The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick
17. What Ever Happened to Esperanto?
The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick
Arika Okrent [+]
Journalist
Arika Okrent received a joint Ph.D. in the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Psychology’s Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience Program at the University of Chicago. She has written about language for The American Scholar, Tin House, and Slate. In the course of writing her 2009 book In the Land of Invented Languages, she earned a first-level certification in Klingon. She is editor-at-large of The Week, and is a frequent contributor to Mental Floss. In 2015 she received LSA Linguistics Journalism Award.
E. M. Rickerson [+]
College of Charleston
E. M. (‘Rick’) Rickerson served as the General Editor of the first and second editions of this book. He is Professor Emeritus of German, Director Emeritus of the award-winning language program at the College of Charleston (South Carolina), a former Deputy Director of the U.S. government’s Center for the Advancement of Language Learning, and an Associate of the National Museum of Language. In 2005 he created the radio series on languages (Talkin’ about Talk) from which The Five-Minute Linguist was been adapted. He is currently retired in the mountains of North Carolina.
Description
The only proposal of an international language that had lasting success was Esperanto, invented in Poland in the late nineteenth century by Ludwig Zamenhof. It was created in 1887, got a boost in popularity in the 1920s and even became a candidate to be the official language of the League of Nations. Esperanto is by far the most successful language in the long history of language invention. It isn’t a universal language, and it’s unlikely to become one, but it has become a living language.