Esperanto Devotees Give Up, Sort Of

July 30, 1997

By Marie McInerney - REUTERS

ADELAIDE, Australia (Reuter) - Devotees of a global language have given up hope of making Esperanto the world's lingua franca, but they are stepping up their campaign to boost its international acceptance in the new millennium.

``I think the times are becoming more favorable to Esperanto now,'' Chong Yeong Lee, the Korean president of the Universal Esperanto Association (UEA), told Reuters in a recent interview.

Lee is spearheading the UEA's Campaign 2000 to put the artificial universal language, devised in 1887 and based on roots common to the chief European languages, on the United Nation's agenda by the turn of the century.

The aim is to have the United Nations support the learning of Esperanto throughout the world and to use it, alongside English and French, in its international meetings, Lee said.

The campaign will target U.N. countries which are ``powerful economically, but weak linguistically'' in terms of the global use of their languages, said Lee, nominating Japan, Italy and Poland as potential allies.

More than a thousand Esperanto enthusiasts, from 55 countries, gathered at the UEA's biennial world congress in Adelaide last week.

As well as mulling the eternal Esperanto question of how to sell an artificial language to the world, delegates put the language to the test -- discussing and debating anything from science and mathematics to the Internet and football.

Lee, a former U.N. employee and professor of business administration who learned Esperanto as a schoolboy, says the attraction of Esperanto is its simplicity and that the conference proved an artificial universal language can work.

``You get involved in these passionate debates and you think, this is amazing,'' said Australian delegate Daniel Kane.

``You have a Korean, a Japanese, a Ukrainian and a Pole and they are all going hammer and tongs in what is essentially an artificial language but they are all speaking it with such fluency and elegance,'' Kane said.

Esperanto, which has counted Russia's Leo Tolstoy among its enthusiasts and was denounced by Germany's Adolf Hitler and the former Soviet Union's Josef Stalin, was invented 110 years ago by Polish philologist Ludwig Zamenhof as an international auxiliary language.

Esperanto was proposed, although unsuccessfully, as the official language of the United Nation's predecessor, the League of Nations.

But Lee said any latter-day aspirations for Esperanto to compete internationally with English or to a lesser extent French were unrealistic.

``Times have changed...so the people we are aiming at are those who for personal or political reasons do not want to or cannot use English or French,'' Lee said.

Lee cites China's decision not to use English in official media briefings, moves by Russia and France to ban foreign languages in public notices, and 15 languages in the European Union, as scope for the use of Esperanto.