Esperanto was a project to create a neutral second language for everybody to use. It was created by a teenager over a century ago. Since its publication it has grown from a one-man project to a community of tens or hundreds of thousands, including fifth-generation speakers.

As a teenager growing up in the divided city of Białystok in the Russian-ruled Poland of the 1870s, student Ludwik Zamenhof mournfully observed that the accident of birth that decided in which area of the city you were born (and, thus, your religious, ethnic, and linguistic background) determined the people that you would consider your friends, and those from whom you shied away.

All around him others thought in terms of labels: Jew, Russian, Pole. It filled him with dismay to see that an errant foot in the wrong neighbourhood would see a man assaulted on account of being an outsider. Observing the prejudice and discrimination that characterised his city, he thought to himself that a principal barrier that separated these groups was that of language. If people could greet one another, express regret or gratitude, or verbalise pain, maybe then they could see each other as fellow human beings. He theorised that Białystok would cease to be so volatile, if its people had access to an additional language, commonly spoken by all of them.

Himself a speaker of a number of tongues, he put his mind to deciding what that common language could be. In the first instance, he had to rule out one of the languages native to the ethnic groups of Białystok, since the perception there would be that one of the groups’ languages (and, by extension, culture and native speakers) was superior to the others’. Imposing A’s language on B and C not only resembles imperialism; it also poses a greater burden on the two groups who have to learn the the other’s native tongue. Hardly the ideal solution to a spawned of perceived inequality.

This being the case, he had to extract a suitable language from outside of those spoken in his home city. It’s likely that others would have done just that. Young Ludwik didn’t. Just as it was not his wont to distinguish himself from non-Polish-speaking Jews in Białystok, nor was it his inclination to do so with people from outside of Białystok. Ludwik was thinking of all people, everywhere. For this reason, there was no national language that could be a fair and just common second language, since it would always be someone’s native tongue.

The solution, then, was to plan a second language. To create one.

Ludwik was not the first person to have tried to create a language. The first on record appears to have been penned in the twelfth century, and no lesser a respected figure than René Descartes (he of “I think, therefore I am” fame) had recognised the need for a neutral tongue and tried his hand at inventing one.

The youngster spent the next several years crafting his language. His first draft of his lingwe universala was prepared in 1878. By 1887, now in his mid-20s, he had finished his third draft, and printed books of his Internacia Lingvo. Interestingly, that was the language’s name, rather than that by which we know it. Ludwik used the pen-name “Doktoro Esperanto” when writing about his creation; in the language itself, Esperanto means “one who hopes” (so “Doctor Hopeful”), and adherents soon applied this name to Ludwik’s project itself.

Esperanto hasn’t risen to its earlier promise to be the common second language for all people. But it has achieved in other areas and, for those of us that speak and use it, proves to be a worthwhile pursuit that I’d recommend to anybody who showed an interest. Other people can give their own stories, as they do in this 24-page booklet, which I think provides an extremely good way of reading how Esperanto plays an important, enjoyable role in people’s lives in the twenty-first century.

Congratulations on finding this page, run by JEB, the youth section of the Esperanto Association of Britain. If you’re here, then you’re obviously looking to find out more about Esperanto. Fortunately, there is a wealth of material available online.

A good place to start for an overall summary would be the Wikipedia page on the language, although the booklet Discover Esperanto, 24 colour pages in length, gives a more readable and accessible introduction to the language, with comments taken from its users.

Answers to questions:
If you’re interested in finding out bits and pieces about Esperanto you might like to follow these links, which contain small, bite-size articles on the relevant topics:

• Esperanto Is Much Easier To Learn Than Other Languages
• Esperanto Makes Learning Other Languages Easier
• What Is Esperanto? Who Created It?

Learning Esperanto:
The one-stop shop for courses, forums, exercises, tutors and, especially, the excellent documentary Esperanto Estas is Lernu, an internationally run site of volunteers. The site is accessible in several languages, including English.

We are also on Twitter (@Esperanto_UK) and Facebook (Esperanto UK).

Even if you’ve not yet tried to learn Esperanto, it shouldn’t be hard to picture that it’s not as hard to learn as natural, national languages. It’s designed to be phonetic and free of irregularities and unnecessary complications, all contributions which make learning easier from the point of view of a learner.

There are figures that back this statement up, such as a study by the Institute of Cybernetic Pedagogy in Paderborn, Germany. They tested how long it took people with French as their first language to learn a series of languages to a comparable “standard” level.

German was the hardest, necessitating some 2,000 hours of study.

English, in spite of its penetration in the world at large outside the classroom, still required an average of 1,500 hours’ study for the students to reach the target level.

Italian, a member of the same language family as French and so genetically “closer” to the students’ own language, still demanded that they invest 1,000 hours of their time in study.

But what about Esperanto? The answer is 150 hours, one tenth of the time needed for English.

(Note: This is from the point of view of French-speakers. The numbers would obviously be different for speakers of other languages. Nonetheless, it’s worth underlining that Italian and French are linguistic siblings, yet Esperanto was far easier (by a factor of seven) to learn.)

So, that’s confirmation that Esperanto is relatively easy. But there’s another thing worth bringing into the discussion: The fact that learning Esperanto first makes it easier to learn other languages later. In other words, if you’re interested in getting proficient in a language, you might be best served to consider learning Esperanto first.

Source for the ICP study: Flochon, Bruno, 2000, « L’espéranto », in Gauthier, Guy (ed.) Langues: une guerre à mort, Panoramiques. 4e trim. 48: 89-95. Cited in François Grin, L’enseignement des langues étrangères comme politique publique (French)

We’ve already seen that Esperanto is relatively easy to learn. That’s one selling point: There’s no need to be apprehensive about it being too hard.

There’s another excellent reason which may be of interest to people, even if you’ve no intention of mixing with other Esperantists or attending any events: Learning Esperanto makes it easier to become proficient in other languages.

There have been several studies over the decades which have looked at the positive influence of Esperanto on language-learning.

Consider this experiment, reported in 1965: A group of secondary school children were being taught French, and would be tested after four years.

Half of the group did four years of French. The other half studied Esperanto for the first year, and followed this with three years of French. The group which traded a year of French for one of Esperanto ended up with a “significantly better command of French”.

(Source: Williams, N. (1965) ‘A language teaching experiment’, Canadian Modern Language Review 22.1: 26-28)

An Irish chap called Benny runs the website Fluent In Three Months, and explains why he feels Esperanto is so effective, two months’ learning of which enabling the learner to jump months ahead.

The central point is that learning one’s first foreign language is harder than learning subsequent ones. Once one has “learned to learn”, things become easier. This being the case, it makes sense to learn the easiest language as the first one, and then move onto learning the first foreign natural language.