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Esperanto

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[[fr:Esp%e9ranto]]

Esperanto is the most widely spoken of the artificial languages. L. L. Zamenhof published the Unua Libro (First Book) in 1887 after ten years of work. His intention was to create a language that is very easy to learn, to serve as the universal second language for everyone in the world (not, as some suppose, to replace all existing languages in the world). Today, millions of speakers use it to contact people around the world on a linguistically neutral basis.

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 only French during all four years.

According to a survey by Professor Sidney S. Culbert of the University of Washington, about two 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 falling far 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 by all who subscribe to the ideal of an international auxiliary language. Other artificial languages have emerged in the twentieth century that have attempted to address some of the criticisms that have arisen in response to some of the features built into Esperanto, although, as latecomers to the scene, none of them have approached the number of speakers like Esperanto. Some of these languages are quite different from Esperanto; on the other hand, another language, Ido, is based on Esperanto, and enjoyed a period of popularity in the early 1900's, and which still has a small number of speakers (1000) today. Other alternative languages include Occidental, Novial, and Interlingua. Because Esperanto is the most well known of artificial languages, many who have been interested in the subject were unaware of these other languages, but the internet has led to the dissemination of information about alternatives to Esperanto.

There is also an Esperanto version of the Wikipedia.

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