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A language to UNITE THE WORLD
It was invented by a doctor; it has been called a key to world peace; Hitler thought it would signify Jewish domination; Stalin called it dangerous. What is it? It is the manufactured language that aimed to unite humanity, Esperanto.
Few people even know of its existence, yet it has been around for more than 135 years. It was invented by a Polish ophthalmologist, Dr Zamenhof, who dreamed of uniting the world. Dr Zamenhof grew up in Russian-occupied Poland and saw the problems resulting from language misunderstandings first-hand. It is said that he believed distrust was exacerbated by language disconnects. This was his motivation to come up with the idea of a universal language. Dr Zamenhof dreamed that Esperanto would become the world’s go-to language because it did not belong to any one nation, could easily be learnt and did not come with historical language and cultural baggage.
Acceptance of this language was met with mixed results however. Tolstoy praised the idea and claimed to learn Esperanto in just a few hours, yet it was banned in Tsarist Russia. Iran proposed the League of Nations adopt it, yet France blocked the move and banned the language from schools. In the 1930s people were being killed in Japan for speaking it and in more recent years, two Swedish Esperanto speakers were severely beaten by Tanzanian police for attempting to teach the language. Today, though, you will find big Esperanto groups in the Ivory Coast because it is seen as an anti-colonial language. In China and Japan more people are learning Esperanto as they find the English language difficult. In Belgium, it is reported that Flemish people who do not want their kids to learn French are teaching them Esperanto as their second language. Esperanto never really became an international language of choice, but it has held on to its status as an underground language with pockets of supporters found all over the globe.
Like it or not, the current true universal language – and the one that is used most on the internet – is English. Today, close to a billion people either know or are learning English and more than 80% of all websites are in English.
Despite Esperanto never really fulfilling what it was invented for, it is still interesting to follow the path of this relatively young language whose roots are largely based on Latin, with influences from Russian, Polish, English and German. Supporters of Esperanto note that because of the simple grammar, familiar Latin vocabulary and phonetic spelling, one can learn it much faster than any other language.
While we are on the topic of young languages: the world’s youngest language is Afrikaans. The modern form of Afrikaans is less than 100 years old while the modern form of the English language is over 400 years old, with Old English dating back several hundred years more.
It has still found a way to connect people and remind them that one is not simply the language one speaks.
While the Esperanto movement is strong, it is unlikely it will ever unite the world in a common language. And yet it has still found a way to connect people and remind them that one is not simply the language one speaks, and that we should never use the vernacular that we were born into to highlight one another’s differences.
