Esperanto: Is Language About More Than Understanding?

Unu, du, tri, kvar, kvin, ses, sep, ok, naŭ, dek: ĉu vi komprenas? Even without knowledge of Esperanto, you are probably able to discern what is being said here. Hints of Spanish? An underlying air of French, perhaps? But where exactly is this country of Esperant, whose inhabitants this language belongs to? You will be glad to know that your geographical knowledge does not betray you: there is no such country. 

That is because Esperanto is a constructed language, based on the Latin script that forms the basis of the Romance languages. In the linguistically diverse landscape of late-19th century partitioned Poland, L.L. Zamenhof created this constructed language as a potential solution to the separation caused when common spoken ground could not be found between different ethnic groups — an isolated reality that he thought to be ‘evil’ as a child. Inside a nation of Polish, Russian, German, and Yiddish speakers, a shared language that all could learn might just be the key to harmonious living. Gone would be the strenuous effort of learning a foreign tongue, and welcome would be the ease of Esperanto: a language rooted in Indo-European vocabulary, syntax, and semantics. Intentionally designed to be simple to learn. Zamenhof saw the potential for Esperanto to become a universal international language: a vocabulary to cross borders and oceans, to unify key texts under one translation, to create an international brotherhood. There is an idealism in this goal that John Lennon would be fond of as he typed away at the lyrics to ‘Imagine’. But is it really that simple? Can a language just skip past the steps of cultural forging, and be accepted all the same? 

In discussing this question with my brother, a keen linguist and an unapologetically passionate proponent of cultural importance when it comes to language, he raised a good point: “Culture is like a locked door, you can’t open it without a key (language), and each key is unique by design.” Language and culture are bound together, and this is certainly true when learning a new language. There is a reason why you immerse yourself in the culture alongside the vocabulary: it breathes life into the words you are speaking. There is also a reason why spending time in a country dramatically improves your ability to speak its language, because you see and feel the language in the landscape that it was created in. These are important aspects that Esperanto will never share in the same way natural languages do.

Tracking the history of linguistics also highlights how a single language often transforms through time and space into a branch of different variants. The widespread secondary language of Latin eventually evolved into the five Romance languages — French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian — rendering the once fiercely spoken language decisively dead and buried. Similarly, English has taken on different forms in England, Scotland, and the United States despite being of the same linguistic origin. The impact of local culture on language cannot be understated. If Esperanto were to be adopted across Europe, it too would likely be destined for a branched existence, and perhaps even the same fate as the deceased Latin. With these differences in mind, the idea that one language could uniformly exist across the globe appears naive.

As naive as it may be, the threat appeared real to fascist dictators during the first half of the 20th century. Esperanto was officially repressed in Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain, and the Soviet Union, often accompanied by accusations that its speakers were part of secret spy organizations. Its repression is a sign that Esperanto’s heart was in the right place, at least. It was a call for hope and unity in a fractured period of history, and this genuine aim should not be forgotten in its assessment. Esperanto has remained the world’s most widely spoken constructed language, even experiencing a surge of popularity at the hands of Duolingo in recent years. In this sense, Esperanto has come to adopt a culture of its own, but one that is different — it comes from within the language itself and connects people based on their choice to learn it.

Esperanto could bring people together under a common voice, but at the grave cost of losing the very important differences it attempts to conjoin. What Zamenhoff considered ‘evil’ is not so, at least not today. Idioms differ across linguistic boundaries because they are birthed in different environments. They reflect the colloquial, the face-to-face, the real culture you only get when you see it. It is necessary that while pigs might fly in England in times of the unlikely, in France the chickens grow teeth. 

Image from Wikimedia Commons