Esperanto

Esperanto is the most widely spoken of the constructed languages. L. L. Zamenhof initiated the language in 1887 after ten years of working on it. His intention was to create an easy-to-learn language, to serve as an international auxiliary language, a second language for everyone in the world (not to replace all existing languages in the world). Some Esperanto speakers still want this, but most just want to meet foreigners and learn about other countries and cultures. Today, thousands of people use it regularly to communicate with people all over the world.

Esperanto has proven to be a good deal easier to learn as a second language than any national language (especially highly irregular and/or non-phonetic languages such as English, French, and Chinese). There is also evidence that studying Esperanto before studying any other second language (especially an Indo-European language) speeds and improves learning, because learning subsequent foreign languages is easier than learning one's first, while the use of a grammatically simple auxiliary language lessens the "first foreign language" learning hurdle. In one study, a group of high school students studied Esperanto for one year, then French for three years, and ended up with a better command of French than the control group, who studied French without Esperanto during all four years.

According to a survey by Professor Sidney S. Culbert of the University of Washington, 1.6 million people speak Esperanto to Foreign Service Level 3 ability. This number is limited to those "professionally proficient" (possessing the ability to actually communicate, not just grunt greetings) in Esperanto. This survey wasn't just for speakers of Esperanto, but was a world-wide survey of many languages. This number also appears in the Almanac World Book of Facts and the Ethnologue. Assuming that this figure is accurate, this means that about .03% of the world's population speaks the language, thus far falling short of Zamenhof's goal of a universal language. The Ethnologue also states that there are 200-2000 native Esperanto speakers.

Esperanto is not necessarily accepted as the ideal solution for an international auxiliary language. Esperanto has had numerous criticisms, especially from the auxiliary language community. Some of the other planned languages that have emerged in the twentieth century have attempted to address criticisms of Esperanto:

large set of morphemes - although it makes the language more flexible and expressive
six letters not found in ASCII
sexist suffixes - by adding -in like in German
heavy reliance on European source languages - although some grammatical structures (ex. agglutination) are more similar to Asian languages

However, no other constructed language has approached the number of Esperanto speakers. Some of these other languages are quite different from Esperanto while other languages, like Ido, are based on Esperanto, and enjoyed a period of popularity in the early 1900s. Other alternative languages include Idiom Neutral, Occidental, Novial, and Interlingua; some languages not originally intended as international auxiliary languages are also sometimes suggested, such as Lojban. Because Esperanto is the most well-known of constructed languages, many who have been interested were unaware of these other languages, but there is information about these languages on the Internet as well.

On May 3, 2002, the Esperanto version of the Wikipedia became the third largest Non-English Wikipedia.

Incubus (1965, starring William Shatner) is the only known feature film with entirely Esperanto dialogue.

Esperanto

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