Esperanto

Upper Intermediate
In 1887 L.L. Zamanhof invented 'a universal second language'. It took the best bits of many European languages to make a new one for everyone to understand.

Zamanhofe called his new language Esperanto.

Orwell

Orwell came across Esperanto when he stayed with an aunt in Paris in 1927. He was hoping to improve his French but his aunt insisted on speaking Esperanto.

Orwell didn’t like the language or the people who spoke it. He clearly based the rules of Newspeak on those of the ‘world language of peace’.

In Newspeak nice words describe horrible things. The 'Ministry of Love' promotes war. Big Brother is really the secret police. Orwell believed that corrupt language showed corrupt thought.

Was Orwell unfair to Zamanhof’s invented language? After all, Esperanto has had some minor success. There are a reasonable number of fluent speakers of the language – though nobody is sure how many. Some say 100,000, others claim an improbable 2.5 million.

There are even a small number of Esperanto native speakers – up to 1,000 according to some estimates.

A universal second language?

But these figures are still comparatively low. More than one billion people use English as their ‘universal second language’. And Esperanto is still not the official language of any country in the world.

English may be illogical. It may have unfair advantages over other languages. But it is is still the lingua franca or universal language in much of the globe. And you don’t need Big Brother to force anyone to use it.


Do you know the words we use to describe he English language. Try this crossword. You can find all the words in the glossary of this section of ESL Reading.