I'm sure there are plenty of people who share your frustration with accented letters, ñ, umlauts, etc, though. I'd hope that most systems can handle those letters, although I wouldn't hold out hope that Ĝ/ĝ would be high on the priority list.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who share your frustration with accented letters, ñ, umlauts, etc, though. I'd hope that most systems can handle those letters, although I wouldn't hold out hope that Ĝ/ĝ would be high on the priority list.
Well, it's the most widely spoken international language, spoken in over a hundred countries, by an estimated 2-5M people. There's a rich literature (probably 30-50K books), vibrant music scene, and support in open source software (Linux, Firefox, Google products) is usually pretty good.
But the issue is not how widely Esperanto, or any other language, is spoken. If you assume that languages should only be supported according to their number of speakers, you leave no room for useful languages, bridge languages, auxiliary languages, or growing languages. Even if Esperanto had only 100 speakers, it'd be worthwhile to support, if it's easy to learn, and easy for non-speakers to understand.
It's not a "severe burden" to consider non-ASCII letters as letters. Unicode is pretty straightforward to work with, and if you want to support more than just English, it's a necessity. There's no need to have a "priority list" of letters you consider more or less important than others. That attitude comes across as very Anglocentric.
It's an official language in many countries, such as South Africa, India, and Ireland, each of which has other official languages.
That still is going to be a quite small number against English, Spanish, French &c. in terms of being a lingua franca.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_auxiliary_langua...
Maybe I didn't communicate my thoughts clearly - the reason I call it a "severe burden" is because people won't know how to type it or how to pronounce it. I doubt many people have the ability to type the letter, and would have to copy-paste it. Even on Mac, where most diacritical characters are an opt+key away, the "ˆ" does not apply to the letter "g", resulting in "ˆg". "ĝ" would need to be treated the same as, for example, "¯\_(ツ)_/¯" - where users generally google it and then copy-paste it. Sure, there are ways to allow for easier retrieval (ex. I have "@shrug" set up to make the shrug), but most people will very rarely encounter "ĝ" or similar, and won't have a shortcut set up.