Esperantic Studies

We, members of the worldwide movement for the promotion of Esperanto, address this Manifesto to all governments, international organizations and people of good will; declare our unshakable commitment to the objectives set out here; and call on all organizations and individuals to join us in working for these goals.

For more than a century Esperanto, which was launched in 1887 as a project for an auxiliary language for international communication and quickly developed into a rich living language in its own right, has functioned as a means of bringing people together across the barriers of language and culture. The aims that inspire the users of Esperanto are still as important and relevant as ever. Neither the worldwide use of a few national languages, nor advances in communications technology, nor the development of new methods of language teaching is likely to result in a fair and effective language order based on the following principles, which we hold to be essential.

DEMOCRACY. Any system of communication which confers lifelong privileges on some while requiring others to devote years of effort to achieving a lesser degree of competence is fundamentally antidemocratic. While Esperanto, like any language, is not perfect, it far outstrips other languages as a means of egalitarian communication on a world scale. We maintain that language inequality gives rise to communicative inequality at all levels, including the international.

GLOBAL EDUCATION. All ethnic languages are bound to certain cultures and nations. For example, the child who learns English learns about the culture, geography and political systems of the English-speaking world, primarily the United States and the United Kingdom. The child who learns Esperanto learns about a world without borders, where every country is home. We maintain that education in any language is bound to a certain view of the world. We are a movement for global education.

EFFECTIVE EDUCATION. Only a small percentage of foreign-language students attain fluency in the target language. In Esperanto, fluency is attainable even through home study. Various studies have shown that Esperanto is useful as a preparation for learning other languages. It has also been recommended as a core element in courses in language awareness. We maintain that the difficulties in learning ethnic languages will always be a barrier for many students who would benefit from knowing a second language. We are a movement for effective language learning.

MULTILINGUALISM. The Esperanto community is almost unique as a worldwide community whose members are universally bilingual or multilingual. Every member of the community has made the effort to learn at least one foreign language to a communicative level. In many cases this leads to a love and knowledge of several languages and to broader personal horizons in general. We maintain that the speakers of all languages, large and small, should have a real chance of learning a second language to a high communicative level. We are a movement for providing that opportunity to all.

LANGUAGE RIGHTS. The unequal distribution of power between languages is a recipe for permanent language insecurity, or outright language oppression, for a large part of the worlds population. In the Esperanto community the speakers of languages large and small, official and unofficial meet on equal terms through a mutual willingness to compromise. This balance of language rights and responsibilities provides a benchmark for developing and judging other solutions to language inequality and conflict. We maintain that the wide variations in power among languages undermine the guarantees, expressed in many international instruments, of equal treatment regardless of language. We are a movement for language rights.

LANGUAGE DIVERSITY. National governments tend to treat the great diversity of languages in the world as a barrier to communication and development. In the Esperanto community, however, language diversity is experienced as a constant and indispensable source of enrichment. Consequently every language, like every biological species, is inherently valuable and worthy of protection and support. We maintain that communication and development policies which are not based on respect and support for all languages amount to a death sentence for the majority of languages in the world. We are a movement for language diversity.

HUMAN EMANCIPATION. Every language both liberates and imprisons its users, giving them the ability to communicate among themselves but barring them from communication with others. Designed as a universally accessible means of communication, Esperanto is one of the great functional projects for the emancipation of humankind one which aims to let every individual citizen participate fully in the human community, securely rooted in his or her local cultural and language identity yet not limited by it. We maintain that exclusive reliance on national languages inevitable puts up barriers to the freedoms of expression, communication and association. We are a movement for human emancipation.

In general, language rights are most often associated with individuals, but they can also be the property of a language community (e.g., the often asserted right to use a particular language in communications media or schools), or even of a state (e.g., the right to declare a language official or require knowledge of it as a condition of citizenship).

Implied in these rights are also responsibilities (such as the responsibility to provide means to learn an official language). In some cases responsibilities are proposed towards languages which have not been officially adopted, or governments are urged to weigh the democratic or participatory costs of language choice. Despite a growing body of scholarship on the topic, many issues remain difficult to understand or to resolve. For example, there are those who argue that if a given language right exists for the individual, then the state has a responsibility to enforce and facilitate it. But if so,then does the exercise of this right by the individual also imply that the individual has certain responsibilities towards the larger community as a result? The conference will explore three broad themes related to such issues:

A. Definitions and Principles. What principles can reasonably be considered to constitute universal language rights, and to what extent do such rights carry with them certain responsibilities? For instance, should individuals have a right to a certain level of schooling in their native language? In a national language? In one or more foreign languages? Are rights different in the workplace? In government? In international organizations? In voluntary organizations? For tourists? For displaced persons or other temporary migrants? For settled immigrants?

B. Legislation. How have linguistic rights and responsibilities been defined in national legislation and in international declarations, covenants, and treaties? What have been the consequences?

C. Linguistic Beliefs & Practice. Does the concept of linguistic responsibility explain any types of individual or collective behavior? What lies behind differing attitudes towards the mother tongue or other languages? To what extent do national education systems contribute to mother tongue competence? To competence in official languages? In other languages? What limits on the content of official language legislation are implied by various conceptualizations of language rights and responsibilities?

Scholars interested in participating in the conference should communicate with Humphrey Tonkin.

E-Babel

In 1898, when Otto von Bismarck was an old man, a journalist asked him what he thought was the decisive factor in modern history. He answered without skipping a beat: "The fact that the North Americans speak English." You wonder what he would have said if they'd had a Net account at the Reichs Chancellery.

Everybody seems certain that cyberspace is going to be an English lake, and some people think it will wind up inundating everything else in the world in the process. The Sunday New York Times ran a story a couple of weeks ago with the headline "World, Wide, Web: Three English Words". One computer writer described the Internet as a great force for the Anglification of the planet, and the editor of a magazine called The Futurist predicts that thanks to new media English will become the native language of a majority of the world by some time in the next century. And indeed, one linguist has suggested that the UN should simply declare English the world language, but rename it Globalese so as not to imply that it belongs to any one community anymore.

Frankly, I have my doubts as to whether Bismarck would have been completely reassured by this maneuver. Certainly theres no shortage of people who view the prospect of a monolingual English Net with some alarm. The director of a Russian Internet provider described the Web as the ultimate act of intellectual colonialism. And French President Jacques Chirac was even more apocalyptic, describing English domination of the Internet as a major risk for humanity, with its threat of linguistic and cultural uniformity.

Is any of it warranted - the neocolonialist swaggering on one side, the hysteria on the other? Like most of what's said about and on the Internet, the discussion tends to be long on speculation and short on data (NOTE 1). There's no question that English is overwhelmingly dominant on the Net right now, but a lot of that is due to accidental factors. The Internet was an American development, and something between 70 and 90 percent of its present users are from the English-speaking countries (NOTE 2). But the proportion of native English speakers on the Internet is dropping very rapidly, particularly as Net service providers and search services proliferate in other countries, and as people overcome the difficulties of sending and receiving accented characters and non-Roman alphabets (NOTE 3). Its a safe bet that we English speakers will be in the minority well before the end of the century (NOTE 4). Even then, of course, there's no question that English will still be the principal lingua franca for Internet communication, just as it already is for most international science, business, and tourism. In fact there are reports that the advent of the Net has intensified the interest in learning English among students in places like Brazil and Germany. But that's mostly old news. What makes the Net different from most of the communications technologies that preceded it is how much it does to preserve linguistic distinctions. The telegraph, the telephone, the radio all made the world smaller. Now finally we have a technology that helps to keep the world big and polyglot (NOTE 5).

One reason for this is that languages aren't in competition on the Net the way they are in print or other media. A Danish rock festival can post its Web page in English and German for the benefit of foreigners, but it also posts a version in Danish so the locals dont feel slighted. And for that matter the National Library of Wales can post its Web page in English and Welsh. In fact you could argue that the languages that have the most to gain here are the ones that are too small or scattered to support a lot of the traditional print media, languages like Welsh and Yiddish and Esperanto (I'm here to tell you, before the Net I had no idea how many Esperanto enthusiasts there were out there, and I suspect that neither did they). But every language group is taking advantage of this. In a half-hour's wandering around the Net the other day I found discussion groups conducted in more than 60 languages, at which point I stopped counting (NOTE 6). The Italians were talking about the elections, as they always are. The French people are exchanging dirty jokes. The Indonesians as best I could tell were arguing over whether the movie True Lies was anti-Islam or merely stupid. All of which confirms the lesson we have already learned from the proliferation of discussion groups on domestic Internet services: if you give people the chance, they are less interested in turning the Net into a world forum than a back-yard fence. There's a new Tower of Babel, and it has an Intel sticker on the side.

NOTES:

2. To the best of my knowledge there have been no surveys aimed at establishing directly the proportions of language use on the Internet. The 70 percent figure for Anglophone use is a guess suggested by a recent study by Woodruff et al. which surveyed some 2.6 million documents with the Inktomi Web crawler and found that 59 percent of them bore US domain names, but which unfortunately did no breakdown on the 41 percent of documents listed as other. (See http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~woodruff/inktomi/.) An article in Business Week (April 1, 1996) says that 64 percent of Internet hosts are in the US and 12.7 percent in other English-speaking countries (a category that appears to include all of Canada but not Hong Kong or Singapore), but it is not clear how these figures should be taken to correspond to numbers of users or documents. More detailed figures are provided by a GVU survey of more than 23,000 respondents conducted in October-November, 1995, which reported that 76.2 percent of the respondents were from the US, and almost 94 percent from countries or provinces where English is the dominant language (See http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/survey-10-1995/). But these figures are almost certainly too high for the Web as a whole, since severe biases were introduced by the fact that the survey was administered in English, that it was advertised primarily on English-language sites, and that respondents self-selected. (The percentages of Japanese and French respondents in the survey were only 0.27 and 0.25 respectively, which if we took them at face value would put the number of Web users in each of those countries below the numbers for Finland at 0.45 and Nova Scotia and Alaska at 0.35 not a very plausible conclusion.)

3. For a discussion of some of these initiatives, see http://www.dragoman.org/winter/.

4. Writing in Wired , Nicolas Negroponte has estimated that US Web sites would be less than 20 percent of the total by the year 2000. That's hard to credit, though.

5. Just about every modern technology of transportation and communication has been heralded as making the world a smaller place. Contemporary enthusiasm for the telegraph prompted Thoreau to write in Walden in terms that might apply to the Internet as well: "We are in great haste to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."

6. It is hard to calculate the number of languages used on the Internet with any accuracy. There are Usenet groups conducting all or part of their discussions in around 30 languages, including Afrikaans, Albanian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. In a relatively cursory search I have also been able to locate references to lists conducted wholly or partially in Arabic, Aragonese, Armenian, Basque, Breton, Cambodian, Catalan, Czech, Gaelic, Galician, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong, Hungarian, Indonesian, Macedonian, Malay, Nahuatl, Rumanian, Slovenian, Swahili, Urdu, Welsh, Yiddish, and Yoruba. (For lists of many of these, see http://www.indigo.ie/egt/langlist.html and http://babel.uoregon.edu/yamada/lists.html.) But the resulting total of around 60 languages is certainly much too low, and I am certain that more thorough research would turn up Web pages and Net discussion groups in dozens more.

A. Language Choice. What effect is the widespread use of English through the Internet likely to have on the relationship between English and other languages around the world? What are the prospects for languages other than English as Internet languages?

B. Pragmatics & Communication Strategies. What are the rules of linguistic behavior, of genre, of address, that govern Internet communication, and how are they evolving?

C. Language Learning. How can the Internet be used for teaching and learning foreign languages?

Scholars interested in participating in the conference should communicate with Humphrey Tonkin.