Towards a universal language?

Should a language policy become part of a list of democratic transhumanist principles?

Today, the principle of a universal auxiliary language is not as timely as it was a century ago. Many find it difficult to work up much of an interest in the issue, especially when compared with more pressing ones such as racism or sexism.

Esperanto was new and exciting in the early 20th century. The idea of an easy to learn, comprehensive international language was appealing in intellectual circles of the time. Volapük was an even earlier constructed language intended as an international auxiliary language. It also won widespread support, though the language ultimately proved too difficult for most supporters to actually learn.

According to Wikipedia, "Esperanto is now the most widely spoken constructed international language. The name derives from Doktoro Esperanto, the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof first published the Unua Libro in 1887. Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy and flexible language as a universal second language to foster peace and international understanding.

Although no country has adopted the language officially, it has enjoyed continuous usage by a community estimated at between 100,000 and 2 million speakers. Today, Esperanto is employed in world travel, correspondence, cultural exchange, conventions, literature, language instruction, television (Internacia Televido) and radio broadcasting. There are possibly more than a thousand native speakers of the language.

There is evidence that learning Esperanto before another foreign language improves one's ability to learn that language — so much so that it takes less time to learn both than it would to learn just the second.

Invented auxiliary languages are not widely used; nor have natural languages such as English and French penetrated universally, as some people imagine. Moreover, advocates of various languages disagree about which language should be universal. To overcome these difficulties, it has been proposed that some language (natural or invented) be chosen by consensus of officials elected by the nations of the world, perhaps through the United Nations, in consultation with experts of various disciplines, a top-down approach. There would be a spoken and a written form; the adoption of an official script for the blind has also been proposed, to correspond to the chosen written international language. The language would be implemented in each nation as an additional (second) language, alongside the national languages. A bottom-up strategy tries to spread the language among ordinary users, so that it becomes the de facto standard. However, the idea has not yet spread as widely as intended. Some people see the need for an official political endorsement from the nations of the world, backed by resources for instruction and implementation.

However, the idea that a universal language would displace native languages is potentially troubling. This could be a problem for people who value cultural diversity. Language is strongly attached to culture. The prospect of all-but-universal language extinction would be undesirable to less dominant languages and cultures, like Uyghur or Cornish, which are struggling for distinction. American Indian languages and cultures were suppressed in boarding schools in the United States and Canada much to the detriment of these peoples. The effects of the suppression of Irish can still be felt today. To the world's ethnic minorities an imposed language would be tantamount to an imposed culture."