The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Second Edition - E.M. Rickerson
Whatever happened to Esperanto?
The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Second Edition - E.M. Rickerson
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 [+]
Consultant
E. M. Rickerson has a Ph.D from the University of California at Berkeley and is Director Emeritus of the award-winning language program at the College of Charleston (S.C.). Formerly a language program director in the U.S. government, he now consults on the development and improvement of language programs at the university level. In 2005 Dr. Rickerson created a radio series on languages (“Talkin’ About Talk”), which was broadcast on public and college radio stations -- and on which The 5 Minute Linguist was based
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.