This Language Has the Power to End Discrimination
Or so its creator and followers claim. Let's dive into Esperanto.
I received a request to write about Esperanto and how it relates to language learning. I hope you like it!
Which language has over two million speakers, is offered on Duolingo, and was completely created by one man in the 19th century?
The answer is in the subheading, but that rhetorical question gives you insight into how odd and remarkable Esperanto truly is. It’s an artificial language, which means it didn’t come about organically through language contact. The creator Ludwig Lejzer Zamenhof formed the language in 1878 to meet a problem he found in his community: a ubiquity of language discrimination and a lack of peace.
He published the first account of Esperanto under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto, which literally translates to “one who hopes.” And hope is a key part of this language: hope that Esperanto can provide a lingua franca, a second language for people around the world which is easy to understand and speak, and is free of ethnic and national ties.
The Language of Unity
Ludwig Lejzer Zamenhof was born in 1859 in Białystok: a city that is in today’s Poland, but that was in Tsarist Russia at the time. Zamenhof was an Ashkenazi Jew in a town which he described as having four major groups: the Jewish, the Russian, the Orthodox Christians and Catholic Poles, and the German Protestants. All groups had their own language and religion. From a young age, Zamenhof began to associate the lack of peace he saw in his town with the existence of multiple languages and religions. He sought to solve one of those problems with Esperanto.
Initially, Esperanto wasn’t for all people. According to Gobbo (2017), Zamenhof created it as a language to link all Jewish people, so they could all be in community. This was during the time period when Jewish people were looking for a homeland and a unifying language. At the time, the language of the Jewish holy books, Ancient Hebrew, had been dead for almost 2,000 years. Zamenhof believed that reviving Hebrew would be impossible and that Esperanto would be better, as it’s easier to learn.
But Modern Hebrew was a success story and was completely revived in the early 20th century. What happened then to Esperanto?
Going into the mid 20th century, Zamenhof changed Esperanto into an ethnically neutral language—it didn’t matter where speakers were from; anyone could learn the language. It no longer had ties to Judaism. Now, Esperanto speakers were tied by the goals of the language to promote peace and unity. He named the new moral philosophy Homaranismo, Esperanto for “a brotherhood of humanity.”1
Today, that message remains important, but many supporters like Esperanto for other reasons, too. Just look at Youtube: Youtube is filled with videos of proponents discussing why they love Esperanto. And these videos are filled with comments of people concurring that they, too, love Esperanto. But a key reason listed in the comments of this video is that the language is easy to understand and is a great way to boost confidence as a language learner. Quite different from the original purpose of Esperanto.
But these comments make sense. Listen to this speaker of Esperanto. How much do you understand?
The Artificial Language Which Made It
The language is artificial: one person made it and it grew from that point. The main difference between Esperanto and other artificial languages shown in Lord of the Rings or Games of Throne is its popularity. To date, Esperanto has over 2 million speakers. A key reason why is that Esperanto is quite easy to learn:
The vocabulary comes from European languages—mainly Romance, Slavic, and Germanic languages—which is why speakers of these languages may be able to understand a decent amount.
The grammar is as simple as possible. There are no irregular verb conjugations. There is no fixed word order.
The sounds make sense. It’s a phonetic language so there’s no surprises in how you read it. And the phonology excludes any hard-to-pronounce2 sounds, like th.
Learning Esperanto takes far fewer hours than learning any natural language. Moreover, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence of Esperanto helping speakers learn additional foreign languages. That’s because students learn a great deal of how languages can work; it creates metalinguistic awareness. For example, in Esperanto, the vocabulary builds on itself. So, good is bona, and bad is mal- (not or without) + bona = malbona. Speakers learn about basic morphemes in Esperanto and can apply that knowledge to other languages which use morphology in similar but more-difficult-to-understand ways.
All of these points come up in this TED talk about why school children should learn Esperanto:
Why Hasn’t Esperanto Replaced English as the Lingua Franca?
For better or for worse, English has been the lingua franca—the language used around the world between speakers who don’t share the same first language—since around the end of the Second World War.3
From the Esperanto perspective, making a language tied to a nation-state the lingua franca comes with a slew of problems:
There’s the uncomfortable truth that English was spread mainly through the British Empire (and later by the U.S.)
It creates a power-dynamic between those perceived as better representations of the best versions of the language and the rest of the world (e.g. native speakerism).
It’s not necessarily the easiest language to learn since its prominence came through socio-political power.
Proponents of Esperanto promote it as a lingua franca because it’s designed to be a lingua franca; it didn’t become one because of socio-political outcomes. In other words, it was literally built for the job.
So, should we all learn Esperanto?
Today, Esperanto is pushed by people who believe in its original message—unity among all people—and people who believe in its future potential—both as a lingua franca and in language learning.
While idealistically Esperanto has always promoted an ethnically neutral language, its potential and shortcomings seem to come from the same place. It has the potential to be a language which ends discrimination because of a lack of authority and ties to a nation-state (though I’m not entirely convinced…the spread of English is but one way in which globalization has enhanced social divides around the world). But because it’s not tied to a culture or greater body, it isn’t tied to the same real-world benefits that come from languages like English: job opportunities, university acceptances, etc.
In other words, most people don’t learn second languages because they like the ideology it represents. Rather, most people learn second languages out of necessity. And that necessity isn’t there with Esperanto. Definitely not yet. Perhaps not ever.
Discussion
Thank you for reading this lesson! I hope you enjoyed it! I would love to hear your thoughts on Esperanto. You can comment below (paid subscribers) or reply to this email:
Had you heard of Esperanto before? What did you find most surprising to learn?
Do you think Esperanto will ever catch on to the extent of it being a lingua franca? Why or why not?
Keep Learning
Videos used are linked in the article. Additionally, I used some research papers…
For the history of Esperanto:
Gobbo, F. (2017). Beyond the nation-state? The ideology of the Esperanto movement between neutralism and multilingualism. Social inclusion, 5(4), 38-47.
For information on Esperanto as a lingua franca:
Li, D. C. (2003). Between English and Esperanto: what does it take to be a world language?.
At the time, this was politically controversial and Esperanto was banned by political groups, including Nazi Germany. This being true, the language was embraced by other groups who believed in its ideologies. For example, Esperanto was rather popular in China throughout the 20th century—both inside and outside the Communist Party.
Hard to pronounce is subjective, but th is relatively hard-to-pronounce because it’s uncommon in most languages in the world.
The information from this section is paraphrased from Li (2003)