“Through language a world is constituted; languages are the primary filter through which we experience the world as ‘our’ world. All natural languages are thus informed by a unique worldview; it is through languages that a people express its ‘genius,’ its historical memory and sense of future identity.”
- Seyla Benhabib, Claims of Culture
Native languages are clearly integral to a people’s culture, yet what happens when people are forced to abandon their languages to adopt a lingua franca? A lingua franca is a “working language” or a language used to bridge speakers who do not have the same language. While it does provide a fair vehicular language in the cases of speakers who do not share a common tongue who resort to using a third tongue, in the cases where one speaker already knows the language, it gives one person the advantage in discussion.
Historically, linguas franca have either been pidgin or creole languages that blend different roots or languages of conquerors. This conquering was both literal and figurative since Arabic became the language that united the cultures from India through North Africa and Spain under the Caliphate while French became the language of diplomacy, exerting cultural influence on the rest of Europe in the centuries leading up to the world wars. Similar regional examples can be seen with Russian in the nations of the former Soviet Union or Chinese in peripheral provinces.
In today’s society, however, it is clear that English is the lingua franca. Since the mid-twentieth century, when American power was exerted over Europe, English replaced French as the vehicular language there. Due to America’s power after the wars as the world recovered, English spread and spread, now becoming the language of international trade and the most common auxiliary (additional) language people choose to learn. My parents, who never planned to come to America when they were young, learned English nonetheless because that was just one of those things everybody did if they could. This was in addition to the mandatory Russian (another example of learning a lingua franca since the Soviet Union’s influence was strong in Yugoslavia) and Latin required of all students.
But look at Americans. We do not, in many regions, even begin learning a language until high school or maybe, if we’re lucky, middle school. The sad thing is that we do not really need it, in the sense that the rest of the world needs it. People seeking asylum from all over the world tend to arrive in the United States, Canada, UK, and Australia. All are predominantly English-speaking.
Americans do not need to know another language because few Americans flee the United States or seek work elsewhere out of necessity (usually it’s out of preference, if at all). But people in many nations around the world learn English as a back-up plan, an escape route, just in case if on some rainy day, their country cannot provide for them.
To me, it seems strange that a language spoken all over the world has a national, cultural origin. It does not make sense to endorse languages that have linguistic backgrounds since there are such close ties between language and cultural practices. In the Balkans, for instance, the three major groups (Croats, Serbs, Bosnians) have three different religions and one common language. Yet there is controversy in calling it the same language, so there are efforts to change the languages on all three fronts to differentiate them.
While this may be one of the more extreme linguistic disagreements, it is clear that using certain languages can offend people so uniting what is essentially the entire world by English seems an offense to many of the world’s cultures and an advantage to the world’s English speakers.
The United Nations endorses six languages as their official languages: Mandarin, English, Arabic, Spanish, Russian, and French. This makes sense since, with the exception of French, these are among the most widely spoken languages. Yet endorsing any single one of them would again yield the same problem I discussed earlier by creating a cultural hegemony. For practical purposes, we need official languages for deliberation, but it’s an interesting intellectual idea to see what language should step up as the official language of the UN. Or even further, the official language of humanity.
To this, I introduce the concept of constructed auxiliary languages, or artificial languages meant to be learned by all people in addition to their native tongues. I must immediately first dismiss this idea as being plausible in the near future or really, most likely, in any future, but it is a topic that is of great intellectual interest to me.
If we were to unite the cultures, peoples, languages of the world into one common language, it would need to be a constructed language. Languages are closely rooted to cultural practices and national sentiments, so it would not be fair to have any one language (and by extension, the culture associated with the language) rule over all people.
This is the same viewpoint held by L. L. Zamenhof at the end of the nineteenth century. He was an intellectual who saw a fighting, divided Europe around him and he developed an “international language” called Esperanto, which in today’s society would really be viewed as a “inter-European” language because it drew from only European roots.
The Bahá’í faith endorses an international auxiliary language, and see Esperanto as a likely candidate. Ayatollah Khomeini also had endorsed this view that Esperanto should be learned to allow for cross-cultural dialogue. Other religions similarly follow suit so as to be more inclusive.
The fault I personally find with Esperanto is its European-ness. I spent a matter of weeks learning it and could converse fairly easily with introductory information, drawing on my Slavic heritage (I speak Serbian and Esperanto uses slavic phonemes) and my Spanish background (many Latin roots are used). But this is not the case for everyone since not everyone has a background in non-English European languages (though this does put Esperanto in the unique position of being endorsed by some European political parties as a candidate for the official language of the European Union).
An international language must meet two requirements, in my view. The first is it being constructed, which Esperanto meets. But where Esperanto fails is in the second requirement: that it be equally as easy (or difficult) to learn and speak for all peoples.
This is where Lojban comes in. Lojban, which I see as a more practical alternative, united Mandarin, Hindi, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, and English roots with a grammar based on logic. Combining these languages makes it easier for about 2.5 billion native speakers of these six languages to learn the language. The question can then be, is it just as easy for those who do not speak these languages? Well, yes, generally. Excepting aboriginal tongues of Africa, the Americas and Australia, this covers the most densely populated language groups. While it is not perfect, it is the closest to being international of all constructed languages.
So should we go full on constructed? With no roots? This is an interesting thought, but one that I do not agree with. A linguistic bias would be given to whoever creates this language. It would be unique, yes, but that also makes it all the more difficult to learn. Lojban unites linguistic roots from different regions of the world with logical grammar, creating a language that has the possibility to spread.
At the moment, however, Esperanto still has more speakers since it is the “original” or “traditional” artificial language that language-fanatics learn. The idea of a new, additional language for the world to learn is within our grasp, but we are not making any movements toward it. It is an interesting idea, that is not altogether impossible, but a large task for a world which has other, larger problems to confront.
