AHC/WI: Esperanto becomes the lingua franca

[lerk]

Could Esperanto become the lingua franca of the world? If so, what would the impact of that be?

 

[Coiler]

Could Esperanto become the lingua franca of the world?

Only if the Circle Trigon Party succeeds in taking over the world.

 

[Alex Richards]

Esperanto's fundamental problem is that basically nobody who's actually running things seems to have had any desire to adopt it. Maybe you could get it forced through as the official working language of the UN or equivalent, but that strikes me that it's just going to be like the Irish Dáil operating officially in Gaelic but where everybody's speaking English in practice.

 

[Redolegna]

Esperanto's fundamental problem is that basically nobody who's actually running things seems to have had any desire to adopt it. Maybe you could get it forced through as the official working language of the UN or equivalent, but that strikes me that it's just going to be like the Irish Dáil operating officially in Gaelic but where everybody's speaking English in practice.

Esperanto has no culture, no literature and perhaps more damningly of all, no army.

 

[OwenM]

Esperanto's fundamental problem is that basically nobody who's actually running things seems to have had any desire to adopt it. Maybe you could get it forced through as the official working language of the UN or equivalent, but that strikes me that it's just going to be like the Irish Dáil operating officially in Gaelic but where everybody's speaking English in practice.

Could plausibly result in it being a not uncommon language to learn in school etc, although probably never the most common.

Esperanto has no culture, no literature and perhaps more damningly of all, no army.

Bit chicken and egg of course, if it gets adopted as a common language it'll develop those things a bit more.
Which would, of course, also compromise its intended neutrality.....

 

[RyanF]

There's a very brief window where Esperanto could have become A Thing, and just that. I think beefier internationalism during the Interwar Period and a League of Nations* that enjoys doing things might lead to what @Alex Richards proposes, and that's as far as it will ever get de jure. De facto? I could maybe see your average punter of many nations knowing a few (written) words here and there for navigating airports and ports - useful words phrases like exit, gate, and of course duty free. Outside of various international organisations where it is a procedural relic.

*or for laughs an earlier European community where its used because no one wants to give the English or the French the satisfaction of using their language

Esperanto has no culture, no literature and perhaps more damningly of all, no army.

What are you talking about? It's like the 1966 independently produced horror film Incubus from The Outer Limits co-creator Leslie Stevens featuring William Shatner butcher his way through the language doesn't exist to you!

 

[Dan1988]

Esperanto has no culture, no literature and perhaps more damningly of all, no army.

There is a culture and literature; the latter is just a bit hard to find unless you're already in the movement. The last bit is amusing, because there is a controversial thesis by the Israeli linguist Paul Wexler which states that Esperanto is nothing more than a relexified Yiddish (which is part and parcel of his even more controversial thesis on the origins of Yiddish which are so far outside the mainstream of Yiddish linguistics). Which is all well and good, but then that leads to at lease one problem - Yiddish, at least in its standard literary form (which is not used by most Yiddish speakers), has 3 of the 4 cases of its close relative, German, while Esperanto only has 2 (with the genitive already taken care of via the correlatives, and the dative is IIRC a prepositional construction with the nominative case).

What would be interesting, if it helped with Esperanto becoming the lingua franca, is if Amikejo really took off. Then we'd case of a dialectal "Spoken Esperanto" which takes on the substratum character of the local dialect. However, if I wanted to construct a dialect based off of living speech, I'd reconstruct it primarily on the basis of Luxembourgish since the local dialect is no longer spoken in the municipality and whatever evidence there is for the dialect is scarce, and also Luxembourgish is probably one of the Germanic languages close enough to Esperanto phonology that it could easily be used as such a base. (Which makes a nice counterpart to Esperanto normally described as being similar to Belarusian phonology minus the phonemic palatalization and a few other minor things, despite Zamenhof recommending Italian as the pronunciation model.) That would make for an interesting contribution to Esperanto history.

 

[Ephraim Ben Raphael]

Apparently Iran proposed that the League of Nations adopt Esperanto as the lingua franca for international diplomacy and it was only because France vetoed the proposal that it failed. The LoN later encouraged its members to include Esperanto in their educational curriculums, and the French responded by banning Esperanto instruction. The Soviet Union initially had some state promotion of Esperanto, before Stalin decided it was bad and suppressed it.

So if we can get the French on board or at least neutral then maybe we could get Esperanto to emerge as a diplomatic language, and a non-Stalinist Soviet Union might promote it as some kind of international "Communist Brotherhood" language.

 

[Redolegna]

So if we can get the French on board or at least neutral

That's the sort of thing that would need a sweeping cultural change in France. Five centuries of conscious imperialistic strategy through language (plenty other imperialism through other means, of course) is not going to vanish because the League is asking nicely.

 

[Ephraim Ben Raphael]

That's the sort of thing that would need a sweeping cultural change in France. Five centuries of conscious imperialistic strategy through language (plenty other imperialism through other means, of course) is not going to vanish because the League is asking nicely.

You're right.

What about some kind of POD involving World War I? Maybe in a CP-victory scenario (say international politics are a little different in the lead up to WWI, there's more Anglo-American hostility, and the USA eventually joins the CPs) a German/American led version of the League decides to promote Esperanto as an alternative to French as the diplomatic language and a defeated France is in no position to oppose it?

 

[Dan1988]

You're right.

What about some kind of POD involving World War I? Maybe in a CP-victory scenario (say international politics are a little different in the lead up to WWI, there's more Anglo-American hostility, and the USA eventually joins the CPs) a German/American lead version of the League decides to promote Esperanto as an alternative to French as the diplomatic language and a defeated France is in no position to oppose it?

While I think having Amikejo being more a thing would be more helpful as a pre-WW1 POD, another would be to try to push Ido out of the picture early enough. Both before and after WW1 there were efforts to try to get Esperanto go the way of Volapük by reforming it so much that it distorts the structure by making it more Europeanized (read: closer to Anglo-French norms) than it already was. So a CP-victory scenario may help, though I can't help but wonder if the Germans attempt to either modify or create a fork of Esperanto that brings it closer to Ido/Novial/Volapük (particularly in terms of vowel phonology as far as a Volapük substratum goes).

 

[RyanF]

Is there any potential situation post either World War where a sufficiently international zone would create a need for an independent lingua franca? Perhaps multiple local languages and multiple languages of powers overseeing its independence? Danzig perhaps if the League of Nations had policing organised by their nations on a rotating basis, so the locals might need some measure of English, French, Dutch and Italian but the proto-peacekeepers would also need a measure of German, Polish and Yiddish?

Trieste under the UN post the Second World War presents another potential candidate - Italian, Slovene and Croatian locally mixed with the languages of the Allies. The Tangier International Zone presents another enticing possibility, the international condominium eventually seeing originally the French, Spanish and British and later expanding to include Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden administrating an area where Arabic and Berber languages were spoken locally. All of them though run into the issue that @Redolegna has rightly already pointed out that France is perhaps likely to through their toys out of the pram at any moves towards a lingua franca other than French.