Lingua franca - a discussion about language

So, I saw the post about someone wanting a topic about Esperanto or artificial languages made here in SD and as a former linguistics student who is overall interested in language I will take the bait. It's a bit hastily thrown together, but work with me here.

Today English is (more or less)undisputedly our worlds lingua franca. Not only is it spoken in a large number of countries as a first language or as a second language taught from very young age, it's also the language that is most used in business and international politics. English is, however, not a particularly easy language to learn for a large number of people. English, being a relatively "young" language created as a mixture of languages from different backgrounds presents both a lot of comfortable and strange rules, not to mention the amount of creole and dialects available.

Esperanto is an artificial language that was made to ease communication and to be used as an international language that surpasses cultural and ethnic borders. I, however, would argue that Esperanto, being based on european languages presents very much the same phonological difficulties as English to anyone from non-european languages.

One thing that Esperanto has going for it is that it's completely regular, which allows for pre- and suffixes to be added to essentially any word in order to change between classes. They have also removed q, w, x, and y which makes a lot of sense if you look at it phonetically.

Now, is it important that we have a lingua franca? I think it is, a secondary language spoken across the globe has countless of benefits. I'm sure that I won't have to list any here as I will just assume that people can see how nice it would be if everyone just spoke the same language. I'm one of those people that hate it when people can't talk or write in a language properly, even if I understand that people might not have the skill. I mean, I can only speak two languages properly and tops understand a few phrases in a few more.

Is it benefitial that a lingua franca is artificial and have no ethnic or cultural heritage?

I'm not sure about this. Part of me means that it really doesn't matter where the language comes from, but people are strange and nationalism and patriotism have some peoples minds warped. I know people that are against learning a new language simply because they don't like where it comes from. Imagine it yourselves; Mandarin have always been a competitor on the lingua franca scene simply because of the sheer amount of people who speak it, even if the majority is located in a single country. Today, at least here in Sweden, it is increasingly popular to learn good Chinese as opposed to other European languages and there is a movement to implement Chinese as a voluntary language starting from middle school (Today, the most common languages to learn are French, Spanish and German.) "Business chinese" is one of the most popular language-courses to attend.

If not Chinese, English or Esperanto is suitable, do you think any other languages would be more appropriate?

To even start to answer this question we have to define what culture is. Culture is a very vague term to be used to describe something. Many different anthropologists will say similar but varied versions of the definition but for the sake of this discussion I will use the american terminology because that is what I am familiar with.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture



What is important about his quote is that culture is defined as something taught within a society and not biological. All languages are crucial to a culture because they are something taught, not something genetic, just like accents. So it would be fair to say that any artificial language in itself is culture. It is something taught for a purpose, to create a certain pattern of behaviour.

If we take a look at Esperanto itself, and break down it's intended use and componants we see that it is a universal language intended for everyone. It's composition while mostly european based, would give it a global culture, and not a culture of specific location although I'm sure that the people who invented the language certainly allowed local influence based on their location and languages they spoke. So it would only be fair to say that a language intended for the entire human race would have a culture of the entire human race behind it. So to make any claim of "no culture" would be inaccurate. At best it can be considered "culture neutral".

If you look at the language itself, it is a fallacy. It is highly based on old greek and latin. Making it more akin to english than mandarin. Which brings me to the next point of how can it be consided a global language when it does not include any characteristics of the most spoken language in the world. English is only the world second most spoke language, and shares more characteristics with Esperanto. It's only estimated that around 510 million people speak english while over 1 billion speak mandarin. It would make much more sense for a artificial language to include characters from this as well.

What stands out most to me is that Esperanto is heavily based on the grammar and word creation of german which is one of the languages and possibly native language of the creator of the language. This can be seen in that Esperanto does not allow for abbreviated root words. It is based on the german use of conjunctions to describe objects. For instance take the german word Eisenbahnknotenpunkthinundherschieber. It's a hell of a mouthful I know. And we break it down just like Esperanto does.

Eisen : Require
Bahn : Train
Knotenpunkt : Junction
Hin : Back
Und : And
Her : Forth
Schieber: Pusher

That's a lot of words to string together just to say Switchman, or for people who prefer the longer english terms, Railroad Switchman. That is what Esperanto is based on, combining words in the same fashion as german.

Esperanto also does not account for mannerisms in which words are spoken that may change their value. We do not see these in english but they do exist in other languages, such as mandarin where you may take the term Wei, a last name. For men it can mean "power" or "lofty", for women it can mean "rose" or "small", and for unisex is means "only". I also do not believe that Esperanto covers gendered terms which many languages have, just like I have described with mandarin, french also shows a large amount of gender words.

I think I may have gotten off topic with my origional answer about culture, but if we trace the origion of Esperanto to who invented it, the area in which he was living was occupied by russians, germans, poles and jews. The intention of the language was the bridge a connection between these specific cultures, which was later thought to be used for global to some huge degree of failure. Now it is merely a pop culture language.

Yes, of course. I might have been a bit hasty to name it without culture but the point still stands. The language itself has no history and haven't sprung from any set culture.



While this may be true we can't look past the fact that even if the number of mandarin speakers are significantly higher, the amount of English speakers are more spread out over the globe. It really doesn't help that the sheer amount of mandarin speaking individuals are higher when the bulk of that amount is confined to a single nation.




This is also one of the points of Esperanto, and might or might not be a bad thing. It makes a lot of sense to put words together in this sense as there can be no irregular words. This word, for example, is not widely used in German, the German term commonly used for "switchman" is "Weichensteller". Which you wouldn't be able to figure out in the same logical way.




This too is to enforce the point of Esperanto being a very simple language. Gendered words are very rarely regular, in French we have 'un' or 'une' as irregular articles, in Swedish we have 'en' and 'ett' which might not be gender-based but function very much the same way. Languages that present these kind of irregular rules becomes significantly harder to learn compared to languages that doesn't present them.



A bit harsh isn't it? Esperanto is still a steadily growing langues both on the international scene and the increasing number of native Esperanto speakers.

English may be a complex language in some aspects but it is also one of the simplest languages in others. It contains one of the fewest amount of letters of any language on the planet, it also uses root words to describe all aspects of life. It is also a gender neutral language. The most complex thing about english is the use of There, Their, they're. These style of words often confuse people as do colloquialisms which are very regional. I don't think that a language that does not attempt to shorten words will survive much. I really don't want to say huge words like I quoted before for railway switchman.

As for my statment as a pop culture reference, at it's current state, that is what it is. Most common forms for seeing the language are often in movies and books.

The majority prioritize benefit over ideals, and in my left lifespan I doubt there will be any need to learn it.
That's the criticism esperanto needs to deal with. What benefit esperanto can give over english? Semi-neutrality and 150 hours of learning (like the internet tells me) vs an internationally established second tongue that we take in schools all over the globe.

I think the problem here is that we shouldn't counterpose esperanto and english in the first place (notice how I didn't mention mandarin). It's not competitive and it probably woun't be. Even in esperanto speaking places english is tought in schools (even though they put it 3d, after their native ones). Unless someone somehow hybridizes eng with mandarin, no esperanto will change the value of learning those two first.

The advertisement about it being the language of love peace and unity is no better than any other language advertisement, there's plenty of love and peace in azn too. The thing is, we're able to understand anyone without saying a word, no culture can take that from us.

So in my view esperanto's benifit should mainly be taken as educational. That's what i've come up with for now.

I definitely agree with the point that having a lingua franca is beneficial, considering the ever-increasing amount of international interactions on the global stage. A shared common language, or bridge language, is almost required in order to facilitate communications in these matters.

Would it help if it was culture-neutral? Most definitely. Unlike the mother tongue/tongues, the bridge language doesn't need to have any use as a cultural identity marker for anyone. It's only purpose is and should be to serve as a foundation for dialogue between two or more parties that otherwise wouldn't usually be able to foster normal communications between them.

But the problem I see here is that there really are no culture-neutral languages. Even Esperanto, as you've mentioned, is an amalgamation almost exclusively consisting of European tongues. In one way or another, people will almost inevitably find someone or something that they will automatically associate a language to.

That's what translators are for. Easier to hire a guide or learn a bunch of common words if it's for tourism. Why change the system?

No one's going to throw out their mother tongues out of free will. And that's why an international language needs to be aggressive (numerically/territorially) to be that #2 everyone should know.

You say it shouldn't be cultural but that's impossible and you're right cause the only way I can see it surviving is through making it native by teaching new generations who can't babble anything yet. Hell knows how long it will take to spread worldwide.

So again do we even need that innovative bicycle with an already functioning system? More likely 'Murica/China will f- us up and it'll give similar lingua franca results.