Should English be the international language?

Since I arrived to Austin, I have been attending ESL classes for almost 2 weeks and I could not help noticing that all the students were foreigners struggling to learn a language they did not choose. So I asked myself, why is English the international language? Should it be this way?

English may look easy to learn for speakers of languages derived from Latin, since some structures and vocabulary are similar. However, for Asian and African people, English has nothing to do with their native languages (Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Afrikaans, Hindi), but they must learn it if they want to take part of our globalized world.

I did some research online about this situation and, except for Chinese, more people speak English than any other language. Most countries have English as their official or unofficial second language. More than 70% of the world’s mail is written in English, it is the primary language on the Internet. In international business it is used more than any other language, and it is the language of airplane pilots and air traffic controllers all over the world. Moreover, although French used to be the language of diplomacy, English has displaced it throughout the world.

There have been many attempts all over history to impose an auxiliary language from dominant societies over the centuries, such as Latin, Greek, Arabic, English, French, Chinese, Russian and Spanish. Some of the most recent attempts have been artificial, constructed international auxiliary languages (interlanguages) such as Ido, Interlingua and Esperanto.

As a curious person I am, I did this research a long time ago and I ended up in Esperanto’s Wikipedia page. As most of the people, I did not know what Esperanto was, only that it is the most widely spoken constructed language in the world.

Esperanto was a project of universal language, interlanguage created by a Polish man, L. L. Zamenhof, in 1887. Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy-to-learn, politically neutral language that would transcend nationality and foster international understanding between people with different languages. Although it didn’t succeed into becoming the universal language for many reasons, it still caught my attention and decided to give it a try.

Surprisingly, it was the easiest language I have ever learnt. It has no verb conjugations and most of the vocabulary is created by adding prefixes and suffixes to another existent word. The Esperanto alphabet is based on the Latin script, it does not include the letters q, w, x, or y.

The 28-letter alphabet is:

a b c ĉ d e f g ĝ h ĥ i j ĵ k l m n o p r s ŝ t u ŭ v z

Esperanto is seen by many of its speakers as an alternative or addition to the growing use of English throughout the world, offering a language that is easier to learn than English. Although Esperanto was not so popular when it was created, it is starting to gain some popularity over the internet and maybe will be the future interlanguage. There are Congresses of Esperanto all the years in a different city. In 2014, it was in Buenos Aires, to which I went.

The purpose of this post was to introduce Esperanto to those who didn’t know it and encourage them to look for more information online since this entry was short and brief. Also to imagine a scenario in which Esperanto is the universal auxiliary language, which makes easier to people all over the world to communicate without having to learn a language they do not find easy, as it happens with ESL students.

FUN FACTS

• 2000 hours studying German = 1500 hours studying English = 1000 hours studying Italian (or any other Romance language) = 150 hours studying Esperanto.
• Esperanto has not been a secondary official language of any recognized country. Neutral Moresnet is the world's first Esperanto state.
• Esperanto is used in China to communicate between people with different dialects.
• Studies show that studying Esperanto before another foreign language expedites the acquisition of the other, natural, language.