Akravideco

Language is so tangled in the human experience that separating purely linguistic phenomena from political or cultural ones is all but impossible. This makes it difficult to address linguistics' central quandary: does language shape us, or do we shape it? Like the chicken-and-egg conundrum, the solution may never be known. However, we can narrow our ignorance to some degree by reducing variables. Among such experiments, constructed languages are particularly compelling.

As an Esperantist, I am privileged to observe a cross-cultural community as it manipulates a language whose cultural context is far less sharply defined than most. Unscientific though they are, these observations do shed some light on the way that humans acculturate language, as opposed to the way that it acculturates them.

Esperanto's inventor, Ludwig Zamenhof, struggled to make his creation as culturally neutral, as semantically flexible, and as easy to learn as possible. To this end, he gave it a brilliant agglomerative structure, rigorously regular grammar and a pan-European vocabulary. These assets have helped to make Esperanto the most successful constructed language in history. To date no single culture has managed to dominate it, so Esperanto remains much as its creator dreamt it, a truly intercultural language.

Yet Zamenhof's vision has suffered at the very hands of those who share it. To begin with, Esperanto is perceived as a language that no-one owns. As a result, students (especially beginners) regularly attempt to "fix" it. Their unenlightened tinkering is a persuasive argument against positions such as my own that deplore the academies that oppress some natural languages. Apparently, the human territorial imperative extends to intangibles such as language, whether or not culture is involved. For example, students seldom attempt to redesign Russian or Japanese, despite the fact that like all natural languages, both are a snarled mess. These languages are perceived as belonging to someone, therefore changing them is trespass. Esperanto, however, is unclaimed territory, real estate in search of a conqueror.

The fact that Esperanto is very easy to learn ironically leads some to learn it very badly. Apparently, people are compelled to disrespect easy languages. This point sheds some light on an ongoing debate among North American Spanish teachers. My Esperanto experience suggests that students' refusal to take Spanish seriously, and their subsequently atrocious Spanish, owes more to that language's (entirely bogus) reputation among North Americans as an "easy" language, than any negative feelings learners may have about Hispanophone cultures.

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