Every Saturday Garrett Myrick, eleven, and his father sit down, open a book, and read stories to each other in a strange language : most of Garrett's friends have never heard of. At school, Sasha Shlyafer, ten, and sister Lana, fourteen, speak English, just as their friends do. But when they go home, they talk to their father in the same peculiar language—a language most of their friends have never heard of, either.

The language is called Esperanto. One of the most unusual things about it is that it didn't just grow, the way English and most er languages did; someone invented it. Esperanto is what is called a planned, or artificial, language. But that doesn't mean it's fake, like an artificial flower. "It's a language, and people speak it," Garret says.

Esperanto was invented more than a hundred years ago by a Polish eye doctor named Ludwik Lazar Zamenhof. Dr. Zamenhof wanted desperately to save the world. He had felt that way ever since he was fifteen. That was when he started working on the brilliant idea that was to take up most of his life: a language that everybody on Earth would learn and understand.

Ludwik Zamenhof about 50 years after deciding to save the world

Ludwik believed that language differences were responsible for many of the problems he saw in the world. In history class, he had learned how people in different countries had fought wars and persecuted one another. In his own country, Poland, he had seen how different groups of people—Poles, Russians, Germans, Lithuanians, and Jews like himself—disliked one another and sometimes fought. If everybody would agree to speak the same language, Ludwik thought, they might learn to get along.

The problem was not just misunderstanding. It was that some people forced their language on others. At that time, the official language of Poland was not Polish, but Russian. Poland was part of the Russian Empire, and anyone who did not learn Russian was considered illiterate. The Russian government also tried to control people's ideas. Every book and magazine had to have government approval.

The only language that could belong to everybody, Ludwik decided, would have to be one that belongs to nobody. So he set about inventing a new one. It took him a few tries to get it right. At first he thought it would be simplest to make the words in his new language as short as possible: ab, eb, ac, ec, ba, be, ca, ce, and so on. But the short words sounded so much alike that he couldn't remember them. Ludwik changed his mind. The words in his language would sound like ones that people already knew. It was the rules that needed to be simple.

In the end the rules he came up with could hardly have been easier. For example, all nouns (words for people or things) had to end in o: amiko, friend; patro, father. All adjectives (words that describe nouns) would end in a: varma, warm; bela, pretty. To make a word into its opposite, he added mal- to the beginning of the word: malamiko, enemy; malvarma, cool; malbela, ugly. Ludwik worked on the language all through high school. He wrote poems and songs in it and taught it to some of his Friends. He named it Lingvo Internacia: International Language.

After graduating from high school, Ludwik stopped working on his language while he studied to become a doctor. But after he got his medical degree, he took it up again and started changing and improving it. In 1887, when he was 28 years old, he wrote t up in Russian and published it in a book—forty pages long, plus a vocabulary sheet. He wrote it up in Russian and published it in a book—forty pages long, plus a vocabulary sheet. He signed the book with a pen name, Dr. Esperanto. In his language, esperanto meant "a person who hopes," but later, people started calling the language Esperanto, too.

Dr. Zamenhof's hope was soon rewarded. Enthusiastic readers began writing him letters, some of them in the new language. He translated his book into Polish, and other people translated it into English and other languages. People throughout Europe started forming Esperanto clubs and publishing Esperanto magazines. By 1905 Esperanto had spread all over Europe and to America, China, and Japan.

The First World Congress of Esperanto was held in Boulogne, France, in 1905. It drew 668 people from twenty countries. Almost 4,000 people signed up for me tenth congress, scheduled to be held in 1914. But the First World War broke out in August 1914, and the Esperanto Congress was canceled. Dr. Zamenhof died three years later, heartbroken that his dream of worldwide peace had failed.

After the war, Esperanto had many ups and downs. But it never again grew as fast or regained the excitement of the early days. Nobody knows how many people speak the language today. If you added up all the members of all the official Esperanto organizations in countries around the world, you would get about 50,000. But Esperantists say there may be many other speakers they don't know about. The office director of the Esperanto League of North America guesses that about 250,000 people throughout the world speak Esperanto fluently, and one to two million can carry on a simple conver sation in it. That's enough so that people who know Esperanto can find pen pals, hold meetings, publish magazines, and even broadcast radio programs in some countries.

On the other hand, about a billion people in the world can speak English, and another billion (including some of the same people) speak Mandarin Chinese. Compared with that, 250,000 speakers—or even two million—doesn't look like much. And it's a long way from Dr. Zamenhof's dream of a universal language.

Sasha and Lana Shlyafer learned Esperanto from their father when they were babies. He spoke to them only in Esperanto until they were both old enough to go to school. Sasha and Lana are what Esperanto speakers call denaskuloj (day-nah-SKOO-loy): "from-birth-people," or native Esperantists. There are fewer than a dozen denaskuloj in America. In many ways they are the most unusual Esperantists of them all.

Esperantists get frustrated when they hear people say that their language is dead, or that an artificial language cant be real. Stelleto Kim, sixteen, is a high school student in Laguna Hills, California. Like Sasha and Lana Shlyafer, she is a denaskulino. Her parents gave her an Esperanto name (Stelleto means "little star") and brought her up speaking both Esperanto and Korean. In elementary school, she says, other kids used to tease her because they thought Esperanto was a joke language, like pig Latin. Even today, a few of her teachers aren't sure about it.

"But if so many people have been speaking it and communicating in it, it must be a language," Stelleto says. And as if to prove it, in her spare time she is translating her favorite book, The Secret Garden, into Esperanto. "I read it, I write it, I think in it. What do I care if somebody made it up a hundred years ago?"

Why aren't there more Esperantists? If Esperanto is so wonderful, why doesn't everybody want to speak it? Its not that there is anything wrong with Esperanto as a language. Dr. Zamenhof did an excellent job. Take spelling. English spelling is a mess. Esperanto spelling is a cinch: every sound matches one letter, and every letter matches one sound. If you hear a word, you can spell it; if you see it, you can say it.

Or consider weird English verbs, like "I am, you are, he is." In Esperanto these are easy, too: mi estas, vi estas, li estas. Or how about plurals such as "goose/geese," "mouse/mice," "foot/feet"? To make a plural in Esperanto, you just take the o at the end of a word and stick on a j: guso/gusoj, muso/musoj, futo/futoj. (The oj sound rhymes with the "oy" in "toy") Because Esperanto is so well designed, Esperantists say people can learn it in a quarter of the time it takes to learn a language such as French or Spanish.

In other words, Esperanto is exactly what Dr. Zamenhof wanted it to be: an easy way for people to communicate with other people throughout the world. So what's wrong with it? Maybe nothing is. Maybe it just isn't what most people want.

After all, in many places in the world, people are changing their languages in ways that make it harder for them to communicate. In Yugoslavia, for instance, the government used to encourage people to speak a language called Serbo-Croatian—a mixture of the languages spoken by the two largest nationalities of people in the country, the Serbs and the Croats. The two languages were already so similar that people who spoke one could understand the other. But in 1991, Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia and fought a fierce war with the Serbs. Now, on both sides of the new border, the Croats and the Serbs are weeding Serbo-Croatian out of their languages as fast as they can, and the two languages are rapidly becoming separate again.

The same kind of thing is going on in India and Pakistan. The official language of Pakistan is Urdu; one of the official languages of India is Hindi. A hundred years ago, the two languages were one language, known as Hindustani. But today the languages are written with different alphabets, and they, too, are starting to become separate.

Why would people want to make it harder to talk together? Because a language is more than a way of communicating. It can also be like a membership badge that shows which group of people you belong to—and which you do not. Sometimes people want to be set apart more than they want to be brought together.

That kind of pulling-apart has even threatened to split Esperanto. In 1908, French Esperantists were ready to spread Esperanto throughout Western Europe—but they wanted it to be their version of Esperanto. They asked Dr. Zamenhof to get rid of the funny-looking extra letters in his alphabet, take more words from Western European languages, and make other changes. When Dr. Zamenhof refused, they split off and founded their own artificial language, called Ido.

Ido had more or less run out of steam by the 1920s, though there are still a few Idists around today. But over the years, other "improved" versions of Esperanto have popped up from time to time, with names like Novesperanto, Reform-Esperanto, Latin-Esperanto, Esperido, Espido, and Esperantuisho. People have also invented dozens of other artificial languages, including Novial, Interlingua, Glosa, Unilingue, Monario, Panlingua, Mondi Lingua, Romanid, Simplo, Wede, Panoptic, Latinesco, Intal, Neo, Unilo, Malfalsito, Globaqo, Delmondo, Uropi, and Eurolingo. Most of them have fizzled out after a few years; some never managed to attract any speakers at all.

Esperantists feel bewildered. Why, they wonder, does anyone bother inventing new artificial languages? If people really want a language for international friendship, why don't they just rally around the one that already exists? Garrett Myrick hopes they will. "I think lots more people should speak it," he says. "That's the reason Dr. Zamenhof made it in the first place—so people could understand each other."

But maybe Esperanto is as popular as it'll ever be. Maybe not everybody wants to have friends around the world, just as not everybody wants to collect stamps, or ride skateboards, or play the flute. In that case, it could be that most of the people in the world who want what Esperanto has to offer already speak it—all 50,000, or 250,000, or two million of them. And besides, there is a language that is—in a way—becoming the new international language. That language is English. People who want to speak a language so they can buy or sell things to Americans (or get information from the Internet, or sing along with Pearl Jam and Alanis Morrisette) have to learn English.

The moral of the Esperanto story might be something like this: If people really want to talk to one another, they will find a way to do it, even if they have to learn a language as hard and complicated and illogical as English. On the other hand, if they don't want to talk to one another, they will find a way not to. And even the best universal language in the universe won't change their minds.

copyright © 1997 Robert J. Coontz, Jr.