SIR - When Eric Firth refuted the claim by Jason Smith, UKIP's local chairman, that England no longer existed in the eyes of Brussels, by offering the fact that English was spoken worldwide, Phlip Bird, for some inexplicable reason, dismissed it as nonsense then asked where Esperanto was on the map.

There are 400 million people who speak English as a mother-tongue, 600 million who speak it as a second language and at least 600 million who use it with some competence as a foreign language.

It is also the medium for auxiliary languages such as those used by international airline pilots and seafarers for intercommunication.

In South Africa it shares official language status with Afrikaans and alongside indigenous languages, for example in India.

English is now used by more than 60 countries as an official or semi-official language.

As for Esperanto, it may be published in a few newspapers and journals together with the Bible and the Qur'an, but with precise estimates of numbers and levels of speaker fluency difficult to obtain, at best there are only ten million or so speakers.

That's where Esperanto is on the map Mr Bird, after 120 years since its invention in 1887.

David Rhodes, Croscombe Walk, Bradford