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However desirable a language that is neutral to everyone may be, there will never be enough momentum to reach critical mass of usage. The historic rise of English and future rise of Chinese are due to socio-political and above all economic factors that put purely cultural or idealistic linguistic projects in the shade.

One of these factors, of course, has been the adoption of English precisely as a neutral (non-native) official language in many countries – known as ‘institutionalisation’. It is logical these countries choose a language which is actually useful and in use by a significant part of the world.

Since Spanish was the first European language to be spoken in North America and there are over 45 million Hispanics, it is not so much a preference as a reality for other Americans that Spanish is the biggest and nearest foreign language impacting their lives, so this is not surprising.

The original point of this post was to warn native English speakers, especially in Britain, where there is no one major foreign language within its borders and so no direct pressure to learn one – in some respects any – other language. The discipline of learning any foreign language, particularly for native English speakers who do not have a grounding in grammar, will reduce the threat of competition from the rest of the world.

By definition, speakers of Esperanto have already made this leap. I did not intend for this to turn into a debate on a common language, so I may move this thread to a new page.

Thanks anyway for the contributions.

I’m not sure it has the legs, however and most people would regard Esperanto as an interesting, but ultimately unsuccessful, experiment. Your link seems to be down at the moment but I would encourage people to check back, as I certainly will be.

Vive la différence, I say! (but that’s partly because I like to mix the language up a bit…;-))

Update: esperanto.net is back up. I had forgotten the delights of esperanto – check out this site which helps you ‘lerni esperanto‘. You’ll quickly be able to say “Mi fartas bone”! (clue to non-speakers – there’s a dictionary on the site…that’s all the help I’m giving you!)

Take a look at http://www.esperanto.net

What do you think?