I'm curious what other "candidates" there are for a secondary world language and how they compare to Esperanto, in terms of the languages themselves and in terms of how practical it would be for them to establish themselves as an official international secondary language.

I have only obtained a basic level of Esperanto speaking, but I know enough to have at least a somewhat intelligent opinion about Esperanto. I would definitely say that in terms of flexibility, and ease of learning, pronunciation and spelling, it ranks far above any language that I have tried to learn. After 2 months, I could be a tourist in an Esperanto speaking country and speak the language to take care of most every day tasks. Imagine if everyone in the world studied Esperanto for 2 months!

From what I have seen, it seems that Esperanto is a great candidate for an international secondary language. But are there better ones?

I'm also interested in how feasible it would be for Esperanto to officially become a secondary world language, at least to a large degree. My guess is that it is extremely unlikely in the near future (by which I mean the next 100 years or so). Change is slow, and many people seem to be offended by the concept of Esperanto itself, for some reason.

Esperanto is the top choice for a neutral non-national constructed second language. Most popular, most loved, etc. It won out over various competitors such as Ido, Interlingua and Volapuk (though all still have their adherents) for various reasons. It's kind of like how VHS won out over Betamax back in the 80s to become the videocassette that everyone used. Betamax may have had some advantages over VHS as I hazily recall, but they didn't matter at the end, and everyone put their support behind VHS. It was the international videocassette.

Lojban seems to be even more neutral, but also seems to lack the zest, character and emotion of Esperanto. For something like a language to inspire lots of people, it needs to touch people's hearts, not just be logical and neutral.

As for it becoming more widespread, maybe. Time will tell. It seems to have a pretty good presence on the net, for instance; something Zamenhof could never possibly have forseen. So you never know what the future holds.

I researched your questions a couple of years ago. There's a LOT of information out there on the internet. Wikipedia has some good, informative articles about various international auxiliary languages (IALs), their pros and cons, and even some articles comparing various IALs. That's a good place to start research.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_auxil...

Also a wonderful site is Don Harlow's website (google don harlow esperanto).

In addition lots of people have written extensive articles or rants on the internet. Some of those are well informed and some are uninformed.

I would also encourage you to try to find material actually written IN auxilary (secondary) languages. There are wikipedias in those various languages, but look for other material too. And try to find material IN those languages but not ABOUT those languages but rather about other subjects. Also look for forums, chatrooms, newsgroups, IRC ('chats') IN those languages and also look at the number of contributors, the level of activity and the date of the last few entries, contributions or posts.

When I did this for non-Esperanto languages I found very little activity, few contributors, barely any written material and almost all of that was ABOUT the languages not about other subjects. I found newsgroups and forums for Ido, Novial, etc. where discussion was often or mostly in English ABOUT the languages and very often about proposing still...yet... more... further...ongoing revisions, modifications and "improvements" to the languages.

Also, look for online dictionaries and review them for their number of words, level of completeness, and degree of precision. I was disappointed in what I found for non-Esperanto conlangs.

Seth442: From what I have seen, it seems that Esperanto is a great candidate for an international secondary language. But are there better ones?

They all have their pros and cons. I think "better" is relative and highly subjective. I liked and still like Ido because with my language background (English, Spanish and French) it is very, very simple and very easy for ME. Unfortunately for me, and probably other romance language speakers,"easy for ME" doesn't make a great auxiliary language for the rest of the world.

I also decided that If I wanted to participate in an international auxiliary language (IAL) it would have to be Esperanto, because in my lifetime Esperanto is the closest thing we have to an IAL

I think that Esperanto has still to obtain its big break, in international peacemaking. I've just finished Wendy Heller's excellent biography of Zamenhof's daughter Lidia. Lidia believed that Esperanto could make a contribution to the Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine (as it was then) because the communities didn't want to know each other's language. This fact doesn't get much mention. A devout Bahai herself, she was also against any European chauvinism based on Esperanto as being contrary to its spirit.

AnFu:When I did this for non-Esperanto languages I found very little activity, few contributors, barely any written material and almost all of that was ABOUT the languages not about other subjects. I found newsgroups and forums for Ido, Novial, etc. where discussion was often or mostly in English ABOUT the languages and very often about proposing still...yet... more... further...ongoing revisions, modifications and "improvements" to the languages.

Also, look for online dictionaries and review them for their number of words, level of completeness, and degree of precision. I was disappointed in what I found for non-Esperanto conlangs.

Be careful though (not to berate or be counter-productive or disagree with you, more for learners or people who might get the wrong idea) - you'll likely find the same thing in Esperantujo, in fact, from my experience I'd say it's safe to say that this occurs in Esperanto MUCH MUCH more (I'm talking about wanting to change the langauge), and that you'll often find that many wanting to modify languages and change them into something new with the same name tend to drift around in between many different conlangs.

(the) Ido is pretty close to set in stone, exactly like Esperanto. In fact, most of the popular ones (EO, Interlingua, Ido) have a sort of untouchable "core". I can't speak for Novial having not hung around enough around that scene, but even less popular conlangs like Lingua Franca Nova still are relatively unchangeable (except for the odd change of words or unimportant and barely noticeable change to obscure grammar rules).

Actually, the entire conlang community occaisionally peaves me off at times due to the fact that so many people are trying to prove why other conlangs are "inferior" and "a bad choice", and a lot of "the pot calling the kettle black" occurs. Actually, this almost reflects the internet as a whole - "such and such is better than such and such for such and such reason". This is why I sort of like Blueprints for Babel, which sort of impartially goes and says why the big conlangs aren't doing as well as they were imagined to, or has the author says: "A web geek's guide to artificial languages and why you've never heard of them".

I put "(the)" before Ido up there somewhere, because of the Idos. Ido isn't the only daughter language to Esperanto as many will have found out, and many of these "Esperantidos" are based off of Esperanto and Ido (or based off of them and then CALLED them, because someone thinks that either Esperanto can be changed and still be the same language, or that Ido's less popular so no one will mind grammatical vandalism. There are so many nowadays, and I can't remember most of them but there are often one-page websites saying "This is X language, and this is its grammar (expect revision of EO/Ido rules with understandable writing system which hasn't got any pronunciation key anywhere" and that's often the most they have. They also seem to have some similarities to each other or other conlang projects, and Reformed Esperanto. Personally, I prefer some praesperanto conventions and would prefer them over novesperanto conventions, but if someone could manage to get one of those Esperantido projects having the same level of development as Esperanto I wouldn't mind..

Regarding dictionaries, I think Interlingua has a pretty good one, and Ido too (Lingua Franca Nova's is nice too but there isn't anything major in the language, mostly casual conversation, poetry, similar amateur works with some community translations) - it seems the most important factor regarding dictionaries and texts in the language are:
- Age (EO wins here)
(- and thus community size)
- Financial backing
- Simplicity of the language (the more simple, the more community and fan translations (Lingua Franca Nova, sort of Ido), the more complex, the more professional translations)
- Demand for it (none of them really win in all areas here, but EO gets good community attention, Interlingua gets sort of goodish scientific attention but EO is still more popular there I think).

This is a big, old question, and the long replies that have already been posted contain much pertinent info/ideas.

I'm in a crazy mood, so I'm only gonna say one word on the matter for myself:

Volapük

Roberto12:This is a big, old question, and the long replies that have already been posted contain much pertinent info/ideas.

I'm in a crazy mood, so I'm only gonna say one word on the matter for myself:

Volapük

+1000000000(100000000^1000000)

I'm currently reading a novel by Andrew Drummond, A Handbook of Volapük, which I bought from the Esperanto Association of Britain bookshop. It's hysterically funny and you get Volapük lessons as well...

ceigered, I understand what you're saying regarding reformists within Esperanto and people who mainly use Esperanto to talk about Esperanto.

However, what AnFu says is right, in my opinion, about using a language to talk about other things than the language. You can join Esperanto clubs for people who like cats, people who like to bicycle, vegetarians, Catholics, people who don't believe in national governments, etc. Other international language movements simply don't have the critical mass of people to support such activities; while there are hundreds of Catholics who speak Esperanto, there are not hundreds of PEOPLE who speak some of these other conlangs. It could be that as those other languages develop, more "non-language related activities" might be started up. But as things stand now, Esperanto is pretty much your one and only international-language choice to talk about something other than languages.

Regarding reformists - we do have them but the less you hang around with beginners, the less you run into them. Personally, I mainly run into reformists in this forum! Most Esperanto reformists are beginners who have just started learning and they're so excited that they've already thought up 100 ways to improve the language before they've even learned it. Assuming they stick with it, once they learn the language better, the desire to reform it usually fades away as well. There are a few experienced speakers who are reformists but they are a tiny percentage of the population of experienced speakers.

----

I own "A Handbook of Volapuk" as well, I enjoyed it. Interestingly, Volapuk is largely sustained by Esperanto speakers today. Esperanto speakers see it not as a threat to Esperanto, but as a part of our heritage, something that opened the door to the idea of an international language. A paper Esperanto-Volapuk/Volapuk-Esperanto dictionary was published a couple years ago; there could only be a market for that within the Esperanto community, since Volapuk has only in the neighborhood of 30 speakers or so.

I think this is a good spot to pose my question instead of making a new topic.

I was wondering if any Esperantists here support the idea of an IAL moreso than Esperanto. Meaning, if interlingua were to swoop through and magically amass a speaking population of 20 million, would you willingly climb onto that boat, out of support of an IAL? Or do you have a sort of loyalty to Esperanto that has somewhat, over time, crippled openness to other IALs.

UNESCO recognized Esperanto years ago, but why has there been no effort on the UNs part to gather a group of amazing linguistic scholars from many countries to form a new IAL with the absolute intent of becoming an IAL within only a few decades?