Esperanto! Yes, there are better conlangs, yes, it's eurocentric, and yes, there are ways to improve it or even come up with something better. But it has a cool history, it's tied to socialist movements and anarchist movements, it is fairly easy to learn (especially for speakers of European languages), it's grammar is super simple, it uses a system of root words and affixes that make me think of Legos, and it has real, native speakers already, meaning it is a living language that has changed over time, and is fully capable of being used exclusively to communicate efficiently.

Plus, the fascists fucking hate it

Esperanto. it's not the statisically-average best lingua franca but it's the best known that's not tied to a single nation. Plus Hitler and Stalin both hated it.

Python

Something with a consistent phonetic alphabet, like Korean with hangol.

I feel like Indonesian is a decent start. There are already a lot of people speaking it, and it's REALLY easy to learn.

There's no conjugation and no cases/agreement. I'm a native English speaker and picked up a functional amount of Indonesian in a matter of months, just from reading a couple books before we went.

Gaeilge just to fuck with the brits. We all have to write it in ogham too, I don't care how inconvenient it might be.

That or serbo-croatian because we are all serbs anyway

Esperanto. It's an artificial language designed to be easy to learn and communicate in. Although it's worth noting that there are esperanto dialects and speakers of one don't necessarily understand speakers of another.

Screeching 9600 baud modems. Now with more emotion!

I've been enjoying studying Mandarin. The tones are a bit weird but the grammar seems surprisingly simple, everything can be written pretty universally in pinyin, and Hanzi characters are great for condensing information.

Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese are totally unrelated languages. Chinese languages are sino-tibetan, Vietnamese is austro-asiatic, Japanese is japonic, and Korean is alone in its own family. Totally unrelated to each other as far as we can trace.

Despite that, they all used to use the same writing system and, shockingly, they were mutually intelligible when written down. In Japanese this method of reading Chinese (without actually knowing Chinese) was called kundoku but I think that the other languages also had ways to read & write Chinese writing with very light translation. Even today, Chinese writing unites the different dialects/languages of China.

My proposed lingua franca is the Chinese writing system. Everybody should keep their own writing systems, but they should also learn to transcribe into Chinese, the only extant written language in which this is really possible.

I've heard good things about Indonesian/Malay. It probably helps it was a regional lingua franca for a long time.

English was legit the best choice in Europe - analytic, with vocabulary drawn from a couple major families, and (almost) no grammatical gender. If only we could unfuck the orthography...

One of the South American variants of Spanish, probably Argentinian. And I say that despite not speaking any Spanish.

The language itself is a contact language and heavily influenced by centuries of cohabitation with speakers of Arabic. That simplified a lot of the Indo-European complexities away.

The phonology - the sounds - of the language are clear and predictable and sufficiently different that a non-native speaker and their accent are not too troublesome in comprehension.

The language itself is already a world language, ranking 4th in number of native speakers.

I like the suggestion of Esperanto, which I do personally speak and which has all the advantages above, except already being a world language.

Latin, or even better, Klingon

Swahili speaker (native) here, fluent in English.

Language is a medium of communication between two or more parties. So long as they understand each other, all is good. whether they used klingon or Martian, it don't matter.

What i do know is that, if, hypothetically, internet throws a poll for people all over the world to choose language they will use for communication, every one, myself included, will hold their conner, defending how real and original the language that they are familiar with (and most definitely biased towards) is.

if you put it on a vote on the other hand, something different happens. In fact, it's been happening all along, silently and quietly at the back of our heads. From the first day surfing through the internet to buying your first own smartphone/laptop and choosing the default language for these devices, I know on my part I was driven by convenience. As the majority of media outlets use English. From the shows i watched to the role‐models i looked up on while growing up, they all circled around this fascinating slang that made them even more interesting. The internet's influence towards english made it easy (at least for me) to catch up real quick.

I will say this tho, hearing hakuna matata on the lion king was awesooome

Türkçe not gendered (at all, everyone and everything is "o") and one of the easiest languages to learn

I would argue no one could choose one. A lingua franca is silently agreed upon over long periods of time. No committee sat down to make old Frankish the language of trade, modern French the language of diplomacy, and nowadays English the language of internet arguments.

If I had a magic wand though my vote is Klingon as well. Qa'plah.

Lojban, or Toki Pona for shits and giggles.

Esperanto. Logical. Clear. Easy.

French, we could all be a little more french when keeping our leaders on a leash

Sindarin

Lojban for now
Certainly not Esperanto

1. Lojban like Esperanto has been created to be a neutral lingua franca.
2. I've heard that it's a logical language that tries to do away with ambiguity and that sounds interesting to me.
3. Esperanto feels like a language made for the EU rather than the world and so do all Esperanto look-a-likes.
4. Lojban sounds like a cross between Romansh and a lost native American language. Not good compared to my two favorite sounding languages, Japanese and French, but at least more neutral than Esperanto. Esperanto sounds Spanish and Interlingua sounds like an Italian that thought that Esperanto should sound Italian and I don't like how either of those two languages sound.

Interlingua

Klingon or Quenya, both sounds like music (just of different genres)

one that told me what that means. Seriously though an additional language or changing my base language?

I would prefer some kind of sign language

Lojban, it's culturally neutral, and that makes it all the more nice. Plus it's got an interesting punctuation style.