One of the largest problems an ordinary person encounters when travelling to a new country is the language barrier. This boundary severely hinders the capability of people to communicate effectively and complete group tasks. So, in an increasingly diverse globalized world, why can’t we simply agree on one language as a globe to fix this problem?

Many are familiar with the Tower of Babel, a biblical story about how God punished humans for trying to build a tower to heaven by splitting their common communication into different languages. Without an easy way to understand each other, humans could not continue the tower and it was lost to time.

In our modern world, we have found treatments for problems caused by the language barrier, but not a cure. World languages are almost always offered in schools around the world. Middleton High School (MHS) itself recommends a level three proficiency in a world language before graduation, and many schools around the world in areas with high cultural density require students to learn more than one language. By teaching more languages, there is a larger field of people that can communicate with each other. Language diversity has also sparked the invention of translators and translating programs. 

There are still gaps in this system because translators are not always available, programmed translation has faults, and there are simply too many languages to learn. In fact, it is estimated that there are over 7,000 languages currently spoken in the world. So, if the problem lies in the sheer number of languages, why can’t we as a world just agree on one? 

This question is what Polish linguist and physician L. L. Zamenhof sought to answer. Growing up, he frequently witnessed ethnic persecution around him, and he theorized that the division between ethnic groups was a result of linguistic diversity. In his famous work, Fundamento de Esperanto, he crafted an artificial language derived from the roots of European languages. Today, it is the most successful international artificial language with more than 60,000 speakers worldwide as of 2017 and millions of learners.

The idea behind Esperanto was to make a language that could be globally understood and spoken, fixing the aforementioned problems with high language diversity. Global education of Esperanto isn’t easy though; linguistic diversity yields many differences between languages that make it difficult to learn nonnative languages.

Zamenhof ultimately decided to base his words around European languages. This is clear in many words such as “Bonvenon,” the word for welcome that closely resembles the French and Italian words for welcome, “Bienvenue” and “Benvenuto,” respectively. 

He also made the language structure fairly straightforward. Nouns only have a nominative (subject) case and an accusative (object) case, each with only one ending, all adjectives end in a, verbs have logical endings based on tense, voice, and mood, adverbs always end in e, the accent always falls on the penultimate sound and most importantly, all words are pronounced how they look.

Esperanto is evidently a very efficient language, but why has it not become a dominant language? 

Many factors are at play here, such as Zamenhof’s motivation for creating the language itself, the language’s heavy basis on European languages and the growth of English as a lingua franca, or a common language between people. Anyone who has taken Land, People, Power at MHS will have learned that language and culture are intimately related. 

Zamenhof’s concept for Esperanto was, on the contrary, a language free of culture and politics. This can be controversial because culture may be expressed through language and the overruling of other languages through a globalized language could eliminate important aspects of different cultures. It can be argued, however, that a global language would be a supplement to any existing languages rather than a replacement. The culture aspect of language can be preserved by having a universal language for general communication, and a cultural language for heritage purposes.

Another issue with Esperanto being a global language is that it is almost entirely based on European languages. For people in other regions of the world, making Esperanto a global language could feel like a denial of their own language and culture. 

The language is also starting to be overshadowed by a much larger universal and natural language: English. English has been internationally recognized as a universal language, and it carries the benefits of maintaining culture unlike artificial languages like Esperanto. 

Additionally, it carries bits and pieces of many different cultures around the world because of its diverse origins. In this way, it solves many of the problems that Esperanto was made to fix while removing some of the drawbacks. 

Still, English is not fully universal, as there are still many areas of the world that do not know it. Regardless, if a language is natural or artificial, it is highly unlikely that the entire world will be able to agree on one.