Esperanto is particularly prevalent in the northern and eastern countries of Europe; in China, Korea, Japan, and Iran within Asia; in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico in the Americas; and in Togo and Madagascar in Africa.
An estimate of the number of Esperanto speakers was made by Sidney S. Culbert, a retired psychology professor of the University of Washington and a longtime Esperantist, who tracked down and tested Esperanto speakers in sample areas of dozens of countries over a period of twenty years.
Esperanto was the language of the house, and Orwell was disadvantaged by not speaking it, which may account for some antipathy towards the language[2].
Esperanto is written in a Latin alphabet of twenty-eight letters, upper and lower case.
(See Esperantopronunciation.) There is a nearly one-to-one correspondence of letter to sound; the only significant exceptions being the sequence kz, as in ekzemple, which is frequently pronounced [gz]; and borrowed words such as ŭato that use ŭ for initial [w], which is normally an allophone of v.
The Signuno alphabet deviates from international norms (that is, ASL with an Irish T) in that all letters are upright, with a straight wrist: the G is simply turned upright, while the H, P, Q are taken from Irish, the J from Russian, and the Z appears to be unique to Signuno.
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