Is Esperanto a Universal Language?

Languages live and die but some languages always leave their mark in history. Esperanto is one of them. Some think it is dead while others think it is still in use. To the people who introduced it, it was the key to the world’s peace, yet for Stalin it was dangerous. But to Hitler, it was a sign of creeping Jewish domination. Everyone perceives it according to their point of view. But what is the truth? Is Esperanto a Universal Language or it is dead?

This article will help you in solving this mystery. So, let’s start!

What is the Esperanto Language?

The Esperanto language is just like any other lingo. It has its own culture, values, literature, and magazine, etc. But guess what? It does not have its own country, nor its people, which means it does not have the status of official language and has no native speakers. But instead, Esperanto has its community. It is a supranational language that has no limitations to any specific nation. Esperanto is a universal language with about 2 million speakers across 120 countries. This is still a large number of speakers for an auxiliary language. For a language to be universal, it is often misunderstood. With the increasing interest in linguistic, people are attracting to this lingo and they are making it the new most widely spoken constructed international language of the world.

Now, some people do not about what a constructed language is?

A constructed language is an artificial language whose grammar and phonology are artificially designed rather than evolving naturally with time. These lingoes have to be regular as they did not tend to go through the historical changes like any other tongue.

Let’s find out the origin and history of this lingo!

History and Origin

The most popular constructed language in the world, Esperanto was created in 1887 by L.L. Zamenhof, who was born to a language teacher. He was an excellent ophthalmologist in the daytime while a passionate polyglot in the nighttime. He came up with this lingo by cherry-picking features from other tongues he knew. Zamenhof had great hopes for his language and the name itself ‘Esperanto’ means hope. He aimed to bring humanity together through speakers that have a common language and that would diminish regional boundaries.

Zamenhof’s plan for Esperanto was born from his experiences. He was a Jew growing up in the Russian Empire. The society in which he was living has strict regional and ethnic boundaries. The Germans, Russians, Jews, and Poles were living in his area. All of them consider each other enemies and often clash with each other throughout Europe. After looking at the miserable condition of his society, Zamenhof gave a conclusion. According to him “the diversity of languages is the first and the most influential reason for the separation of the human family into groups of enemies”. But he was hoping that maybe after a century or two, things will get better.

The scientific community was already looking for a way to share their discoveries across Europe. It was the time when Zamenhof introduced Esperanto. The number of speakers grew eventually within few decades, at first in the Russian Empire and Central Empire, and then in other parts. And later on, it became an international language. The roots of this lingo came from Latin but part of the Lexicon came from the romance languages as well as Polish, German, Russian, and English. To solve the two world wars, another century was required. Also check out new blog on Kaixana language.

Is Esperanto a Universal Language?

As people of more than 120 countries speak this language, there is no doubt that it is a universal language. Though, the hosted community of this lingo is Pasporta Servo developed in 1974. Just like English speakers, Pasporta Servo also allows its speakers to travel easily and freely all around the world without the need to be a natural language or a local language. The origin of Esperanto dates back to the 19th century and nearly 20th century when it began as a solution to the Jewish question. In the same eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nationalism was at its peak.

The speakers of this lingo are most numerous in Europe and East Asia, especially in urban areas. In Central-Western Europe, people gave it the status of the world’s first Esperanto state. Since the evolution, the Esperantists did not have to fight over tribalism the way they had in Europe. So between the two world wars, most people speaking Esperantists remain in Central Europe and the U.S.S.R.

To learn it, people are speaking in Translation because it was much easier to comprehend this way. Because of this, a lot of helping material was explaining the importance and translation of Esperanto in them. Though it is not an official language of any state, therefore, some people think that it is generally based on Indo-European languages. The speakers of this lingo are present all around the globe.  A statistician Svend Nielsen claimed that he found no significant correlation between the number of Esperanto speakers and the similarity of a given National native language to Esperanto.

Esperanto Grammar

Esperanto was derived from different foreign languages to make it easy through mutual understanding. The vocabulary is predominantly taken from the Romance languages. This lingo has prepositions that are classified in an orderly manner like subject-verb-object by default. Though the adjectives can be written before or after the nouns that they modify most people place them before. The formation of new words is done through the combination of suffixes and prefixes. Every common noun ends at ‘o’ while every adjective ends at ‘a’. Adverbs end at ‘e’ and every verb end at one of the six tense suffixes. It allows up to three cluster consonants in the initial position which belong to European languages. And it has five vowels i.e. a, e, i, o, u. The 28 letter alphabets of Esperanto are as follows:

a b c ĉ d e f g ĝ h ĥ i j ĵ k l m n o p r s ŝ t u ŭ v z

As the grammatical rules and conjugations are very easy and straightforward, it is easy to learn this lingo. It lacks all sorts of exceptions and complexities that plague other tongues. This lingo even does not have any dialect variation. The vocabulary is extremely simple. L.L. Zamenhof while introducing this lingo gave 900 root words that could easily evolve expansion to thousands of words by using prefixes, suffixes, and compounding. Esperanto has no idiomatic or slang words as this will contradict the original goal of global communication.

Why Learn Esperanto?

Being the unique and widely spread spoken language, there are several reasons why people should learn this language. Some of the major reasons include:

• It is an international language because people of all different nations speak it so it will be helpful to learn it. It will become easy to communicate with neighbors, workmates, and people all around the world. The idea of the creator was to destroy all the limitations and language barriers. Though his mother tongues were Russian and Yiddish which are related to German but still he introduced this language.
• Esperanto not only has linguistic diversity but this neutral language also has a different culture. Its culture is very simple too which anyone can have access to without any linguistic discrimination.
• As it is not a native tongue to any country, it does not have any complexity to it. Zamenhof made it very easy to learn this lingo. Some people learn it 5 times faster than other lingoes.
• You can use this language to travel around the world. It is because when you speak the same language, it becomes easy to establish close relationships. Esperanto gives access to a low-cost accommodation or service known as Pasporta Servo.