Note · Language and writing
What is Esperanto? The language built to be easy
Esperanto is a language L. L. Zamenhof designed in 1887 as an easy second language for everyone. How its regular grammar works, who speaks it, and why it never took over.
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Contents · 6 sections
Esperanto is a constructed language, designed on purpose by one person rather than grown over centuries, published in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof as an easy second language anyone could learn alongside their own. Its grammar has no irregular verbs or nouns, its words are built from roots with fixed endings, and each letter has one sound. It is the most widely spoken constructed language in the world, by tens of thousands to perhaps two million people, and an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 speak it from birth.
In short
- Zamenhof wanted a neutral language that belonged to no nation, to help people with different mother tongues understand each other.
- Its design trades irregularity for building blocks: learn a root and a handful of endings, and you can make dozens of words.
- It never became a world language because a language's usefulness depends on how many others already speak it, and English got there first.
Who created Esperanto, and why?
Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof was a Jewish eye doctor from Białystok, then in the Russian Empire and now in Poland. He grew up in a town of Poles, Russians, Germans and Yiddish-speaking Jews who often distrusted one another, and he came to believe that a shared, neutral language could ease that distrust. On 26 July 1887 he published a short booklet in Russian, known in Esperanto as the Unua Libro, "First Book", under the pen name Doktoro Esperanto, "Doctor One-Who-Hopes". The name of the language comes from it.
The booklet gave 16 rules of grammar and 917 roots. Zamenhof wasn't the first to try: a German priest, Johann Martin Schleyer, had launched Volapük in 1879, and many of its followers moved to Esperanto because it was simpler. In 1905 Zamenhof fixed the core of the language in the Fundamento de Esperanto, and that year the first World Esperanto Congress met in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France. The congress has met most years since.
How does Esperanto work?
The design has three ideas. Every word's ending tells you what kind of word it is, so nothing has to be memorized as an exception. Spelling matches sound, one letter for one sound, with six accented letters such as ĉ (the "ch" in church) and ŝ ("sh"); stress always falls on the next-to-last syllable. And most of the vocabulary is built from roots plus prefixes and suffixes, so a learner needs far fewer roots than words.
The endings are few:
| Ending | Marks | Example |
|---|---|---|
| -o | noun | hundo, dog |
| -a | adjective | granda, big |
| -e | adverb | rapide, quickly |
| -j | plural | hundoj, dogs |
| -n | direct object | hundon, the dog (as object) |
| -i | verb, infinitive | vidi, to see |
| -as, -is, -os | present, past, future | vidas, sees; vidis, saw; vidos, will see |
The -n ending lets the order of words move freely. La hundo vidas la katon means "the dog sees the cat", and so does La katon vidas la hundo, because -n marks the cat as the thing seen whatever its position.
One root, many words
The root san- means health. Here is how a learner builds from it, one piece at a time:
- sana: add the adjective ending -a, and it means "healthy".
- malsana: the prefix mal- makes the opposite, "sick".
- malsano: switch to the noun ending -o, "illness".
- malsanulo: the suffix -ul- means a person with that quality, so "a sick person".
- malsanulejo: the suffix -ej- means a place for it, so "a place for sick people", a hospital.
- sanigi: the suffix -ig- means "to make", so "to make healthy", to heal.
- resaniĝi: re- is "again" and -iĝ- "to become", so "to become healthy again", to recover.
Seven words from one root and a handful of pieces that work the same way with every other root. In English the same seven ideas need healthy, sick, illness, patient, hospital, heal and recover, seven unrelated words to learn. The same suffix -ej- turns lerni, "to learn", into lernejo, "school", and preĝi, "to pray", into preĝejo, "church".
How many people speak Esperanto?
No one knows precisely, and estimates differ by a factor of thirty, depending on what counts as speaking it. Wikipedia's account of the language sets out the main attempts:
| Estimate | Who, and when | What it counts |
|---|---|---|
| 1 to 2 million | Sidney Culbert, University of Washington, over about 20 years to the late 1980s | people able to use it at a professional level |
| about 100,000 | Jouko Lindstedt, 1996 | people who can use it actively, beside 10,000 fluent and 1 million with passive knowledge |
| about 63,000 | Svend Nielsen, 2017 | speakers, from memberships, websites and censuses; disputed for its wide margin of error |
| about 1,000 | Ethnologue, 2022 | first-language speakers |
The native speakers, called denaskuloj, "people from birth", usually come from families where the parents' only shared language is Esperanto. A 2004 estimate counted about 2,000 children in roughly 1,000 such families.
Interest rose again online. The language-learning app Duolingo launched an Esperanto course for English speakers on 28 May 2015, and by March 2016, 350,000 people had signed up for it. Signing up for a course, though, is a long way from speaking.
Why didn't Esperanto become a world language?
Mostly because of the problem Zamenhof himself named: people are reluctant to learn a language hardly anyone speaks, and hardly anyone speaks it until people learn it. He once asked readers to promise to learn Esperanto once ten million others had promised; about a thousand replied. A language is worth learning in proportion to how many people you can then talk to, and the national languages, French, then English, had a vast head start.
History made it harder. In the early 1920s, after a report by the Japanese diplomat Nitobe Inazō, delegates at the League of Nations proposed teaching Esperanto in member states, and the proposal failed, mainly because of French opposition. Hitler attacked it in Mein Kampf as a tool of a Jewish conspiracy, and Nazi Germany suppressed it; under Stalin, Soviet Esperantists were persecuted from 1937, and some were executed. After the Second World War, American power and then the internet made English the default second language. In 1954 the United Nations agency UNESCO passed a resolution supporting Esperanto, but it is not one of the UN's six official languages.
Still argued
Whether Esperanto is as neutral and easy as its supporters say is debated. Critics point out that about 80% of its roots come from Romance languages, so it is easier for a Spanish or Italian speaker than for a Chinese or Arabic one, and that features such as the -n ending and adjectives that agree in number trip learners up. Supporters reply that it is still far more regular than any national language, and one statistical study found no link between how close a country's language is to Esperanto and how many people there speak it.
Some teachers argue for it as a stepping stone: learning a fully regular language first, they say, makes later languages easier, the way children learn the recorder before other instruments. Only a few schools have tried it, so the claim has not been tested at any scale.
What is Esperanto like today?
It is a small but living language community, with books, music, magazines, a Wikipedia of its own and an annual World Congress, and with speakers spread thinly across Europe, East Asia and South America rather than concentrated anywhere. No country has adopted it. Speakers call the scattered places where it is used Esperantujo, "Esperanto-land".
Its oddest achievement is that it became a native language at all, which no one designed it to be. Compared with Latin, which kept a role for centuries after its last native speakers, Esperanto shows the reverse: a language that gained native speakers without ever gaining a country. How invented and natural languages differ, and what they share, is the subject of what language is; its sounds can be written down exactly in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Check yourself
- With the table hidden, build the Esperanto words for "healthy", "sick person" and "hospital" from the root san-, and say what each piece adds.
- Why does the -n ending let Esperanto words appear in any order?
- What is the strongest reason Esperanto didn't become a world language, and why is it so hard to overcome?
Sources
- Esperanto — Wikipedia
- L. L. Zamenhof — Wikipedia
- Fundamento de Esperanto — Akademio de Esperanto
- A Complete Grammar of Esperanto — Ivy Kellerman Reed, Project Gutenberg