Esperanto

What is Esperanto, I hope everybody knows. Is it practical? Can it challenge English as an international language?

Here is what I heard from Hannes Larsson, the person who knows something about languages:

I spoke 6 languages: Finnish, Swedish, German, English, French and Italian. In 2005 I learned Esperanto and wondered why I had not learnt it earlier. Very easy to learn, no exceptions. However nothing to do with basic English: Esperanto is a perfect language ideally suited for literature, and at the same time it is clear and avoids misunderstandings.

In 2009 I gave a 90 min lecture at the Universal Esperanto Congress in Bialystok. Last June I was with my wife at the Asian Esperanto Congress in Ulan Bator. Everywhere our group was welcomed by local Esperantists and we had some nice evenings together.

In my book about my skiing adventures, the last chapter will be “The International language”.

Nowadays English has a predominant position, not because of the qualities of the language but because USA is the economic superpower. But English is one of the less suited languages to become an international language. Chinese have enormous difficulties to learn it and Esperanto is more and more taught in schools and universities. Same in Brazil.

Also for India, another future economic superpower,Esperanto is a good solution. When they got rid of the British empire, they had to choose a language. If they had adopted one of the 80 or so local languages, it would have been discriminatory towards all the other languages, so they resigned to adopt the language of the former colonizer.

On the contrary, Esperanto is a neutral language; it is not the language of one superpower but belongs to the whole humankind.