**another one of my drafts; this one will probably be re-written into a proper article on my website, but i wanted to share the thoughts early anyway
esperanto gets a pretty bad rap both inside and outside the conlang community, but i think a lot of it is very unfounded. you're allowed to personally dislike the language or how it's constructed, but it's an insanely impressive language that's refused to die. over time, i've grown a huge appreciation for the language, and wanted to be able to share that with you all.
- isn't it a dead language? a failed project?
esperanto is not a dead language. its goal of being a universal language did not technically succeed if we're going by the definition of "the majority of the planet speaks the language," but few languages could. it's still regularly used online and in real life, with a population of native speakers and large meetings/conventions.
while it doesn't have as many speakers as english (and again, no language does), it still has a sizable number of speakers. exact numbers are difficult, but wikipedia says anywhere from 100,000 to 2,000,000. this is larger than some languages you might know! hawaiian only has about 20,000 speakers, for example.
"but that's cheating!" you might say, "hawaiian is an endangered language!" and to that i say it's not cheating, because i think a dead language would have to have less speakers than an endangered language, and believe me when i say i've seen constructed languages with dead communities.
(no shade to hawaiian btw, i love yall and your beautiful language and hope the revival efforts go well)
- esperanto is eurocentric! that's not universal!
this is flinged around the conlang community a lot, and it is a perfectly valid criticism of the language itself. however, to think the language is like, racist (some people do!) is massively ignoring some very important context.
first of all, zamenhof was no slacker. he knew like 13 different languages, and for someone who was not a linguist, that's PRETTY insane. second of all, esperanto was made in the 19th century, well before the internet, and much older than people probably realize. with no way to quickly access information and collaborate with people across the world, he constructed a language that was genuinely ahead of its time. i've seen auxlangs made decades after esperanto still including ridiculous things like conjugation and
euphonic systems that have no place in an international language.
i also have no concrete way to confirm this from internet research, but like. maybe it was just really hard to find information on things like east asian language guides in 19th century europe?? rather than him excluding it on purpose for some racist reason??
what's my basis for this outside of conjecture? oh, right. maybe it has something to do with the fact that like...
esperanto predates the FIRST ever airplane flight?????
literally HOW was he supposed to just account for stuff like that?? would YOU be able to research japanese if you didn't have access to the internet right now? like be honest with me.
and even despite that... esperanto speakers don't really care! there is a huge population of esperanto speakers in china and other parts of east asia, to the point that there are classes for it. they definitely exist elsewhere too, but that seems to be one of the more well-documented cases.
- why do you have so much faith in the creator?
ok so, ive seen a lot of auxlangs during my research, and there are some WORRYING creators. multiple that are outright and blatantly racist, in fact!
but zamenhof will forever be cemented in legacy because he cared and BELIEVED in his dream. he lived in a time where the idea of a universal language was really possible, and he pushed it until (as far as i know) the day he died. it wasn't just a language, he wanted to unite nations and create peace through understanding.
it's the sort of pure-hearted and optimistic idealism that is essentially impossible for any auxlang creator today to have, since the dream has basically died with the rise of english. his optimism is a relic of the past that lives on in esperanto, and i personally find that very beautiful.