Maybe you have heared about Esperanto, Volapük, Ido, Interlingua, or some of the newer or more obscure proposals for a planned auxiliary international language. They are both loved by their communities, and ridiculed by those who doubt about the need for any of them, or the possibility that any of them might succeed in their goal. So why exactly would we need a planned auxiliary language?
The biggest idea lying behind this is that English is perfectly fine for international communication. I won't deny that for example for writing this article, it's probably the best I have so a big range of people can read it. However, I think the more we live in the real world internationally, the more we see that the reach of English is far from what it should be for a real international language. It's the best we have now, but I think in this age of computers and science, we can do MUCH better.
The big idea of planned languages is not so much trying to replace existing languages, but mostly that we become aware that we can indeed plan a working language. Esperanto proved that very well. We are now in a new generation of planned languages: purpose-built languages for specific sub-goals. I think that if we first acknowledge that Esperanto in specific, and language planning in general, works, we can much improve the situation of many study fields where the usage of an appropriate language can make a difference. See for example studies into animals, where language planning can make a difference by creating an intermediary language that both humans and animals can communicate with. Or for example native deaf/blind people, who now risk mostly growing up without any communication/language means at all. We need to get really good at language planning to solve this kind of problems.
When we understand this good enough, we can really try to solve the world communication problem. That is not just picking the best language. Considering we basically already picked English for that, we can see in practice that the properties of the language really matter. Because most people really don't do well with using and learning English. Esperanto is already a step in the right direction and probably the best we have now that shows a working language learnable by all. I think a project that goes really well into the direction we finally should go is Pandunia, which equalizes the international word sources so it really feels like a language of all, and it eliminates all gramatical balast without elimitation of expression power. I urge you to give it a look. What do you think about the issue of an international language and about planned/artificial languages?
