Applied Languages

As the community of Esperanto speakers prepares to mark the 150th anniversary of its author’s birth, the appeal of this language designed to foster harmony and coexistence continues.

There are currently believed to be about one million people around the world who speak Esperanto, devised in the 1880s by Dr Ludwig Lazar Zamenhof (1859-1917) whose 150th birthday is being marked this month by an International Esperanto Congress in his birthplace, Bialystok, Poland.

Language is identity, and Esperanto speakers have a strong sense of community, based on tolerance and equality. “You’d have to be pretty weird not to be accepted in an Esperanto club,” says Mr Miklaf who belongs to a group of speakers in Tel Aviv.

Some argue that this tradition of tolerance goes back to the original values of its founder. “If I wasn’t a Jew from a ghetto, the idea of uniting humanity would either have never occurred to me, or it would have never taken such a firm hold of me throughout my life”, wrote Zamenhof in 1905. A resident of Warsaw, Zamenhof was alarmed at the growing wave of anti-Semitism throughout the Russian empire.

Zamenhof’s book Dr Esperanto (meaning Dr Hopeful) offered a simple grammar and a vocabulary of 900 words derived from Romanesque, Germanic and Slavic languages. Through a system of suffixes and prefixes it had a built-in ability to generate new words.

“Everyone who has learnt Esperanto knows the joy of using this flexible and witty language”, says Esther Schor of Princeton University, who is writing a book on the history of Esperanto. Zamenhof believed that his language was so simple that even an uneducated person could learn it in a week. This assessment was probably optimistic. But today most speakers would agree that a couple of months is sufficient to become fluent.

These days, Esperanto has gone far beyond being a purely Jewish, or minority, project. It connects people even in troubled parts of the world.

Read More: BBC News

Slovakia has dismissed protests by neighbouring Hungary over a new language law which would impose fines for using minority languages. The Slovak foreign minister Miroslav Lajcak was speaking after Hungarian MPs on Monday jointly urged Slovakia to rescind the language law. He said “it’s necessary to return this hysterical atmosphere – which hasn’t been caused by the Slovak side – to normal”.

Slovakia’s 5.4 million population includes more than 500,000 Hungarians. The law, due to come into effect on 1 September, envisages fines of up to 5,000 euros (£4,315) for people who use minority languages in public services. It would apply in cases where the minority forms less than 20% of the local population.

Janos Koka, leader of the liberal Free Democrats (SZDSZ) party group in the Hungarian parliament, said “what we need is a diplomatic offensive so that this law is rescinded before it comes into force on 1 September”.

A German conservative MEP, Michael Gahler, also condemned the law. He said Slovakia was “violating commonly respected standards in the EU and disregarding respective recommendations of the Council of Europe, which foresee the extended use of minority languages”.
According to Mr Lajcak, the law “in no way restricts the use of minority languages in Slovakia”.

He said the law was intended to “ensure that no Slovak citizen, irrespective of their ethnicity, feels disadvantaged or discriminated against in the territory of their country on the grounds of the language they speak”.

Slovakia’s ruling coalition, led by Prime Minister Robert Fico of the left-wing Smer party, includes the far-right Slovak National Party (SNS) of Jan Slota.

Read more: BBC News