While English is still the de facto lingua franca, with the US burning bridges to Europe like there’s no tomorrow, and the UK having left the EU, should they adopt an easy-to-learn auxillary language?

I’m thinking of an language like Esperanto, but not necessarily that. I was intrigued by Esperanto and went through the course on lernu.net and found it easy to pick up (though I am by no means fluent yet). While it is constructed, it was developed without any modern linguistic knowledge, so another option could be to construct a new language for this purpose, or adopt another already developed language that would serve the purpose better (I don’t have an overview of what is out there).

I know there are several official languages already, but I imagine that leads to a lot of overhead. An auxillary language could make communication easier, and make it easier for citizens of any member state to participate in the Union, and would to some extent remove any power asymmetry resulting from native mastery of a language.

Good idea? Poor idea? Why? Why not?

  • solbear@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    I’m curious, what language would you consider being easy to learn

    A language with no grammatical irregularities for starters. And one where the phonetics are consistent. Constructed languages can offer this. Whether any existing ones are sufficiently easy, I’m not sure.

    And then some mechanisms that facilitates vocabulary building. For instance, I like the affixes in Esperanto, as understanding the root word and then the affixes allows you to pick up all kinds of words you never explicitly learned. And example is -ejo, which indicates a place, could be combined with a root word such as the verb forĝas (to forge, root: forĝ-), yielding forĝejo = place where one forges. Or monero (money, root: moner-) + -ejo yields monerejo = place where one stores money (= monero).

    I’m sure with modern linguistic knowledge a much easier language than Esperanto could be constructed.

    However, it’s not that you can dictate a language

    The question was whether an auxillary language would be a good idea. It would necessarily be dictated. Every citizen would learn it in school. The proposed benefit having a a common language easily learned and spoken equally well by all member state citizens, that could be used to cross language barriers (like English is today), and that could be used within EU (i.e. all institutions) as an official language.

    For the record, I am intrigued by the idea, but I am very open to this being a bad idea, which is why I made the thread to hear people’s opinions.