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Esperanto- the answer to language barriers?

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flag of esperantoThere are 6,909 known living languages in the world according to Ethnologue. As you might imagine, this makes communicating with foreigners pretty hard. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there was an animal called a Babel fish. Insert one into your ear, and BAM! you could understand any language in the universe. Unfortunately, current technology is nowhere near this good, even with Google Translate adding voice translations in the Android app.

A more realistic solution might to be to create a universal language. If everyone would learn this language, then the world would be more connected. Enter Esperanto, a constructed language created by Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof back in 1887. It’s the most successful constructed language created to date, boasting millions of speakers worldwide. The Esperanto Wikipedia has more than 143,00 articles. Esperanto has many strong points:

  • There’s actually a culture. There are many books and magazines written in Esperanto, and countless websites and blogs. This means that there’s a vibrant community to immerse yourself into, a key component of learning a language. This also highlights the fact that this language isn’t dying or abandoned.
  • It’s easy to learn. Studies by the Institute of Cybernetic Pedagogy at Paderborn have shown that French students who studied 150 hours of Esperanto reached the same level of proficiency as those who studied 2000 hours of German. Another surprising fact is that Esperanto only has 16 grammatical rules. English has many, many times that.
  • It’s for a good cause. Esperanto is a neutral language, not affiliated with any country. As such, when you converse with someone in Esperanto there is no feeling of “You have to learn MY language.”

Having said that, I don’t think Esperanto is the solution to our language barrier issues. I’ll counter each of the points I made above:

  • It’s not useful enough. Estimates put the number of speakers between 10,000 and 2 million. Look at the list of most spoken languages:
    most spoken languages in the world
    Learning one of these languages will allow you to communicate with many more people. And any of these languages also has a unique culture and interesting content.
  • It’s not really easy to learn. Esperanto is based on European languages. This means that if you are a native speaker of Korean, for example, you are unlikely to find Esperanto easy to pick up. Also, another point should be made- don’t choose a language to learn just because it’s simple. You should choose one because you enjoy it or because it is useful.
  • I’m not going to deny that Esperanto is for a good cause. However, you should balance this with a pragmatic look at if a just cause is one of your top priorities. There is nothing immoral about learning Spanish or Russian, or any other language.

Most people only have enough energy and time to learn one second language. Therefore, you should choose carefully. If you think Esperanto is a cool and beneficial language to learn, go ahead. There are many in the Esperanto community who will welcome you with open arms.

The Best Language to Learn

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Learning a new language is one of the hardest yet most satisfying challenges one can take. Technology, globalization and transportation have revolutionized the way cultures interact and have impacted many aspects of our lives. In an effort to join the global community, to enrich cultural experience, and to stay marketable in an increasingly competitive economy, many people would like learn a new language. Before committing to the massive investment in time and money to do so, it is important to know which language will provide the most benefit to new speakers over the next few decades.

How to tell which language is the best?

Academic Popularity

Quantifying the value of learning a new language is a complex task, but a good place to begin is with the most popular new languages being learned today. Traditionally, Romance languages have dominated college enrollment and to a certain extent this is still true today. Languages such as Italian, French and German are popular. Enrollment in Spanish classes is rising and accounts for roughly half of American students. Not surprisingly, as the geopolitical landscape has changed, so have the demands on language departments; the number of students learning Chinese has grown by over fifty percent in the last decade and Arabic classes have more than doubled in response to a growing demand for speakers.

Number of Speakers

In addition to academic popularity, it is interesting to look at the number of speakers worldwide when choosing to study a foreign language. German and French have been academically popular for years but only boast around 100 million speakers each. In the west, the Japanese and Russian languages are not often studied but are actually more common with around 125 and 250 million speakers respectively. The widespread use of these languages pales in comparison with Spanish, Hindi-Urdu and Arabic languages that each come in at around 500 million native and non native speakers. The most widely spoken language in the world though, with the possible exception of English, is Mandarin. This fact is not surprising when one considers that China is by far the world’s most populous country. Many estimates place the Chinese language at over one billion speakers worldwide even after accounting for several different Chinese languages and dialects.

How hard is it to learn?

Another factor that affects decisions to learn a language is the ease of acquisition. Some languages are easier to learn than others, but this variable is not as easy to quantify as one might think. It turns out that the difficulty of learning a particular language is related to which language the learner speaks first. The more closely related the native tongue is to a new language, the easier the process tends to be. Romance languages are closely related and share many words and have very similar sounds. A native Spanish speaker would have an easier time learning French than they would Japanese. For native English speakers, languages like Spanish, French and German are considered easier to learn than less closely related languages like Russian or Arabic. Even more distant cousins, such as Mandarin and Japanese, are considered quite difficult. One reason that learning distantly related languages is so challenging is that often, the new language requires learners to incorporate brand new phonemes, or sounds, into their speech. Children are flexible with languages, but as adults this skill does not usually come easily.

Conclusion

Futurists are constantly trying to predict trends about fashion, technology, economics and even language use. Which language stands the best chance of being most useful 20 years from now? Linguists will tell you that trying to predict trends in language even a few years away is frighteningly complicated; just like the weather, there are so many variable that small, unpredictable changes can have huge consequences later. The most useful language then for most people will be the one they will use. This depends on where they live, what they want to do professionally and where they might like to go. Spanish speakers in the United States are on the rise and job opportunities for bilingual speakers are also on the rise although an economic study by Albert Saiz shows only a 1.7% wage increase for bilingual Spanish speakers. (See here: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/SmallBiz/story?id=4349200&page=1) When considering economic benefit, the Saiz study gives easy answers: German, Italian, Russian and Chinese yield closer to a 4% wage increase. Considering the languages in highest demand from employers and colleges right now (Chinese and Arabic), Chinese appears to come out on top of the equation for savvy linguistic investors over the next few decades.