There needs to be an international version of English designed so that it is simple to learn. For instance: one sound = one letter and all verbs conjugate the same.
You would enjoy Bill Bryson's book Mother Tongue. At one point (several hundred years ago) English was going through a period of simplification and rationalization but it was also during that period that dictionaries, newspapers etc become popular. Consequently some words had already become consistent and some hadn't and we are somewhat stuck with poor timing. http://www.amazon.com/The-Mother-Tongue-English-That/dp/0380...
Because English and English speakers are happy to adapt and change, the simplification is happening. Look at text messaging where superfluous extra words and letters get dropped, as does case. Even Hollywood is careful to keep language simple in their popular movies aimed at a worldwide audience.
Thank you for the recommendations. How do you think English speaker would respond to a version of English which had changes like: Each sound had its own letter and all spelling was phonetic?
There have been lots of attempts to reform English. There is also Simple English Wikipedia which just simplifies structure not pronounciation https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
The idea is glorious but if you skim random pages ("Show any page"), most of pages are neigher complete nor about important topics nor written in simple language.
An incompatible variant of English would have none of the network advantages, at which point you might as well use a fully designed conlang like lojban.
An alternative, phonemic alphabet for foreigners might have more hope, though even then the use case is narrow.
I was thinking it could be designed initially to be 80% compatible with English, in order to gain a high rate of adoption. then introduce changes every 5 years.
