Esperanto: The Universal Second Language | Great Ideas and Inventions Great Ideas and Inventions Posted on January 21, 2013 by bgr5040 For my first passion blog of the new semester, I am going to write about an invention that probably most people have thought of or discussed at some point, but do not know that it is actually already in the progress of being developed. This idea is the one of a world-wide common language. We’ve all taken a foreign language in middle and high school, usually Spanish, French, or German. So we know how difficult and frustrating it can be to learn one—but, speaking from experience, having to learn a language is not nearly as frustrating as not being able to communicate with someone because you didn’t learn it. And then, even after learning another language, it’s only one more. With the thousands of languages out there, you aren’t really that much better off. So, the concept of a universal second language arose. This language is called Esperanto. The majority of Esperanto roots are based on Latin, though some vocabulary is taken from modern Romance languages, and from English, German, Polish and Russian.

This makes it easy to learn for anyone already speaking any of those languages—and the bits of middle school Spanish and French help too. Esperanto was invented in 1887, in Poland, and has continued growing over the past century. There are approximately 1,000 native speakers of Esperanto, 10,000 people can speak Esperanto fluently, 100,000 can use it actively, 1 million understand a lot of Esperanto, and about 10 million have studied it to some extent. I fall under the last category, having studied Esperanto for two weeks in my high school Theory of Knowledge course. Unfortunately I wasn’t motivated enough to continue studying it outside of that unit in class, but I know some of my peers that did, and can now read, write, and have near fluent conversations in Esperanto. There exists a plethora of websites that can be used to teach yourself Esperanto, and many more advocating for it to be taught in schools. Esperanto is not intended to replace all other languages; languages are a fundamental and defining part of every culture. So Esperanto seeks just to be the language everyone understands, the language of diplomacy and international interactions.

If it works, Esperanto would be revolutionary. Uniting everyone in the world under a common language would be huge. However, the path to complete success in spreading the language is long, daunting, and nearly impossible. Spreading the language among technologically advanced and developed countries has been easy enough, but how to get it to reach undeveloped countries? How to make it a priority when there are so many other pressing problems? These barriers facing Esperanto will make it difficult, but it is a cause and an idea that will grow until maybe someday it will achieve its goal of becoming the universal second language. Although Esperanto is further in the process of development than any other idea I’ve written about, it will also take much longer to be successful since it depends on the active participation and involvement of people all over the world, not just a technological breakthrough. So, Fantasy Factor: 3 This entry was posted in Uncategorized . Bookmark the permalink . Klingon, Elvish and Esperanto — Linguist takes a serious look at Invented Languages — Blog of the Long Now Pingback: The Long Now Blog » Blog Archive » Ese… Esselen… Esperanto!

() Dea France and the world need to acknowledge that the romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula does not boil down to much more than Gaelician with a patriotic flavour own to each different country, which woul affect the EU reasons of wanting a “neutral language in which to communicate, the alledged swahili influence in Esperanto could sway it more toward the “Persian side, see the Moorish invasion of the middle ages into Africa and Europe. Esperanto that is spoken with a French accent is French as the way you speak any language is indicative of who you are, perhaps the EU listeners should just try to listen without passing judgement on race and country of origin, the whole EU have languages originating in Proto Indo European, why not start there? They are a nation, even into Urdu in Pakistan alan more since when was esperanto created in poland? the man behind it was german and if you speak, german, spanish, english, you can speak esperanto easily too. Dea What then about PIE and the genetic coding for language?! THe only diference between most languages from the same tree is pure assumption, if you are human, you should be able to speak whatever you like, as long as it is species related.

Pingback: Endangered and invented languages « Language and identity trends tracking project () Henry V. Janoski I am surprised that someone today thinks that Ludwik Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, was a German! He was a Polish Jew, born in Bialystok, Poland, who later lived and worked in Warsaw, where he first published this international language in 1887. Dea If it were: Language does not dictate what is said, except perhaps in instances of the subjunctive and other rules of grammar borrowed from languages such as Sanskrit. but it could mamake the “setting ever so much more interesting (Elvish) as well as select the partners in dialogue and open them up to easier agreement in the transaction of communication, creating only common ground I’d settle for lack of hostility Amiralrancourt How many people can speak Esperanto fluently ? How many people can speak Klingon fluently ? How much more are there of the later than of the former ? I think a lot more people speak Klingon fluently than Esperanto, eventhough the later was created much earlier than the former.

BBC - Languages - Languages - Languages of the world - Interesting facts about languages Languages of the world Languages of the world - Interesting facts about languages Languages of the world A guide to which languages are most widely spoken, hardest to learn and other revealing facts. 1. How many languages are there? It’s estimated that up to 7,000 different languages are spoken around the world. 90% of these languages are used by less than 100,000 people. Over a million people converse in 150-200 languages and 46 languages have just a single speaker! Languages are grouped into families that share a common ancestry. For example, English is related to German and Dutch, and they are all part of the Indo-European family of languages. These also include Romance languages, such as French, Spanish and Italian, which come from Latin. 2,200 of the world’s languages can be found in Asia, while Europe has a mere 260. Nearly every language uses a similar grammatical structure, even though they may not be linked in vocabulary or origin. Communities which are usually isolated from each other because of mountainous geography may have developed multiple languages.

Papua New Guinea for instance, boasts no less than 832 different languages! 2. What are the world’s most spoken languages? The world's most widely spoken languages by number of native speakers and as a second language, according to figures from UNESCO (The United Nations’ Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), are: Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, German and French. 3. Which are the hardest languages to learn? The ease or difficulty of learning another language can depend on your mother tongue. In general, the closer the second language is to the learner's native tongue and culture in terms of vocabulary, sounds or sentence structure, the easier acquisition will be. So, a Polish speaker will find it easier to learn another Slavic language like Czech than an Asian language such as Japanese, while linguistic similarities mean that a Japanese speaker would find it easier to learn Mandarin Chinese than Polish. Dutch is said to be the easiest language for native English speakers to pick up, while research shows that for those native English speakers who already know another language, the five most difficult languages to get your head around are Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and Korean. 4.

Endangered languages Globalisation and cultural homogenisation mean that many of the world’s languages are in danger of vanishing. UNESCO has identified 2,500 languages which it claims are at risk of extinction. One quarter of the world’s languages are spoken by fewer than 1,000 people and if these are not passed down to the next generation, they will be gone forever. Language experts discuss saving endangered languages In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions In September 2010, delegates at the Trinity College Carmarthen conference in Wales focused on how to stop endangered languages becoming extinct. Nine different languages are used in this clip to explain the current crisis, including Irish Gaelic, Maori, Berber, Guernesiais, Welsh, Scots Gaelic and Manx. Read the whole article from the BBC News Magazine on Dying Languages 5. Alphabets from A to Z The Latin, or Roman, alphabet is the most widely used writing system in the world. Its roots go back to an alphabet used in Phoenicia, in the Eastern Mediterranean, around 1100 BC.

This was adapted by the Greeks, whose alphabet was in turn adapted by the Romans. Here are the world’s most widely-used alphabets (or scripts) which are still in use today (in alphabetical order): Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Burmese, Chinese script, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese script, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Latin, Sinhala, Thai and Tibetan. 6. Why learn another language? Around 75% of the world's population don’t speak a word of English and a grasp of a different language improves your abilities to use your first language and explore other cultures more successfully. According to research, on average, people who use languages in their jobs earn around 8% more! Many scientists also believe that knowledge of another language can boost your brainpower. A study of monolingual and bilingual speakers suggests speaking two languages can help slow down the brain's decline with age. And to quote Nelson Mandela, "If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head.

If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart." The advantages of learning a second language In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions The Head of the European Commission Office in Wales, Andy Klom, discusses the advantages of a second language and says "Learning another language is a matter of confidence, learning and hard effort." Read the whole interview of Andy Klom on learning other languages 7. Languages in the world When NASA launched the 'Voyager 1 & 2' spacecraft in 1977, they put on board golden discs containing the sights and sounds of Earth, including greetings in 55 of the world’s most widely understood languages. These are currently travelling through space! The United Nations uses six official languages to conduct business: English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and Arabic. Under the Romans, Latin became the lingua franca across Europe.

As of 2010 the European Union has 23 official and working languages: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish and Swedish. 8. "Ouch!", "Mama?" The origins of language Some of the oldest languages known include Sanskrit, Sumerian, Hebrew and Basque. A study of macaque monkeys suggests that languages may have evolved to replace grooming as a better way of forging social ties amongst our ancestors. Another theory is that our ancient predecessors imitated natural sounds: e.g. the bird that made a "caw caw" sound became a 'cuckoo'in a similar way to today’s children calling things by the sound that they make: "Look, there's a moo, baa, choo-choo!". Human communication might have been sparked by involuntary sounds such as "ouch" or "eek" or by communal activities such as heaving or carrying heavy objects, coordinated by shouts of "yo-he-ho", etc.

Another theory proposes that language evolved from the communication between mother and baby, with the mother repeating the baby's babbling and giving it a meaning. Indeed, in most languages "mama" or similar "ma"-sounds actually mean 'mother'. 9. Artificial languages Around 200 artificial languages have been created since the 17th century. The first were invented by scholars for communication among philosophers. Later ones were developed by less scholarly men for trade, commerce and international communication. They include 'Interlingua' (a mixture of Latin and Romance with Chinese-like sentence structure), 'Ido', 'Tutonish' (a simplified blend of Anglo-Saxon English and German) and the more commonly-known 'Esperanto', invented by Ludwig Zamenhof, a Jewish ophthalmologist from Poland, in 1887. Esperanto is a spoken and written blend of Latin, English, German and Romance elements and literally means "one who hopes". Today, Esperanto is widely spoken by approximately 2 million people across the world. 10. The best way to learn a language The first language you learn, your mother tongue, usually comes with little conscious effort.

If you're lucky, you might even acquire more than one language in the so-called 'critical period' of language learning, believed to end sometime between ages 4-12. After that, it doesn’t come so easy, as you might have found out at school. Something that might help is finding out about your learning style: are you a visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learner? The visual learner might benefit from writing down words and phrases over and over again. The auditory learner could gain from reading out loud or recording their own vocabulary lists and listen back to them. The kinaesthetic learner may enjoy learning in a group or using flash cards or anything else that satisfies their hunger for 'experience'. Finding what works for you could speed up your language acquisition - or at least make it more enjoyable! How to learn languages In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions The Outreach and Information Officer at the European Commission office in Wales, Leri Davies, discusses the benefits of a second language. She also explains what helped her learn different languages. Lojban: An Artificial Language Seeks Status as the Lingua Franca : Communications: There have been several attempts to create a universal tongue.

This is one of the latest. - latimes Lojban: An Artificial Language Seeks Status as the Lingua Franca : Communications: There have been several attempts to create a universal tongue. This is one of the latest. November 17, 1989 |DON OLDENBURG | THE WASHINGTON POST WASHINGTON — Recently, as Bob and Nora LeChevalier prepared for dinner guests at their Fairfax, Va., home, they worried: Would party conversation diminish to small talk? Or, worse, would their guests find nothing at all to say to each other? Common concerns for all hosts, of course. But this wasn't a typical dinner party. In fact, it is safe to say there had never been one remotely like it. "It was an all-Lojban party," says Bob LeChevalier. No English allowed. All talk had to stick to a newly constructed tongue known as Lojban (pronounced LOZH bahn), now being developed as a culturally neutral, unambiguous and totally logical parlance.

"We maintained conversation for 4 1/2 hours," boasts LeChevalier, president of the Logical Language Group Inc., the organization that is trying to complete the unfinished language, polish it, promote it and offer classes in it. "Four and a half hours, and we're still recovering." Over homemade pizza, five students gripping their Lojban word lists chatted haltingly about music, about translating poker terms, about how odd it is that here they were conversing in a language that, except for a handful of novices in other parts of the world, only they knew how to speak. Knowing that even his most loyal and fastest-learning Lojbanists might be intimidated by an evening of exclusive use, LeChevalier labeled all of the food dishes, figuring to prompt dialogue. The pizza toppings included rectrpeproni (pepperoni) and cirla (cheese). Beverages? Sodva (soda), camska vanju (intense-colored wine, meaning red) and kandyska vanju (dim-colored wine, meaning white). "Some of those are borrowings," he says, almost apologizing for words that blatantly resemble English equivalents.

Sometimes it can't be avoided, he explains, though Lojban is largely built from sounds and syllables lifted from most of the world's major languages, including Chinese, English, Hindi, Russian, Spanish and Arabic. One entree that was fully Lojban: zalvi ke nakni bakni rectu. It is the logical extrapolation of hamburger, which everyone knows isn't logical at all in English because hamburger isn't made of ham. Lojban logic calls it ground type of male cow meat. "We can shorten that a bit," assures LeCheevalier. Perhaps too much logic spoils the soup. "Nobody really got into a discussion about the food," says LeChevalier. Still, nobody had to use the designated "cheating room," where tongues could be untied and misunderstandings cleared up in English. "We exceeded our expectations," he says of the party prattle. " Mi'a lifri lei xamgu temci. " Literal translation: "Me and others, not including you whom I'm talking to, experienced some particular mass of good time interval," roughly meaning a good time was had by all.

If the concept of man-made linguistics seems unusual, Lojban is neither the first nor the most peculiar of the dozens, and by some counts hundreds, of attempts to construct languages since Descartes proposed a worldwide tongue more than 350 years ago. Probably the most durable was invented in 1887 by L. Zamenhof, an idealist eye doctor using the pseudonym Dr. Esperanto ("one who hopes"), who had hoped to fashion a universal communication from bits and pieces of the European languages to encourage peace. Today, Esperanto, as the language came to be known, claims more than 100,000 fluent speakers worldwide and between 8 million and 15 million people with some knowledge of it. Yet Esperantists are generally seen as verbal hobbyists who dream that Esperanto may one day become the international second language. Most lesser-known and long-gone constructed languages had equally idealistic starts. Typically, they have sought to simplify speech and gain cross-cultural acceptance.

A 19th-Century musician named Jean Francois Sudre created a language of almost 12,000 words called Solresol, which used only combinations of the syllables of the musical scale--as in do, re, me, fa, so, and so forth. It got off the ground only briefly when some naval vessels used it to send musical communiques. In 1879, a Catholic priest claimed religious inspiration in creating Volapuk (world speech), which is now on the endangered linguistics list. And, in 1933, a New York group tried to standardize vocabulary shared in the Latin-based Romance languages to invent Interlingua, which never seriously challenged Esperanto but still lingers. Lojban itself is a renegade language. University of Florida sociologist James Cooke Brown began creating a language he called Loglan 35 years ago, as an instrument to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a linguistic riddle that wondered whether the structure of language limits thought.

"The concept was to invent a language which is speakable but significantly different," says LeChevalier, "and then test its effect on thinking." With the additional prospect of computer and artificial intelligence applications for Loglan, Brown continued to develop it. How an artificial language from 1887 is finding new life online By Sam Dean On a recent Friday evening, the Esperanto Society of New York convened in a rowhouse on Manhattan’s East 35th Street. The upper floors of the building seemed to house a bilingual preschool, going by the many large surfaces covered in multicolored paint handprints; the ground floor was made up of multipurpose meeting rooms administered by the Unitarian Universalist church down the block. Four people had been listed as "attending" on the Facebook page for the event, but by the time the meeting began, eight Esperantists were sitting in a rough semicircle of dormroom couches and hard plastic chairs. The exuberantly mustached Neil Blonstein, president of the Society, was presiding behind a folding banquet table, wearing a white T-shirt printed with the word "ESPERANTO" and a photo of a group of Esperantists at a convention.

There were grapes and crackers by the door. That night, the Society consisted of seven men, including Neil, and one woman (though Neil’s girlfriend, also an Esperantist, did show up later). Some were young, most were not. The agenda for the evening included two speeches, each followed by discussion. The talks were difficult to follow if you didn’t know any Esperanto, but a rusty background in French allowed for an understanding of the broad strokes. It's an artificial language, with none of the messy exceptions of natural tongues Tech was in the air. A bearded Brooklyn College junior read an account of a conference he’d gone to the previous weekend called Organizing 2.0, peppered with the untranslated names of apps, and followed by a discussion of the uses and meaning of MailChimp. Then, a composer and member of Mensa gave a speech on Wikipedia, specifically the problems that crowdsourcing presents for smaller languages. He compared Esperanto to Bislama, the language of the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu. Despite having 250,000 native speakers, Bislama Wikipedia only has 444 pages. Esperanto Wikipedia has over 215,000.

Like its vastly more successful digital cousins — C++, HTML, Python — Esperanto is an artificial language, designed to have perfectly regular grammar, with none of the messy exceptions of natural tongues. Out loud, all that regularity creates strange cadences, like someone speaking Italian slowly while chewing gum. William Auld, the Modernist Scottish poet who wrote his greatest work in Esperanto, was nominated for the Nobel Prize multiple times, but never won. But it is supremely easy to learn, like a puzzle piece formed to fit into the human brain. Invented at the end of the 19th century, in many ways it presaged the early online society that the web would bring to life at the end of the 20th. It’s only ever been spoken by an assortment of fans and true believers spread across the globe, but to speak Esperanto is to become an automatic citizen in the most welcoming non-nation on Earth.

To speak Esperanto is to become an automatic citizen in the most welcoming non-nation on Earth Decades before Couchsurfing became a website (or the word website existed), Esperantists had an international homestay service called Pasporta Servo, in which friendly hosts around the world listed their phone numbers and home addresses in a central directory available to traveling Esperantists. It may be a small, widely dispersed, and self-selected diaspora, but wherever you go, there are Esperantists who are excited that you exist. It sounds hokey, but this is the central appeal of Esperanto. It’s as if the initial utopian vibes of the World Wide Web had never reached a wider audience. There’s no money, no power, no marketing, no prestige — Esperanto speakers speak Esperanto because they believe in it, and because it’s fun to speak a foreign language almost instantly, after a couple months of rolling the words around in your mouth. The internet, though, has been a mixed blessing for Esperanto. While providing a place for Esperantists to convene without the hassle of traveling to conventions or local club meetings, some Esperantists believe those meatspace meet ups were what held the community together.

The Esperanto Society of New York has 214 members on Facebook, but only eight of them showed up for the meeting. The shift to the web, meanwhile, has been haphazard, consisting mostly of message boards, listservs, and scattered blogs. A website called Lernu! — Esperanto for the imperative "learn!" — is the center of the Esperanto internet, with online classes and an active forum. But it’s stuck with a Web 1.0 aesthetic, and the forum is prone to trolls, a byproduct of Esperanto’s culture of openness to almost any conversation as long as it’s conducted in — or even tangentially related to — Esperanto. But there’s hope that the internet can give the language new life. Wikipedia and its 215,000 pages was a first step, and yesterday, Esperanto debuted on Duolingo , a virtual learning app with 20 million active users — far more people than have ever spoken Esperanto since its invention. "Strangers in the Night," sung in Esperanto The assembled Esperantists in that scuffed room on East 35th Street knew the Duolingo course was coming, and they were optimistic.

The word Esperanto, after all, means "one who hopes." But the final item on the meeting’s agenda underscored what all those virtual Esperantists were missing. After the speeches, Neil got up and passed out sheets printed with the lyrics to "Fremdaj en la Nokt," the Esperanto version of the Sinatra hit "Strangers in the Night." He explained that a particular Italian Esperantist had an extensive YouTube presence and a habit of jumping into worldwide Esperanto forums and Facebook groups to plug his singing. This was one of his better songs. Neil settled back down behind his banquet table, counted out the time, and the eight attending members of the New York Esperanto Society started to sing. Esperanto was invented in 1887 by a Polish ophthalmologist named L.L. Zamenhof, who hoped his creation would bring about world peace. Zamenhof saw a turbulent world divided by language, and concluded that the situation was too complicated, essentially unfair, and ultimately doomed. He believed that the languages people already spoke were oversaturated with history, politics, and power, making it impossible to communicate clearly.

Esperanto was a fresh start, a technology that would allow its speakers to sidestep the difficulties of natural languages altogether. He made it as easy to learn as possible, with no irregular verbs, a vocabulary adapted from Romance language roots, and a simple, genderless, almost caseless grammar. The late 19th century was the heyday of the artificial language, and before Esperanto, an artificial language called Volapük was all the rage, with almost a million speakers across Europe. Zamenhof dismissed it as too difficult to speak (the Esperanto word for "gibberish" is still volapukaĵo), and by the late 1880s, it was starting to unravel. Zamenhof wrote his first book describing Esperanto in Russian, and he called the language the studiously dull Lingvo Internacia, or "International Language." But he published it under the pen name "Doktoro Esperanto," meaning "Doctor Hoper" in his new idiom, and like Doctor Frankenstein before him, soon found that people were calling his creation by the name of its creator.

With its simplicity and supposed neutrality, he was hoping his language would make it to the Fina Venko, the "Final Victory," his term for the Esperanto rapture: the day when the whole world would speak his invention as a second language, facilitating clear, neutral, and ultimately peaceful dialogue among all humanity. Babel, basically, be gone. He soon found that people were calling his creation by the name of its creator Progress was slow in the early days. Zamenhof and his buddies started publishing a magazine in Esperanto, and word trickled out over the continent. Eighteen years after the first book describing Esperanto was published, there were 27 Esperanto magazines in regular production, and Zamenhof decided it was time to mark a new phase in the movement by doing what nerdy subcultures do best: he organized a convention. This was 1905, so they called it a "world congress," and 688 people showed up to discuss their new language in their new language. At least one convention has been held every year since, save the cumulative 10 years of World Wars, and conventions are still the major feature of the Esperanto social calendar.

As the movement grew, it started attracting notice from powerful places, not all of it positive. The League of Nations almost adopted Esperanto, but the idea was shot down by the French delegate. Zamenhof was Jewish, so Adolf Hitler denounced Esperanto as a language designed to unify the Jewish diaspora, and the Nazis were officially anti-Esperanto. Joseph Stalin was reportedly an Esperantist, but he turned on the language in the late '30s, calling it a "language of spies," and started purging people who spoke it. Ayatolla Khomeini, too, waffled on Esperanto. Shortly after the Iranian Revolution, he urged his people to learn the language as an anti-imperialist counterpoint to English, and an official translation of the Qur’an followed. But adherents of the Baha’i faith had been fans of Esperanto for decades, and Khomeini was definitely not a fan of Baha’i, so his enthusiasm dimmed. And Baha’i’s not the only smaller religion that’s embraced Esperanto as a liturgical language.

In Brazil, which has one of the world’s largest populations of Esperantists, the language is intimately associated with the séance-centric Spiritist movement, and many followers of the neo-Shinto Japanese religion Oomoto have studied some Esperanto. Esperanto was a fresh start Mao Zedong liked Esperanto too. The Communist Party of China has published an Esperanto magazine, El Popola Ĉinio , since 1950, and state radio stations still regularly broadcast in the language. And perhaps most famously, George Soros grew up speaking Esperanto, though his public involvement with the language hasn’t gone beyond getting his father’s Esperanto memoirs translated into English. Mostly, though, Esperanto survived the 20th century on the strength of the local clubs and spread by chance encounters and word of mouth. This culture created hundreds of books, dozens of publications, and at least four known full-length feature films. Today, nobody has any good idea how many people have even heard of Esperanto, let alone speak it fluently.

Some estimate that millions can "parolas Esperanton," but a Finnish linguist who’s studied the 1,000 or so native Esperanto speakers in the world came up with more reasonable ballpark numbers: around 100,000 can speak it to some degree, and only 10,000 are totally fluent. There’s no federal Esperanto government to pay for a census, and the decline of the local clubs and societies has made any kind of headcount nearly impossible. It’s not easy being artificial. This would be great for computers to learn, was the first thought that Chuck Smith had about Esperanto. It was 2001, and he was in college, taking a class called Models of Mind. With its logical structure, Smith thought Esperanto could work as a bridge language for translation, especially between two languages like Finnish and Turkish, that are unlikely to have a large overlapping dataset that a machine translation program could use. Just as Zamenhof intended, Esperanto would be the metamedium of communication across tongues. Smith didn’t pursue that idea beyond the class, but he did pursue Esperanto. The summer after Models of Mind, he went to Esperanto meetings in New York and San Francisco.

Like every Esperantist I spoke with, the radiant chumminess of the Esperanto world drew Smith in. The following fall, he tapped the Esperanto network to find a place to stay during a board game fair in Essen, Germany. He was hooked, and he had a new angle: he wanted to use computers to help people learn Esperanto. So he started Vikipedio, the Esperanto Wikipedia. This was 2001, and Esperanto was only the 11th language to have its own version. The first article, "Modernismo," was imported from an extant online Esperanto encyclopedia called La Enciklopedio Kalblanda, or "The Kalb Land Encyclopedia," which a guy named Stefano Kalb had been slowly writing since 1995. The radiant chumminess of the Esperanto world drew Smith in Lernu! launched a year later. More people visit Vikipedia, but this is the site that first posted free Esperanto classes online that were more advanced than email versions of the pen-and-paper correspondence courses that had existed for decades.

It made learning the language easier, but some in the community believe that the popularity of its forums also sped the decline of the Esperanto clubs — instead of being a quiet member at a meeting, you could just lurk on the Lernu! forums. While Esperanto became more digital, Smith dug deeper into Esperanto’s real-world organizations. He attended conferences, backpacked across Europe and stayed only with Esperantists, and started working at various Esperanto organizations in Europe and Canada. He landed in Berlin, and started a company, Ludisto (Esperanto for "player"), that makes iOS games. So when Duolingo launched in 2012, Smith was one of the thousands who requested Esperanto for the new, free, and intentionally addictive language learning program. Duolingo eventually tapped Smith to be Team Leader for the development of the Esperanto course that went live yesterday. He’s the public face of tech Esperanto in many ways, serving time as a guest on podcasts and logging many thousands of words on his own Esperanto-centric blog on Transparent Language .

But the actual work of making the Duolingo course for Esperanto has largely fallen to a relative newcomer to the language: Ruth Kevess-Cohen, a DC-area doctor in her 50s specializing in internal medicine and geriatrics. "It would be unusual to start from zero and, after two years, be able to develop a course in any other language," Kevess-Cohen told me. "Maybe some geniuses, you know, but I’m just doing it in my spare time." She heard of Esperanto first as a possibility for a new Duolingo course, and then sought it out elsewhere. First she looked up the course on Lernu, but ultimately learned the language through the oldest method available: a correspondence course. After practicing the regular grammar with pen and paper, she spent a couple weeks at an intensive Esperanto immersion camp in Raleigh, North Carolina, and found that she could already understand what longtime Esperantists were saying. The community was welcoming, and the ability to suddenly speak a new language was practically addictive. Ruth, just like Chuck, was in. That sense of empowerment has drawn the growing language hacking community to Esperanto, too.

Benny Lewis, a man better known as Benny the Irish Polyglot, has built a career on telling people how to learn languages as quickly as humanly possible. His website, fluentinthreemonths.com , is the center of his business, and he’s written a book with the same name. If you ask where he lives, he says that he’s been traveling for 12 years. He claims to be fluent in 7 languages, and proficient in many more. Benny first encountered Esperanto through couchsurfing (he says he’s hosted over 2,000 people on his own couches), and was immediately intrigued. His core language learning principle is confidence — the trick to being fluent in three months, he says, isn’t any kind of drug or special flashcard system, but a willingness to be humiliated by speaking a language poorly as soon as you know a single word. And Esperanto is the ideal language for shamelessness: it’s simple, and almost everyone is a relative newcomer.

Many studies, most of them conducted in the first half of the 20th century, found that Esperanto had a marked propaedeutic effect on language learning, which is a fancy Latinate way to say that, if you take college Esperanto classes for a year and college French classes for three years after that, you’ll know more French than if you took four straight years of college French. The hyper-regularity of Esperanto makes it supremely easy to learn, and its newness, its foreignness, primes the monolingual brain to learn more complicated newness even more quickly. "Your brain starts to accept how to say words in another language without having to worry about complexity," is how Benny puts it. He believes in Esperanto as a springboard to other languages so much that he convinced his girlfriend to learn Esperanto as her first foreign language, and filmed every minute of her progress.

"Your brain starts to accept how to say words in another language without having to worry about complexity." As a language hacker, Benny scoffs at the slow pace of academic language learning — he doesn’t recommend six months or a year of Esperanto, followed by years of French, but rather two weeks, just two weeks, of intensive Esperanto training, followed by a couple more months of anything else you’d like to learn. "Ultimately it’s an easy language," he said, "and it’s not intimidating." He remembered his first attempts to learn German and Spanish, and being cowed in the face of all their particular grammatical rules and irregularities. Esperanto, on the other hand, is pure self-esteem. Plus, there’s a whole world of Esperanto speakers who are happy to hop on Skype to help out a neophyte — good luck finding a friendly francophone to do the same for free. Esperantists like to talk about logic: Zamenhof made the grammar to be logical; Chuck Smith found that logicality intriguing; Benny the Irish Polyglot finds that the language's logic makes it a logical choice for language hacking; and Duolingo chose Chuck Smith as the logical person to create its Esperanto course.

But by what logic did Duolingo decide to make an Esperanto class at all? Over 30 million English speakers have signed up to learn Spanish on Duolingo, and even more Spanish speakers have signed up to learn English. Anglophones also have French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Irish, Swedish, Danish, Turkish, Norwegian, and Ukrainian, in descending order of popularity, available to learn for free. Esperanto is the 13th language to be offered, chosen over many others with speaking populations 10 times larger. Esperanto, though, has enthusiasm. When Duolingo first launched, Luis von Ahn, its founder, was surprised to find that Esperanto was the number one most requested new language for the program. "Speakers and supporters of Esperanto are very hardcore," von Ahn said over email, "and vocal!" "Speakers and supporters of Esperanto are very hardcore." Esperantists are linguistic evangelists — the community saw an opportunity for expansion, and pounced. Two of the other languages available on Duolingo fit a similar bill, though by dint of history rather than original intent; Irish and Ukrainian are both associated with strong nationalist movements.

Irish was the first of many languages that English would violently suppress, and Ukrainian is shoring up its ramparts to avoid the same fate from Russian regional control. Esperanto, of course, was designed precisely to transcend linguistic nationalism and ultimately avoid conflict, but the end result is similar: a small group of people intensely invested in seeing their language spread. But Esperanto on Duolingo makes sense in a deeper way, as well. Both the language and the app were created, at least in part, to solve the same problem: the world is divided by language, and more importantly, the majority is often forced to learn the native tongue of a powerful minority in order to get by. In Zamenhof’s time, Yiddish or Polish speakers in his hometown of Bialystok had to learn Russian to interact with the ruling state. Today, anyone who doesn’t speak English is born at a disadvantage, and probably can’t afford Rosetta Stone. Von Ahn didn’t just create Duolingo to give Anglophones a fun, free way to learn new languages — he created it for the non-Anglophone majority that’s stuck with the burden of learning English.

There might be 13 languages available for English speakers on Duolingo, but English courses are available in 22 world languages. Zamenhof saw the same problem and took a more radical tack. Instead of starting a network of free, worldwide language schools, he invented a free, worldwide language. Instead of starting a network of free, worldwide language schools, he invented a free, worldwide language Twenty-five thousand people have signed up to be notified when the Esperanto Duolingo course goes live. If just those people complete the course, that would qualify as an Esperanto baby boom. But Chuck Smith is thinking bigger: "I keep saying that, by the end of the year, over 200,000 people will be learning Esperanto on Duolingo." The world will probably never see the Fina Venko, but the internet does have a way of hypercharging communities that never could have existed before it. Who could have imagined that more than one Brony would ever exist, or that Americans would want to write thousands of pages of Harry Potter slash fiction.

And soon, Esperanto might not even be the least likely artificial language to get a signal boost from Duolingo: the Klingon course is on track to debut in 2016. Linguistically, the language is the exact opposite of Esperanto. Its grammar was designed to be as difficult to learn as possible, and its vocabulary is strongest when discussing the warlike and brutal traditions of Klingon culture. "Many who try it will drop it later," admitted André Müller, the German PhD student who’s creating the Klingon course. "But some might enjoy the challenge, a very Klingon thing to do." Given the language’s difficulty, he considers himself to be only a "conversational" Klingon speaker. He is also fluent in Esperanto. Correction: An earlier version included Linux in a list of coding languages. It's an operating system. * * Volapük language, alphabet and pronunciation Search Volapük Volapük ("World Language") was invented in 1879 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a German priest who lived in Baden. Schleyer claimed the idea for creating an international language was suggested to him by God in a dream.

His aim was to create a language which was "capable of expressing thought with the greatest clearness and accuracy" (Sprague, 1888) and was easy for as many people as possible to learn. Schleyer based the vocabulary of Volapük on English, German and Latin and tried to eliminate sounds that would difficult for speakers of other languages to pronounce. Few of the resulting words are easily recognisable to English, German or Latin speakers. Schleyer also tried to reduce words to one syllable, and devised a complex set of grammatical rules for his language - a Volapük verb can have over 500,000 forms! At first there was little interest in Volapük in the scientific and literary communities. Then in 1882 a society to promote the language was set up in Vienna. In 1884 interest in Volapük spread to Belgium and the Netherlands. By the late 1880s, there were Volapük societies springing up all over Europe, North and South America, Russia and parts of Asia. A number of periodicals in Volapük were published and conferences were held.

The first world congress of Volapük was held in Germany in 1884, the second in 1887, the third in 1889. A its peak, Volapük had over 100,000 speakers. The Volapük movement started to unravel after the third world congress in 1889 at which Professor Auguste Kerckhoffs, an enthusiastic French advocate of the language, was elected president of the Volapük Academy. Schleyer refused to recognise the authority of the Academy and within a few years the Volapük movement had collapsed. In 1887 that Dr L. L. Zamenhof published his first work on Esperanto , which soon became the international auxiliary language of choice for Volapük enthusiasts and many others. Volapük alphabet Sample texts in Volapük Valik mens labons leig e lib in dinits e dets. Givons lisäls e konsiens e mutons dunön okes in flenüg tikäl. Hear a recording of this text by Daniel McFarland Translation All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) 5 Interesting Endangered Languages With Fewer Than 10,000 Speakers 5 Interesting Endangered Languages With Fewer Than 10,000 Speakers by Jeffrey Nelson of LivingBilingual.com There are over 6,000 diverse languages spoken throughout the world and over half of them have less than 10,000 people that still speak the language fluently. For many, language is an identity and the loss of that dialect almost always spells the end of a specific culture. Of the more than 3,000 seriously endangered languages, there a few on the list that might surprise you ... Hawaiian (ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi) Aloha Hawaiian! As many know, aloha means both "hello" and "goodbye" depending on the context, and in this case, both definitions work.

Until the year 2000, the Hawaiian language was spoken by as little as 2,000 native speakers and its demise was the result of colonialism and English replacing Hawaiian as the primary spoken and written language in the islands. In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in Hawaiian and the number of speakers has drastically increased as the state has created programs bringing the language back into the mainstream. More information about Hawaiian Ainu (アイヌ イタク / Aynu itak) When most people think of the inhabitants of the Japanese isles, they think of the dominant Yamato ethnic group, but a people now known as the Ainu were a native tribe in the northern Japanese isles. Today, there are less than 25,000 ethnic Ainu left, and of those less than 100 are native Ainu speakers. More information about Ainu Jeru (Aka-Jeru) Jeru is a language that is spoken in the Andaman Islands, located just south of Burma in the Indian Ocean.

It is only spoken by about 20 individuals, but it is important as it is an ancient language that has been spoken for thousands of years and allegedly is linked to the first human migrants to come out of Africa. Carabayo The Carabayo, also known as the Yuri, is a tribe in the Columbian Amazon that has had relatively little contact with the outside world and is considered a protected tribe by the Columbian government. There is only an estimated 150 native speakers, but very little is known of the mysterious language as outsiders are not permitted to speak with the tribe, but only observe them by flying overhead in planes. Klingon (tlhIngan Hol) While you may argue that Klingon is a fictional language, Star Trek fans everywhere are willing to fight to the death to defend its honor. I doubt Gene Roddenberry imagined that an invented language would become so popular, but as L.L. Zamenhof discovered with Esperanto, and as Tolkien did with Elvish, fictional languages can become more popular than ones that evolved naturally. Today, there are about 30 fluent Klingon speakers, and the number seems destined to grow as several companies have popped up advertising language courses in the fabricated dialect.

More information about Klingon Many languages with a limited number of speakers exist in the world. Of the 6,000+ languages, there are about 10 languages that comprise almost half of the all the native speakers in the world. Among them, there are several languages; ranging from the easy-to-learn (Spanish) to the incredibly hard to learn (Mandarin Chinese). Difficulty aside, the language world is shrinking and the writing is on the wall for thousands of languages that are on the brink of extinction. Language Facts Reference: Excuse me, do you speak Klingon? - Salon.com Wednesday, Jun 3, 2009 10:30 AM UTC Excuse me, do you speak Klingon? A delightful journey through the realm of invented languages and its cast of dreamers, weirdos and obsessives. Topics: Books , Entertainment News According to Arika Okrent’s highly entertaining book “In the Land of Invented Languages,” the two most popular invented languages in the delirious, 900-year history of such endeavors serve to tell us something about the possibilities and limitations of the whole idea.

By invented languages, Okrent does not mean pig Latin or secret codes or the fragmentary gobbledygook often concocted to represent alien speech by fantasy authors. (I’m sorry, Lovecraftians, but “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl Cthulhu fhtagn” does not a language make.) She means a language with its own fully constructed vocabulary and grammar, which is potentially or hypothetically capable of replacing the flawed, irregular, piecemeal “natural” languages virtually all of us speak. By far the most successful invented language in history was created in 1887 by Ludwik Zamenhof, who grew up in the city of Bialystok, on the western fringe of the Russian empire (today it’s in Poland). In those years Bialystok was divided into hostile ethnic and linguistic camps — Russians, Poles, Germans and Yiddish-speaking Jews, including Zamenhof’s family.

While 21st-century mores might demand that we view such a community as a fascinating multicultural experiment, Zamenhof felt its linguistic diversity only as a “heavy sadness.” So at age 28, Zamenhof spent his wife Klara’s dowry to self-publish a book he called “Lingvo internacia,” introducing the world to a new universal language that would counteract the rising tide of nationalism and hatred with a “linguistic handshake,” and provide a neutral ground “where people of different nations can communicate as equals.” Zamenhof renounced any copyright to his book — making him a pioneer not merely of the invented-language movement but also the open-source movement — and signed it with a name that meant “one who hopes” in his new language: Dr. Esperanto. Despite being unremittingly mocked by journalists and linguists over the past 120 years, Esperanto has innumerable advantages over every other proposed universal language. You’ve actually heard of it, for one thing.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries produced a cluster of forgotten or nearly forgotten competitors: Universalglot, Volapük, Interlingua, Ido, Glosa, Globaqo, Novial, and so on. Furthermore, Esperanto is an ingenious attempt to simplify and standardize various common elements of Romance or Germanic languages, and if you can speak any of those, it’s genuinely easy to pick up. (Here is the beginning of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy: “Cu esti au ne esti — tiel staras nun la demando.”) There are at least 50,000 to 100,000 people who speak it today, and avid Esperantists claim a much higher number than that. That may not sound too impressive in a world that includes more than 1 billion speakers of Mandarin Chinese and 800 million or so speakers of English, itself a bastardized Germanic-Romance hybrid that long ago usurped the role of global lingua franca coveted by Esperanto.

Hell, even at an upper-level estimate Esperantists are outnumbered by speakers of the Peruvian indigenous language Qusqu-Qullaw (4 million), Kyrgyz, the national language of Kyrgyzstan, in central Asia (3 million), and the West Germanic dialect called Limburgish (1.6 million). But if Zamenhof’s followers have thoroughly failed to unite the world in linguistic brotherhood, they have defied the odds, Okrent says, in producing both a living language and a distinctive (not to say distinctively odd) culture to go along with it. There are scant similarities between Esperanto and Invented Language No. 2 on Okrent’s list, but here’s the biggie: People who speak either of them are seen as hopeless weirdos by the outside world. Language No. 2 is only 25 years old and was definitely not created to serve the cause of universal brotherhood. It is not the uncopyrighted property of all humanity, but rather the trademarked invention of a major corporation. It is maddeningly and indeed deliberately difficult to learn, and doing so has no practical or theoretical usefulness, either now or in some contemplated future utopia.

“Hamlet” has been published in that language too, and here’s how the soliloquy starts: “taH pagh taHbe’. DaH mu’tlheghvam vIqelnIS.” Yeah. Klingon. Developed between 1982 and 1984 by a linguistics Ph.D. named Marc Okrand for the Paramount Pictures release “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock,” the language of a fictitious warrior race from outer space might be the most successful invented tongue of the entire 20th century. Okrand’s “Klingon Dictionary” has sold more than 300,000 copies, but as Arika Okrent observes, a dictionary-buyer is not a language-speaker. She estimates that a few thousand people know a little Klingon, several hundred can read and write it, and perhaps a few dozen can speak it fluently. At a qep’a’, or Klingon conference, that Okrent attended in Phoenix, most conversations she observed took place with the aid of dictionaries on hand-held devices.

(The first spoken sentence she could understand was “Ha’DIbaH vISopbe,” or “I am a vegetarian,” an extremely un-Klingon thing to say.) Still, it’s amazing that such conversations were happening at all. Marc Okrand is a student of various Native American languages, which are notoriously difficult for speakers of Indo-European languages to learn, and in creating Klingon he borrowed rare and unfamiliar grammatical and syntactical rules, along with tongue-twisting sound combinations, from those and other little-known world languages. Klingon verbs have 29 different prefixes to indicate subject and object agreement, Klingon sentences have a highly unorthodox word order (object-verb-subject), and Klingon vocabulary can be almost endlessly agglutinated, meaning that long phrases can be stuck together into single words. (The supposed Klingon proverb “If it is in your way, knock it down,” is expressed in just two words: “Dubotchugh yIpummoH.”) Okrent says her reaction to Klingon, as an accredited linguist, was that “it was completely believable as a language, but somehow very, very odd.” I guess that last part goes without saying.

Klingon and Esperanto have both created odd, outsider cultures, and have both invited derision from the mundane, natural-language world, but it’s important to reiterate that the intentions behind them could hardly be more different. Esperanto represents the non-triumphant culmination of many efforts to foster worldwide peace and equality by breaking down language barriers. Whether they admit it or not, Esperantists are presumably disappointed that their language, designed to be spoken by ordinary people all over the world, has instead become the focus of a minuscule and familiar kind of subculture. As Okrent describes it, “Esperantoland” is a realm of aging socialists and hippies, nudist vegetarians, pot-smoking anarchists, folk musicians and backpackers, and other sweet-natured dreamers determined to resist the global hegemony of English. But not even the most ardent speaker of Klingon expects or wants it to be adopted by the United Nations. It is a new variety of invented language, one meant to be exclusive rather than inclusive, and one whose point is to be pointless. It invites fans to ramp up their fandom to absurd levels, and lifelong social outsiders to go nuclear with their outsiderness.

As Okrent diplomatically puts it, “Klingon is a type of puzzle that appeals to a type of person.” Even she, a double Ph.D. in linguistics and psychology who is clearly delighted by the challenge of learning such a difficult language, has some trouble dining with cape-wearing, rubber-foreheaded companions (among them a fellow named Captain Krankor) who insist on bewildering the waitress at a Thai restaurant with their guttural Klingon grunts. Okrent covers a lot of material besides Klingon and Esperanto in “In the Realm of Invented Languages,” but those two languages lie at the heart of her book in ways she only partly recognizes. She takes a halfhearted stab, in fact, at describing the entire nutty, colorful and almost unbearably pathetic history of language invention in less than 300 pages, thereby ending up with a book that’s not all that focused but is too brief to be comprehensive. She’s a wonderfully warm and witty tour guide to this alternate universe, amused by the hubris and grandiose rhetoric that tends to accompany this myriad of failed projects, but unfailingly sympathetic to the urge to improve on the unstable existing methods of human communication.

She spends quite a bit of time on John Wilkins, an Englishman who briefly rode the crest of a 17th-century wave, the desire to invent a “philosophical language” that bore no relationship to any natural languages and would reflect the true nature of things. Wilkins’ utterly unusable language was derived from an immense treelike chart of the Aristotelian variety, running several hundred pages and meant to categorize everything in the universe. To find the word for “dog,” you had to drill down through the following categories: Special>creature>distributively>substances>animate>species>sensitive>sanguineous>Beasts>viviparous>clawed>rapacious>Dog-Kind (oblong-headed). As Okrent notes, this Monty Python-style taxonomy tells us a lot more about 17th-century language and thought than it does about how to identify dogs, or the universe in which they live. (Why “oblong-headed”?

And what do “sensitive” and “distributively” mean in this context?) While gleefully following a quest to find Wilkins’ word for “shit,” Okrent uncovers various delightful period euphemisms for the act or product of bodily excretion, including “Siege,” “easment,” “Jakes,” “Privy House of office” and, best of all, “Sir-reverence.” Wilkins left behind a marvelous catalog of early modern English usage, and accidentally invented the system later used by Peter Mark Roget to create the thesaurus. He did not, however, invent a language ever used by anyone. Wilkins’ unreadable and unpronounceable language has virtually nothing in common with Esperanto, which does not try to intellectualize itself above natural languages but rather to Cuisinart them together and tamp down their peculiarities. And neither of them much resembles sociologist James Cooke Brown’s “tiny model language” Loglan — based on the apparatus of formal logic, and cooked up as a scientific experiment in the late 1950s — or its successor Lojban, which resulted from one of the bloody schisms that seem to plague the invented-language world.

(Then there’s the “woman’s language” Láadan, invented by linguist and science-fiction author Suzette Haden Elgin in 1984.) But all of those are essentially utopian projects, based on the premise that our ordinary languages can’t adequately express what we mean to say. But Klingon and the veritable explosion of Internet-abetted “artlangs” and “conlangs” (artificial languages and constructed languages, respectively) that have followed it are not based on any such assumption. Some are languages that could conceivably be spoken by humans and others are fanciful creations designed for armless, legless, voiceless life forms in a distant galaxy. Most inventors of such languages are emulating natural languages, not trying to transcend them; eccentricity, irregularity and difficulty are prized, as long as they are adequately thought out. If the nature of invented languages has changed, it’s because the world around them has changed. One could look at the media universe, where mass-based broadcasting has been replaced by niche-based narrowcasting, for a parallel. (If Esperanto is a failed broadcast medium, Klingon is a highly successful narrowcasting one).

More broadly still, the entire modernist project of utopianism, which produced Ludwik Zamenhof as surely as it produced Karl Marx, has become disreputable. Okrent sees this, at least in part and in passing, but she doesn’t quite see how central it is to her argument, and spends a lot of time and energy establishing what we already know: Natural languages are good enough for almost all of us, and in our postmodern age the ideal of perfect communication, uprooted from nationality, ethnicity and tribal identity, has pretty much vanished. Okrent is so sharp and engaging when discussing how and why languages work that her tone-deafness when it comes to anything approaching popular culture is more than a little baffling. She admits that she attended that Phoenix Klingon conference knowing nothing about the “Star Trek” universe, but in that case, at least, she subsequently did some homework. Bizarrely, she appears to know next to nothing about “Lord of the Rings” creator J.R.R. Tolkien, a towering figure in linguistic and philological history, and the father of the entire conlang movement.

I guess Okrent is a hotshot modern-day academic linguist and Tolkien occupies the blind spot in her rearview mirror, but the effect is something like reading a book on American history that barely mentions Thomas Jefferson. Very late in her book, Okrent offers a three-page summary of Tolkien’s linguistic inventions, which I assume was tacked on at the last minute and appears to be cribbed entirely from Humphrey Carpenter’s authorized biography. (She does not pretend to have done any original research.) It’s clear that she has never read “Lord of the Rings,” seen the film versions or otherwise encountered Quenya and Sindarin, the two Elvish languages (based respectively on Finnish and Welsh) around which Tolkien developed his fictional universe. She seems to have no idea that extensive para-scholarly institutions and resources, both online and elsewhere, are devoted to exploring and disseminating Tolkien’s Elvish languages. Statistics for this sort of thing are tough to come by, but I’d be surprised if there weren’t at least as many Elvish speakers as Klingon speakers.

Quenya and Sindarin predate Klingon by 30 years, and while the latter was created to add depth and dimension to existing stories, Tolkien literally wrote his stories in order to give his languages life. Tolkien once wrote that he admired Esperanto for its “individuality, coherence and beauty,” and while he might have found the first or second qualities in Klingon, he might also have seen it as a grotesque, decadent and deliberately ugly concoction (since it is). Tolkien’s languages, one might say, form the missing link between Esperanto and Klingon. They mark a solitary moment of anti-modernist aesthetic innocence. Language creation had abandoned the quest to be universal and had become a “private vice” (in Tolkien’s phrase). It had not yet become a Heidegger-grade exercise in puzzle-solving, a social forum for outcasts, a commodity to be bought and sold by Paramount Pictures or an excuse for terrifying waitresses.

Question: What language was invented in 1887 and has over 100,000 fluent speakers?
Answer: Esperanto