Esperanto
In 1887 L.L. Zamanhof invented 'a
universal second language'. It took
the best bits of many European languages to make a new
one for everyone to understand. He called it Esperanto.
Orwell
Orwell came across Esperanto when he stayed with an aunt in
Paris in 1927. He was hoping to improve his French but his
aunt insisted on speaking Esperanto.
Orwell didn’t like the language or the people who
spoke it. He clearly based the rules of Newspeak on those
of the ‘world language of peace’. In Newspeak
nice words describe horrible things. The 'Ministry of Love'
promotes war. Big Brother is really the secret police.
Orwell believed that corrupt language showed corrupt
thought.
Was Orwell unfair to Zamanhof’s invented language?
After all, Esperanto has had some minor success. There are
a reasonable number of fluent speakers of the language
– though nobody is sure how many. Some say 100,000,
others claim an improbable 2.5 million.
There are even a small number of Esperanto native speakers
– up to 1,000 according to some estimates.
A universal second
language?
But these figures do not compare with the
more than one billion people using English as their
‘universal second language’. And Esperanto
is still not the official language of any country in
the world.
English may be illogical and have unfair advantages over
other languages. But it is the language people freely
choose to communicate with. You don’t need Big
Brother to force anyone to use it.
So when your car breaks down in a foreign country,
don’t reach for your Esperanto phrase book. English
is still the lingua franca or universal language in much of
the globe.
Do you know the words we use to describe he English
language. Try this crossword. You can find all
the words in the glossary of this section
of ESL Reading.
