As part of my Stage 2 Research Project for school, I have chosen to look into Esperanto and whether it can still fulfil its initial purpose. I do not speak Esperanto myself but am really intrigued by the language and would like to know your thoughts on the topic to grow my research. Any information provided will be highly useful, including opinions, factual information or even any websites, books, etc that I should look into for more information. If you comment below, please indicate whether you wish to remain anonymous or if your name can be quoted in my outcome.

Thank you

Hello,

First you need to define the goal. Will everyone speak E-o as a second language in future? Hardly, but there can be communities and situations, where E-o could be the primary choice. It could be the bridge-language used in international contexts, UN, EU, AU, APEC etc. organs and meetings. Initially E-o could serve as a retour language in interpretation. A retour language is a language that is used, when direct interpretation between languages A and B is not available for some reason. The interpretation then is from A to the retour language and from it to B and viceversa. Speakers would be encouraged to switch to the bridge-language directly. Same applies to translation. This is the fundamental idea of E-o, to be the auxiliary language between speakers of different mutually unintelligeble languages.

Well, I'm not convinced, that the current E-o organisations can push that idea through. There seems to be an atmosphere of introversy, where the organisations live for themselves instead of trying to get the world aboard. Maybe I'm wrong.

From the little I've read, a lot of texts are written in too complicated ways. They contain too many courtesies ("I would like to express my outmost thank you for this great opportunity to bla, bla, bla" instead of "I thank you") or express things in a way, that is alien to speakers of other languages ("This can't be correct, can it" instead of "Is this correct?"). Some writers seem to see E-o as goal per se instead of being a means to express ideas.

While being used as a bridge-language is a top-down way to widen the use of E-o, we need also a bottom-up growth even more, if any degree of "the final success" is to be reached. This means, that E-o should be used in popular culture, porn and so on. For instance a fantasy series, where humans, elves, trolls each speak their own language, but E-o is used for interspecies communication. Or a Star Trek film, where humans and klingons use E-o as a common language. Or some pop star makes a song with clear, loud chorus in E-o. The idea is to expose the great masses to E-o, make E-o cool.

(I self-studied E-o as a teenager in 1980's. Some thirty years later I came back to E-o and now I have studied E-o in courses arranged my local association and the national one. Currently I practise E-o daily on Duolingo. Yes, you may quote me.)

Metsis, your answer is a fine one !

Metsis is quite correct in his view that many Esperanto organisations are too inward-looking and are not going about their business in the way that any single-issue political organisation might best proceed.

In particular, I see little attempt at addressing the major current threat to Esperanto as a world lingua franca - which is the rise of machine translation.

I would expect that in as little as 5 years time it will be common place to load one's smart phone with a translation app. which will allow the user to speak into his phone in his own language and have the translation into another language transmitted to another party's phone.

The likely near future emergence of such technology should already be influencing the way that Esperanto is promoted. But I see little sign of that.

In my view the best hope for the future of Esperanto is to emphasise its educational value - teaching students grammatical concepts, revealing ambiguities in their own language, demonstrating that there are alternative ways of expressing ideas (that not all languages work in the same way).

All this is difficult to achieve by teaching a national foreign language, since there is so much dross to be absorbed before the student can begin to express himself in that language. In fact, in education at a secondary level, few students of a foreign language get close to achieving a reasonable command of the language - quite the reverse is true of Esperanto.

There is an interesting phenomenon in the case of Esperanto, which is that whilst few students of a national foreign language get to the point where they feel that they own the language, this is a not an uncommon experience of students of Esperanto.

How many students of a national foreign language get to the point where they can spontaneously crack jokes in the language, or would undertake writing an original piece in that language, or would take on the production of a quality translation into that language.

I have no doubt that the fields of application of Esperanto will continue to grow within the Esperanto-speaking community, as they have done for the past 130 years.

But that is not the same as getting the growth in the number of speakers that is required to achieve the 'fina venko' - the Esperantists term for when so many people have a command of the language that it has become in practice a world lingua franca.

Estimates of the number of people in the world with a reasonable command of Esperanto vary wildly, and, now that so many isolated individuals are learning or have learnt the language through the Internet, are difficult in principle to calculate.

But in any case even the most generous estimates fall short of the numbers required for la fina venko.

If I remember right, one of Zamenhof's initial goals was to use Esperanto to achieve world peace, so from that premise alone I would say that it will not reach its initial goals.

That being said, I do believe that it is useful enough in some small pockets to achieve some goals that Esperantists have assigned to it. In fact, there is already a small handful of benefits that come with speaking Esperanto, so to an extent, some goals have already been met.

As for whether these things count as its "full potential" depends, I think, on the individual and what they think the "full potential" is at this point. Personally, I'll just be happy if people keep creating more esperanto media content and it becomes a recognized language on the internet. Some places online already have officially recognized it (Google, minecraft, etc), so I'd say we're well on our way as far as that goes. I'd also like to see the travel benefits continue to grow, but honestly what we have in that regard is pretty good, relatively speaking, considering how small the language is.

No one hasn't yet translated Grin's report ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Grin
Kore,

我不认为世界语可以发挥它的最大功效，因为随着科技的发展，越来越多的翻译工具问世，不同国家的人交往隔阂日渐减少，甚至不需要去学习外语就可以和外国人交流。当然我个人还是希望世界语有一个好的前途，这就需要广大世界语者去寻求世界语在未来存在的意义。

studentojn:我不认为世界语可以发挥它的最大功效，因为随着科技的发展，越来越多的翻译工具问世，不同国家的人交往隔阂日渐减少，甚至不需要去学习外语就可以和外国人交流。当然我个人还是希望世界语有一个好的前途，这就需要广大世界语者去寻求世界语在未来存在的意义。

Translation by Google-Trad:

I don't think that Esperanto can exert its maximum effect, because with the development of science and technology, more and more translation tools are coming out. The gap between people in different countries is decreasing day by day, and even foreigners can communicate with foreigners without even learning foreign languages. Of course, I personally hope that Esperanto has a good future. This requires the majority of Esperanto to seek the meaning of Esperanto in the future.

It can be a self-referenced example. Why not?

But people with the same language may fight each other. What about Interna Ideo? humour? Culture? Religion? A lot of more things are needed to achieve Zamnhof's goal, i.e. peace and brotherhood in all the earth.

the translation is right.And i agree with you,may be more things should be done in the future.to be honest ,Zamnhof's goal is diffcult to come ture even impossible just like you said i think.may be Esperanto will be a symbol of peace to attract more people instead a communicate tool