Conlanging is the process of making a constructed language, called conlang for short. Well-known examples of conlangs are Klingon, created by linguist Mark Okrand for the Star Trek movie franchise, and Quenya and Sindarin, created by J.R.R. Tolkien for his books about Middle-earth.
But conlanging isn’t always for fiction or entertainment. Esperanto, the most widely spoken constructed language, was created for world peace. It all started with a man called L. L. Zamenhof, who created Esperanto as a universal second language to unite people worldwide. The word Esperanto even means “one who hopes.”
Zamenhof knew several languages, including English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, Polish, Russian, and Yiddish, which helped him construct Esperanto. In 1887, he published Unua Libro (First Book) as an introduction to Esperanto. In the 1920s, Esperanto was almost adopted as the language of international relations but was vetoed only by France, since French was the world’s lingua franca. during WWII, both Germany and the Soviet Union banned Esperanto as anti-nationalist.
Despite all the struggles during the 20th century, Esperanto was able to survive. Two million people speak it today, not bad considering there are more than 7,000 languages in the world, and it’s one of only 492 institutional languages.
Here are some interesting linguistic properties of Esperanto:
- It is morphologically agglutinative, which means morphemes (the smallest unit of meaning) are put together to form new words by adding prefixes and suffixes.
- It is somewhat isolating, which means many Esperanto words are single morphemes.
- It has SVO (subject-verb-object) word order.
- It has five vowels – a e i o u – that are the most common in the world.
- It has a 28-letter alphabet.
- Nouns do not have grammatical gender.
- There are no irregular verbs.
- Spelling is entirely phonetic.
I love the story of Esperanto because it illustrates that language is powerful. It would not have been banned and persecuted otherwise.
Ĝis revido! (Goodbye!)
Holzer, J. (2022, July 25). A brief history of Esperanto, the 135-year-old language of peace hated by Hitler and Stalin alike. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/a-brief-history-of-esperanto-the-135-year-old-language-of-peace-hated-by-hitler-and-stalin-alike-186025.
Koutny, Ilona. (2015). A typological description of Esperanto as a natural language. Language. Communication. Information (JKI). JKI. 43-62. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299475481_A_typological_description_of_Esperanto_as_a_natural_language.