As a teen, I was quite curious about Esperanto … enough that I ended up buying several books in the language and making a few semi-serious attempts to develop fluency. I still have those books in my library, but I never actually achieved any firm grasp of Esperanto. It was the most successful of a number of attempts to create a universal second language, intended to allow people to communicate with others who did not speak their primary tongue. When I was young, I also believed that this was a way to reduce inter-cultural frictions and in at least a small way to lower the risks of war between nations. As I got older and more cynical, I realized that Douglas Adams probably had the truth of it in describing the Babel Fish from his novels:
Anatomy of the Babel Fish as explained in the BBC TV series.
The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
[…]
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
All that aside, Douglas Todd points out that despite all of its manifold complexities, the English language is actually taking on the role that Esperanto and other artificial languages were intended to do:
I recently travelled to the home of Ludwik Zamenhof, the Russian-Polish Jew who in 1873 invented Esperanto. It was intended to become the world’s first universal language.
Hoping it would end wars, Warsaw-based Zamenhof dreamed Esperanto would encourage people to come together under a common language. He thought that kind of connection would help overcome the distrust that can be exacerbated by the globe’s multi-language Tower of Babel.
Zamenhof’s vision of a common language caught on for hundreds of thousands. I have met people in Poland, South America and elsewhere who learned Esperanto as children. But, needless to say, the cause of Esperanto is now virtually lost.
Whether we like it or not, English is on the road to become the world’s lingua franca.
It is not the world’s most spoken language — that’s Mandarin. But English is arguably the language most commonly adopted as the medium of communication between speakers whose native languages are different.
I know I’m not the only Canadian who has travelled — in my case to Indonesia, Argentina, Denmark, Spain, Poland, Brazil, Turkey, Germany and elsewhere — and witnessed a collection of multilingual speakers suddenly revert to English, even if awkwardly, as they seek a shared way to talk.
It is a thing to behold. It is humbling.
As a native English speaker, I am not proud to say I only know about 1,500 words of French that I have trouble putting together in a meaningful way. I’m intimidated by new languages, whereas many friends and family are polyglots. So, for that matter, are most Europeans, where 97 per cent of 13-year-olds now study English.
It rarely ceases to amaze me when disparate multilingual people around the world show me and others their respect (and perhaps their pity) by speaking in English. Of course, most of them also like the chance to practise the language, since they know it is a key to new vistas.
