Even with the best will in the world, we cant all learn every language. And even in one language it is nigh on impossible to achieve the fluency of a native speaker. No matter how hard you try, you will always be at a slight disadvantage when you´re speaking to someone in their own language. But imagine if someone could invent a new language. One so simple that we could all learn it and speak it in a few months. It wouldnt belong to any country or nationality so when we used it to communicate with people we would be talking to them on an equal level, without either of us having to use a word of the others native language. Imagine if people as far apart as Russia and Brazil learnt this language. We could talk to Russians without learning Russian and Brazilians without speaking Portuguese. We could freely exchange our ideas without worrying about grammar and pronunciation....
It sounds Utopian doesn´t it? And i know what you´re thinking: it could never be done. No one could ever invent such a language.
Well, that´s where you´re wrong. Such a language already exists and it´s called Esperanto. Although you´ve probably never heard of it, Esperanto has been around for over a hundred years. It was constructed in the second half of the nineteenth century by a Polish man called Zamenhof. He designed Esperanto to serve as a neutral international language which could be used by people of diverse nationalities to communicate with each other on an equal footing. In fact a lot of other intelligent men had had the same idea and Zamenhof´s language was neither the first or the last artificial language to be created. It is however the only one to have survived over a century of usage, devoloped a unique culture complete with pop music and poetry and attracted enough speakers to populate a small country. How come? Because Esperanto is so simple!
Esperanto was constructed to be the easiest language in the world. That means there´s no irregular grammar or difficult pronunciation. You dont have to spend years studying boring rules and exceptions to rules. you can just go out and speak it. And people do. Admittedly not many british people, but in other parts of Europe and beyond Esperanto is pretty popular. Will Esperanto replace English as the worlds international language? Probably not in the near future, but you have to admit, it would be fairer if it did. So, perhaps you should give it a go. Just in case!
