Professor of Phonetics, University College London

ABSTRACT: Document on Esperanto prepared for the 36th Congress of the Radical Party (Rome, Hotel Ergife, 30 April - 3 may)

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1. The problem. The advantage of adopting a single common language for communication across national and linguistic frontiers must be obvious to all. No-one can master all the nine official languages of the European Community (Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portoguese, Spanish), let alone the many further languages which may be added in the years to come (Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish; Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Slovak, Slovenian, Turkish?). On a world scale, we must reckon with some fifty standardized literary languages and well over 3,000 different languages in all. What language are we to use in order to do business with the Arabs? the Chinese? the Japanese? We need a common second language which all can learn and use alongside their own native language.

2. English. At present the world is on the whole trying to solve this problem by choosing English. The view has been increasingly widely held during the last half-century that English is destined to be the international language, which everyone must learn to use. Since the end of the second world war, in fact, English has been taught in the schools throughout western Europe and indeed throughout most of the world. We now have a generation of young and middle-aged adults who learned English at school and who therefore ought to be able to use it for international communication. To some extent, they can: many people have learnt enough of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) to exchange very basic information.

Unfortunately, very basic information is often all they are capable of exchanging. For more sophisticated or subtle matters, whether in speech or writing, their knowledge often proves insufficient. This is often the case even for those who have spent years of their life working hard at language study. Some may find they can read written English and understand spoken English, but not feel able to write or speak freely themselves. Faced with the ordinary speech of English people, or Americans, or other native speakers, they cannot follow; they certainly cannot participate freely in a conversation or negotiate as equals. Market research by the advertising agency Lintas:Paris (1989) showed that a simple English test sentence was correctly understood by fewer than half of a representative sample of the adult population in the Netherlands, fewer than a third in (western) Germany, u2e. and less than one-tenth in France, Spain, and Italy. In Italy, in fact, only 4% interpreted the sentence correctly; even among tho

se under 25, only 7% got the right answer. The conclusion is that after years of teaching English the Italians, at least, have failed to solve the language problem.

Among the reasons why English is unsuccessful must be that it is difficult to learn. Its phonetics offer great problems to many learners. Its orthography is notoriously inconsistent. Its morphology may be relatively straightforward, but its syntax is remarkably intricate once the learner moves beyond very simple constructions. Its vocabulary is indeed rich (that is, large); but with richness comes the difficulty for the learner of committing to memory all the subtle distinctions of meaning between near-synonyms. Its phrasal verbs offer many traps for the learner (e.g. "to put up" meaning "to accommodate"). In the verbal system there is a tricky set of aspectual distinctions, a rich source of errors in EFL (e.g. the difference between "Where do you live?" and "Where are you living?") Many of its grammatical words, vital for understanding nuances of tense and aspect, appear in connected speech as "weak forms", so reduced phonetically that they are just not heard by most speakers of EFL; the EFL speakers themse

lves, by not using these weak forms when they speak, give native English listeners the false impression that they are emphasizing the words in question. English word stress is variable and only in a very limited degree predictable. English intonation is much more complicated than that of most languages.

There are also external reasons why English is an unacceptable choice for the role of international common language. It is unfair: using English gives an unfair advantage to those who happen to be native speakers (in Europe, the British and Irish; on a world scale, the Americans, the Australians, and others too). It is seen by many as threatening to lead to the swamping of the world's mosaic of indigenous cultural patterns by an all-engulfing American Coca-Cola Disneyland juggernaut.

3. Esperanto. The users of Esperanto have demonstrated that there is another way. Being a constructed language, based on European roots but massively standardized, Esperanto is much easier to learn than ethnic languages. A century of practical use in many different countries means that it is a well-proved living, functioning language, not some armchair project. (It is not widely appreciated that Esperanto is an actual language, in which hundreds of thousands of people u2e. can and do speak to one another: some meet, marry, and raise families in it.)

Esperanto represents a fair solution to the problem. It belongs to no particular national or ethnic group - it belongs to everyone equally. It gives no linguistic group a unique advantage over all the rest. It is surely fairer that ten-tenths of mankind should learn an easy language, rather than that nine-tenths should have to learn a difficult language which the remaining one-tenth, through the accident of their birth, already know.

4. Conclusion. To advocate Esperanto means to advocate a radical rethink of our attitude to the world language problem. The power of the status quo is strong - the political, economic, and social factors that favour the continued use of English. Nevertheless, I would claim that the long-term arguments in favour of adopting Esperanto are stronger: it represents a more equitable and more efficient solution to the world language problem.

Professor J.C. WELLS

CURRICULUM VITAE

Name: John Christopher Wells MA (Cantab) PhD (London)

born 11 March 1939 in Bootle, Lancs., England.

Employment: Professor of Phonetics in the University of London and Head of Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London.

University degrees:

1960 BA Classical Tripos, University of Cambridge

1962 MA General Linguistics and Phonetics, Univ. of London

1971 PhD General Linguistics, University of London

Professional activities include:

1973-86 Secretary, International Phonetic Association

1971-87 Editor, Journal of the IPA

1979-80 Convenor, CST Working Group on Phonetic

Representation of Disordered Speech

1984 - Director, UCL Vacation Course in English Phonetics

1985-88 Named Investigator, Alvey research project "Speech

processing and algorithmic representation"

Publications include:

1971 (with G. Colson) PRACTICAL PHONETICS. Pitman.

1982 ACCENTS OF ENGLISH. Three volumes + cassette. C.U.P.

1985 "English Accents in England" in LANGUAGE IN THE BRITISH ISLES ed. P. Trudgill. C.U.P.

1987 (pronunciation editor) UNIVERSAL DICTIONARY. Reader's Digest.

1987 "Computer-coded phonetic transcription". JIPA 17:2, 94-114.

1989 "Computer-coded phonemic notation of individual languages of the European Community", JIPA 19:1, 31-54.

1990 "A phonetic update on RP", Moderna Sprak lxxxiiii, 3-9.

1990 LONGMAN PRONUNCIATION DICTIONARY. Longman.

1990 (Pronunciation editor) HUTCHINSON ENCYCLOPAEDIA, 9th edition. Century-Hutchinson.

Broadcasting includes:

1981 "In a Manner of Speaking" 25-prog. series, BBC English.

1886 Appearance in "The Story of English", BBC 2 TV.

Many brief interviews on BBC Radio 2, Radio 4, World Service, etc.

Invited lectures overseas include the following universities:

1987 Reykjavik, Pisa, Seuol (Nat'l and Dan-Kook), Taegu u2e. (Yeungnam), Busan.

1988 Barcelona (both), Lérida, Tarragona, Paris XIII, Nagoya, Okayama.

1989 Surugadai (Tokyo), Kyoto, Fukuoka, Hokkaido, Sendai, Budapest (K.M.).

1990 Berlin (F.U.), Havana, Cologne, Heidelberg, Wurzburg, Augsburg, Munich.

1991 Malaga (EOI), Stockholm, Innsbruck, Salzburg, Graz, Vienna.

1992 La Coruna

March 1992