As a teenager growing up in the divided city of Białystok in the Russian-ruled Poland of the 1870s, student Ludwik Zamenhof observed mournfully 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) was superior to the others’. It’s common sense; 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 gift itself.

So, that is the story of Esperanto. Granted, I could’ve written

Esperanto is a language created at the tail-end of the nineteenth century, that flourished in the early twentieth,

but I believe that a bit of historical insight is that much better.

Esperanto In The 21st Century & Reasons That People Learn It

The realities of the world meant that Ludwik’s gift never fulfilled its original intention on the broad scale that he had hoped it to. The world built in the aftermath of the Second World War saw the ascension of English to its current position as the chief language of trade and international communication.

Granted, it’s not particularly fair that people from non-English-speaking backgrounds have to put many years of intensive effort into learning the language that we are lucky enough to be born into (never mind the fact that we are often too ignorant to check our own speed, clarity, and choice of words when speaking to people for whom English is an acquired language) but, fairness-be-damned, that’s how things are.

I humbly submit that the idea of a significant part of the world adopting Esperanto as a common language for communication (in addition to one’s native language and any other languages that one chooses to learn) is not likely. But that is not to say that Esperanto is a failure, or that it is not worth learning the language now. According to the World Almanac, nearly two million people speak the language. Considering that the language started with a single speaker, I wouldn’t consider that to be a bad thing. It is, by a wide margin, the most successful of the created languages, by far the largest fish in an admittedly small pond.

So, if the dream of a common second language for everyone has failed to materialise after 120 years, why do people still learn it? What can one possibly derive from the language?

For some of us, it’s a hobby, purely and simply. Others spend their time and money watching overpaid primedonne kick an air-filled sac of leather around a field, and more power to them; I prefer languages. I like history too. Here I have a language which has a traceable and published history. Plus, others who are interested in languages benefit from a familiarity with Esperanto. It’s not for nothing that some primary schools in the UK are teaching it to their children. (Oh you didn’t know? Every study ever undertaken on the subject shows that Esperanto acts as a catalyst for better language-learning. Split a group down the middle. Give one side four years to learn a specific foreign language; give the other a year of Esperanto followed by three years of the language. Then test them both. Without fail, those who had only three years of learning the language will score higher than those who had an extra year. I’ll leave it to you to take a guess what the difference-maker was.)

I know people in JEB who are third-generation speakers of the language; they wouldn’t even have had occasion to be conceived had their ascendants not had Esperanto as a common language. I know people of my own age who are now married having originally met through Esperanto, neither of whom was in their home country at the time.

And here’s an important thing to bear in mind. Esperanto is used as a method of international communication. Successfully and often. Where else would you get a Serbian, Russian, Catalunian, Englishman, Croatian, Italian, Chinese, and Vietnamese all sitting around a table drinking a few beers, and chatting away as though they were old friends, swapping stories about life back home, all speaking to one another in a common language, such that no-one is in an unfairly advantageous position other than in an Esperanto setting? These (normally week-long) events happen several times a year, all over the world, some attracting thousands of participants.

So, 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.