Miland:Suppose 600 * (a^9.5) = 300,000
then log(a) = log(500)/9.5 = 0.6542
so a = 1.9235. Till the end of 2050, at this factor of growth every decade from now we get 300,000 * (1.9235^4) = about 41 million.
Fina Venko, here we come! Though I am not certain that I will be there to see it.

Dear lord, Afrikaans is half way to the fina venko!

That's it, Esperanto now needs a mascot! (Oh well, if Afrikaans does beat EO, that's not so bad. Those ĥ vs h sounds will be the end of me though)

As for the maths, I wish I knew what was going on here.. I reckon 500,000 through pure one-on-one evangelism alive today sounds like a nice number, but that does not account for mass media, internet fora nor temporary fads. With that taken into account, the 2,000,000 figure doesn't sound so bad, although I imagine that without more widespread coverage in this mass-marketing saturated world that figure may drop. It also doesn't take into account any paradigm shifts concerning the global lingua franca - if Chinese or Japanese or any European language were to become popular, just as Spanish seems to be at the moment, that craze might take away from EO to some extent. In other ways it might help if say Portuguese became a little fad due to Brazil, since there are many Brazilian EOists.

Also important is the human population. If war were to break out (more than it is now) and result in massive casualties, EO may gain more importance. If the world population booms, EO may not keep up but may spread in relation to the growth, who knows. If urbanisation causes countries to become too centralised, or cities become little worlds of their own, Esperanto may suffer by a growth of ignorance. If something awesome yet potentially ecologically-influential, like seasteading, took off, EO may gain important among individuals living there due to being more dispersed and needing a sense of unity other than that of other nations who'd rather control all those around them. If something as crazy as space colonisation were to occur around the 2050 mark or before, EO may even find importance as a scientific mini-lingua franca by sometime in the 2100's, although its future after that would be threatened with an increase in human population in space, or it mightn't even leave the planet easily if private researchers and space companies don't manage to get a shoe in with US/RU/CN/EU/JP around (hopefully the US will encourage privatisation), and that's not taking into account India.

Of course, this is all assuming we live past 2012 [/sherco]

Essentially though, I believe human demographics in the coming decades I believe will be extremely important to the future of EO or any other language with similar aspirations, let alone those native languages not as popular as English/Spanish/Arabic/Chinese/German/Japanese/French.

Also, there's another question of whether heavily centralised superpowers will be able to continue to support their own growth and power vs that of more loosely tied yet still relatively peaceful societies. South East Asia for that reason could be used as an example of recent changes in demographics, politically, economically and linguistically...

No matter what, I hope that this coming century and the ones after it are as exciting as one could talk them up but only in a good way and not the bad!

Sorry, it should have been 4.1 million, one decimal point away and one order of magnitude less. I've corrected my earlier message. The Fina Venko doesn't look likely in the foreseeable future.

Ah crud, scrap that then. Time to ditch Esperanto and learn me some Afrikaans![/forumforinte]

You're right! I didn't take deaths into account.

BTW, isn't the fact that Hitler and Stalin were against Esperanto a strong argument in favor of it? You see, had any of them stated that 2 plus 2 equals 4, I would have checked that twice with a calculator and then twice again with my fingers.

Regards,

Daniel

sudanglo:Thank you Daniel, for doing the calculation. But have you allowed for Esperantists dying?

I know that many of them live to a ripe old age (look around any Universal Kongreso) but surely many who were alive in the first half of the 20th century would now be dead. And of course the efforts of Stalin and Hitler would have knocked back the numbers.

Anyway, let's say that with this correction the number comes to say 300,000 for 2010 and let's say that this is plausible. Then this shows a very slow rate of recruitment (2 more in each decade was the assumption).

Does the picture look a bit more rosy on the exponential growth model in 2050?

I've known about Esperanto for 10 years and only now have I decided to actually learn the language. I would list among my reasons for learning is growing number of Esperanto sites on the Internet and my interest in using Esperanto as a stepping stone to other languages. As for promoting Esperanto the lesson of Visicalc comes to mind. Visicalc made microcomputers a business power tool rather than an expensive toy for nerds. More recently the advent of video games has drawn people to purchase computers. I know many of my relatives are computer-illiterate yet they want the games. So if Esperanto could offer business leverage or massive entertainment value then it would spread like a viral email.

Esperanto could be of considerable value for business if more people spoke it. In general terms, the practical benefits from knowing Esperanto are very much bound up with the number of speakers.

May be the Internet is producing a snowball effect, who knows.

But it is patently clear that if Esperanto were commonly taught in the schools across Europe or across the world, then in the time of one generation nobody would argue about whether there were any practical benefits.

However given current numbers, you need a non-practical argument (ie the educational one) to set in motion this growth in numbers.

Perhaps the best example of an organization that could benefit immediately and extensively by adopting Esperanto is the Roman Catholic Church. It has to be in constant communication with diocesan priests and their staff in virtually every country on the planet. Although Latin was traditionally used for communication in the RC Church, and still is used for certain official documents, it isn't used much anymore for ordinary communication. The Church certainly knows about Esperanto, and even uses it a bit for public relations.

Why hasn't the RC Church adopted Esperanto as the obvious solution to its considerable linguistic challenges?

Todd

Radio~!:

T0dd:Why hasn't the RC Church adopted Esperanto as the obvious solution to its considerable linguistic challenges?

Ulrich Matthias wrote a whole book on this theme. I picked it up in German when it was being given away free at an Esperanto event a few years ago, but there's an English translation on the internet here

Thank you. There's a lot of information there. I see that in some instances resistance to Esperanto as a communication language is grounded in resistance to it as a liturgical language, which is another thing entirely.

Todd

T0dd:Why hasn't the RC Church adopted Esperanto as the obvious solution to its considerable linguistic challenges?

Esperanto has been accepted as one language among others; the Pope's traditional Xmas greeting in many languages include Esperanto (at 20:21-20:25, Esperanto banner in crowd visible at 20:29-20:32), and there are Vatican Radio broadcasts.

The reasons for the esteem accorded to Latin as the Catholic Church's official language were given by Pope John XXIII in his Apostolic Constitution Veterum Sapientia. However most liturgies (outside the Vatican) are now celebrated in the local vernacular.

Miland:
As to why Latin hasn't been replaced, the reasons (whether one agrees with them or not) were given by Pope John XXIII in his Apostolic Constitution Veterum Sapientia.

I'm not so interested in why Esperanto hasn't been adopted as a liturgical language as in why it hasn't been adopted as a bureaucratic language. The Catholic Church has one of the largest global bureaucracies in the world.

Todd