Esperanto (eo and epo in ISO 639) is the most widely spoken of the constructed languages. L. L. Zamenhof created the foundation of the language in 1887 after ten years of working on it (see Esperanto history). His intention was to create an easy-to-learn language, to serve as an international auxiliary language, a second language for everyone in the world, rather than to replace all existing languages in the world. Some Esperanto speakers still want this, but most just want to meet foreigners and learn about other countries and cultures. Today, thousands of people use it regularly to communicate with people all over the world.
Esperanto has proven to be a good deal easier for speakers of European languages to learn as a second language than any national language (especially highly irregular and/or non-phonetic languages such as English, French, and Chinese). There is also evidence that studying Esperanto before studying any other second language (especially an Indo-European language) speeds and improves learning, because learning subsequent foreign languages is easier than learning one's first, while the use of a grammatically simple auxiliary language lessens the "first foreign language" learning hurdle. In one study, a group of high school students studied Esperanto for one year, then French for three years, and ended up with a better command of French than the control group, who studied French without Esperanto during all four years.
A survey of the number of Esperanto speakers was conducted by Sidney S. Culbert[?], a retired psychology professor of the University of Washington, himself a Esperantist who has attended Esperanto congresses, who has commented regarding the logical structure of Esperanto: "If the world could be structured that efficiently", and whose wife Ruth, who has herself written four plays in Esperanto, has commented "It's the only hope for the world or it will be destroyed" ([1] (http://personal.southern.edu/~caviness/Eo_unue/mondvasta.html)). Culbert concluded that 1.6 million people speak Esperanto to Foreign Service Level 3 ability. This number is limited to those "professionally proficient" (possessing the ability to actually communicate beyond greetings and simple phrases) in Esperanto. This survey wasn't just for speakers of Esperanto, but was a world-wide survey of many languages. This number also appears in the Almanac World Book of Facts[?], and in Ethnologue. The Ethnologue data may need to be treated with caution, as on their web page (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=ESP) they incorrectly categorize Esperanto as a language of France, and also give -al as a dative ending (not quite correct; al is a separate word meaning "to"). Assuming nonetheless that this figure is accurate, this means that about 0.03% of the world's population speaks the language, thus far falling short of Zamenhof's goal of a universal language[?]. Ethnologue also states that there are 200-2000 native Esperanto speakers.
However, some key persons within the Esperanto movement have lamented how few of the speakers then progress to a high level of fluency. Most notably, the author Julio Baghy[?] critiqued mediocre Esperantists in his ironic poem Estas mi Esperantisto ("I am an Esperantist"). Also the author Kazimierz Bein[?], while attending a conference at which it was generally agreed that everyone should learn Esperanto, remarked that the first who ought to learn it were the Esperantists themselves.
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Esperanto is not necessarily accepted as the ideal solution for an international auxiliary language. Esperanto has had numerous criticisms, especially from the auxiliary language community. Some of the other planned languages that have emerged in the twentieth century have attempted to address criticisms of Esperanto:
Despite its criticisms, no other constructed language has approached the number of Esperanto speakers or has an extensive body of literature like Esperanto. Some of these other languages are quite different from Esperanto while other languages, like Ido, are based on Esperanto, and enjoyed a period of popularity in the early 1900s. More recent spinoffs from Esperanto include the modified form Riismo which seeks to eliminate sexual inequality from the language. Other alternative languages include Idiom Neutral[?], Occidental, Novial, and Interlingua; some languages not originally intended as international auxiliary languages are also sometimes suggested, such as Lojban. Because Esperanto is the most well-known of constructed languages, many who have been interested were unaware of these other languages, but there is information about these languages on the Internet as well.
The phonemic alphabet of Esperanto has six accented letters: ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ (c, g, h, j, and s with circumflex), and ŭ (u with breve). The alphabet does not include the letters q, w, x, and y.
Therefore the alphabet is:
(See also the external PDF file The Alphabets of Europe (http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/esperanto.pdf).)
As of June 22, 2003, the Esperanto version of the Wikipedia (http://eo.wikipedia.com/) had 6789 articles, making it the eighth largest language in the Wikipedia.
Angoroj (1964) was the first film produced in Esperanto. Incubus (1965, starring William Shatner) is the only known feature film with entirely Esperanto dialogue.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump