and Facebook.

Native Esperanto speakers, (people who have used the language from birth), include financier George Soros, World Chess Champion Susan Polger, Ulrich Brandenberg the new German Ambassador to NATO and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet.

Your readers may be interested in the following video. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670

A glimpse of the language can be seen at http://www.lernu.net

Yes, it was designed to be easy to learn and use but it’s not. It’s full of rules and exceptions just as arbitrary as the languages it seeks to replace/augment, it’s very euro-centric and even most Esperantists cannot speak it well enough to be considered fluent by any measure you care to name. (Klingon actually beats it in terms of both number of speakers and average degree of fluency.)

Like all constructed languages such as Volapuk, Interlingua, Anglic, etc, it is a noble endeavour which has resulted in nothing but fail.

I’m surprised to see no mention of Esperanto here. I’d like to see wider use made of Esperanto for this purpose. Esperanto was designed to be simple and regular; English was not.