When I first heard of
Esperanto I thought it was a Spanish word that I had no clue as to what it
meant. Later on I learned that this is in fact a language that has a serious
weight in the world today. It is known as a man-made universal language. But, Isn’t
English already the Lingua Franca? If
this is true, then why is Esperanto called a universal language? There are so many
people who don’t consider Esperanto an international language because English
already is, but others say the contrary.
Ludwik Lazarus Zamenhof was a Polish physician and the
creator of Esperanto. His dream was the idea of a world without war and the way
to achieve this would be by a universal language because of the lack of
communication. Over many years he developed the basis of this language and
finally in 1877 he presented it to the world. Esperanto, which means “The one
who hopes”, comes mostly from European languages but its grammar and way of
building words have many similarities with other languages. Today, it is spoken
by thousands of people all over the world and its number of speakers is
increasing due to their new fond love for this language.
Many international meetings, books, magazines, websites,
translations, films, and music are done in Esperanto and believe it or not, it
has many demands. Esperanto is the only hybrid language that has successfully
reached the point of becoming a universal language. Why is this? Because it is
considered easy to learn due to its spelling, pronunciation which is close to
Spanish and Italian, grammar and vocabulary. Another main reason is because it
is neutral. This means it belongs to no country; it belongs to everyone.
Countless people
have a negative point of view about Esperanto. Some say that it is not a
natural language, but an artificial one. It is in fact an artificial one
because it is based on different natural languages. Others say that its
vocabulary is very poor, but its structure has carefully preserved necessary
grammatical and syntactical elements. It doesn’t mean its poor, it’s actually
quite flexible, stable, and its vocabulary has formed new words through time.
Numerous people mention that Esperanto has no specific cultural heritage, but
it’s a universal soul that facilitates communication.
A universal
language is a global spoken language. Today, there is no actual universal
language, even though English is considered to be one; not everyone speaks it.
Then consequently, English is really not a universal language. It is possible that one day there will be one,
but for it to get a universal status, it needs to be a language that every
single person in the world speaks with fluency. Honestly, this is quite
impossible to reach at least maybe in the future. It’s amazing how many people
today don’t know how to speak English and especially in neighboring countries
of where native speakers inhabit. One example I’m very closely related is the
State of Northern Baja California, Mexico, where we are just a few minutes away
from California, USA, and the majority of people including children still don’t
know English while having the advantage of living so close to native English
speakers.
As a conclusion, the Esperanto language has still a long
way to go in order to become a universal language because not many people know
it exists; even English due to previously criteria, technically it is not a
universal language. Everything basically revolves around English and we need it
as a country to develop economically, politically, culturally, and
educationally and even personally, to establish relations, get a job, etc.
English has a long head start and Esperanto is catching up, but still has much
to grow and who knows, maybe it will overthrow English and become The
International Language. We just have to wait and see.
Loves God Greatly,
Adriana Giletta
Adriana Giletta
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