WTH Is Esperanto & a Lingua Franca?

9 min readSep 1, 2026

The Language of Hope brings peace by building bridges between different peoples

This picture of Earth stands for a neutral global language of hope that could unite all peoples and contribute to understanding and peace. Esperanto could be the lingua franca, as Latin was in the Middle Ages. AI illustration:

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My father told me about Esperanto when I was a teenager.
It sat in the back of my mind for years, one of those things you know about but never do anything with. He was very interested in languages.

When I was working for The Hunger Project, I sat in an international conference in London. On the stage there was a big map of the world. I looked at all those countries, all those borders, when I suddenly had an epiphany: the biggest barrier between people isn’t the borders of the countries. It’s language. You can cross a border. You can’t cross out a sentence you don’t understand.

Esperanto as a solution!?

I flew back home to Munich and looked up the local Esperantists. Then I started learning Esperanto. I had every piece of important Hunger Project material translated and printed in Esperanto because I was going to talk to international Esperantists from many countries. I wanted to hand them something they could read. I had postcards for people to sign for a personal commitment to end hunger, as it was customary at the Hunger Project.

In 1983 I went to the international congress in Hungary and to the Congreso Junaularo, the youth congress, right before it. I came home with contact people for The Hunger Project scattered across countries I’d never have reached any other way.

On that same trip we stopped at the Esperanto Museum in Vienna, in the Hofburg, and stood in a room built around the idea of a world language for all and all the different attempts, all of which had failed, except Esperanto.

That trip is the reason I still believe what Zamenhof believed. Not that a language fixes everything. Just that it opens a door that would otherwise stay shut. And that such a language is a piece project, and it always was, right from the start.

What the heck is Esperanto, really?

Esperanto is not a dead language, and it’s not a joke. It’s a made-up language, built on purpose in 1887 by a Polish eye doctor named Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof.

He didn’t build it to replace anyone’s mother tongue. He built it as a second or third language for everyone (after your dialect and your national language). A neutral meeting point, so a Pole and a German and a Jew and a Russian could talk without one side having the home-field advantage.

Esperanto means hope — the name says it all.

Zamenhof published his first textbook under the pen name “Doktoro Esperanto”. In his made-up language, that means “Doctor One Who Hopes”. People started calling the language itself Esperanto, and the name stuck. Hope. That’s the whole project in one word.

He grew up in Bialystok, a small city full of Poles, Russians, Germans, and Jews who mostly hated each other’s languages and, by extension, each other. Zamenhof believed the fighting wasn’t really about religion or blood. He believed it was about not understanding what the other person was saying. Take away the barrier, take away the fight. That was the theory, anyway.

The first attempts to create a worlds language flopped and why

Zamenhof wasn’t the first person to try this. People had been trying to fix Babel for centuries.

Most people’s first impulse is, ‘Why not use English? It is the most widely used second language.

Here is why:

There are many different ways to write one sound, like ‘ee’, ‘ie’, ‘i’, and ‘ea’ (as in ‘flee’, ‘piece’, ‘finger’, and ‘teaser’), and also different ways to pronounce it. (Honestly, it’s a mess and totally inconsistent!) Not so with Esperanto: one letter, one sound, always the same pronunciation. This is one of the grammar rules.

English also has a huge vocabulary that quickly excludes non-native English speakers, especially when colloquial language and idioms are used. …

Pidgin spellings like ‘taksio’ and ‘aiskrim’, which I have both seen in Indonesia, expose how inconsistent English is — with spelling and with pronunciation. It shows that English is not a functional, rule‑based language but a historical patchwork.

There are a few different Pidgin English languages around the world, for example, in Africa and Asia, each different, each a simplified version of English which at the same time shrinks and dwarfs the possibilities of expression.

People often call it “pigeon English” by mistake, and it’s a fun slip because it makes you picture birds carrying messages. It grew out of trade contact between English speakers and everyone else, a stripped-down, simplified English used to get business done, not to unite humanity. It was never built for peace. It was built for selling tea and cotton.

In 1930 there was a serious attempt to use English as the base language. A British scholar named C.K. Ogden made his try: not a new language, just English cut down to 850 words. His claim was bold. Seven years to learn full English, seven months for Esperanto (in my experience it is more like seven weeks), and seven weeks for Basic English. Winston Churchill even backed it for a while after the war, hoping it could become a real-world tongue.

It never took off, and the reasons why are worth knowing.

First, cutting the vocabulary didn’t cut the difficulty. With only 18 verbs allowed, called “operators”, you couldn’t say “succeed”; you had to say “make good”, but “fail” wasn’t “make bad”, it was something else again. Ogden built a language that ran on idiom and paraphrase, and idiom is exactly what trips up a non-native speaker.

Second, it stayed English, which meant it stayed tangled in English’s spelling, its odd stress patterns, and its grammar full of quiet exceptions. Cutting the word count didn’t touch any of that. Third, and maybe most telling: Ogden himself barely used it. His own books explaining Basic English are full of words that aren’t on his own list. If the inventor can’t stick to his own rules, nobody else will either. It was still English wearing a smaller coat, not a genuinely different tool. It stayed a teaching aid, a word list still used today to introduce beginners to English, and it never became the neutral, learnable-by-anyone language it was pitched as.

Then came the constructed languages, made on purpose in a room with a plan. Volapük showed up a few years before Esperanto and actually had a real following for a while, until people found it nearly impossible to pronounce and it collapsed under its own weirdness.

After Basic English and Volapük came a string of others too: Ido, Interlingua, Novial. None of them caught on the way Esperanto did.

Esperanto is the only constructed language that built a living, breathing community that has lasted well over a hundred years.

All good things come in threes.

Here’s the part that always gets me. Zamenhof didn’t get it right on the first go. He built three versions.

The first one he called “Lingwe uniwersala.” He finished it as a teenager and was so proud of it he threw a little celebration with his school friends, reciting poems they’d written in it. Then he went off to Moscow to study medicine. His father, worried the language project would ruin his son’s future, or maybe worried it would get the family in trouble with the Tsar’s censors, took the notebook and burnt it while Zamenhof was away.

Most people would stop there. Zamenhof didn’t. He’d worked on the thing so long he could rebuild it from memory, and when he did, he made it better. This second version he called “Lingvo internacia”. He spent years quietly testing it, translating texts into it, thinking in it, and catching every place it broke.

The third version came out of a realisation: Lingvo Internacia still had far too much vocabulary to learn, word after word with no relation to each other. So he looked at how German and English build new words out of small, reusable syllables and built the same trick into his language but stripped it down and made it completely regular.

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One root, then small fixed pieces added to the front or back to shift the meaning. Learn the pieces once, and you can build words nobody ever taught you and be understood anyway.

Take the root manĝ-, meaning “eat”:

manĝ-o is a meal,
manĝ-il-o is a tool for eating, like a fork, and
manĝ-et-o is a small meal, a snack
manĝ-eg-o a big huge meal

Verbs, only 3 tenses no exeptions:
mi manĝ-as is I eat,
mi manĝ-is is I ate,
mi manĝ-os is I will eat,

One root, seven clean words, and no irregular forms to memorise anywhere in sight.

This third version was the one he finally dared to publish, in 1887, paid for by his father-in-law because Zamenhof himself was broke. That third version is the Esperanto we still have today. Three tries. One father who lit a match. One son who refused to let the idea die.

What the heck is a lingua franca?

A lingua franca is a language people use to communicate with no native language. It’s a bridge language — neutral, practical, shared.

The idea of a shared language is not new, and it was actually practised in the courts of Europe.

During the Middle Ages, Latin served exactly that function: a language that belonged to no one and was therefore fair to everyone.

It was nobody’s native language, which made it neutral — at least in theory.

But in practice, it was reserved for the wealthy and highly educated: scholars, clergy, and people at the courts. Latin was the language of science and sophisticated knowledge exchange. Nothing like pidgin or basic English

Much Money could be saved if Esperanto were used

The European Parliament pays to keep 24 languages alive

The story of Babel is often told as a warning about fragmentation — too many languages, too little understanding. Europe still lives with that reality: dozens of languages, each with its own identity, history, and political weight.

Now for the money question. The EU runs on 24 official languages. Every law, every major document, gets translated into all of them. Every EU parliament member has the right to speak in their own language and be understood. That costs money, real money.

The total bill across all EU institutions runs to roughly one billion euros a year. All in all a billion euros a year is a billion euros a year, and it pays

for thousands of translators and hundreds of interpreters working nonstop to move meaning across 24 languages and 552 possible language pairs.

Esperantists have argued for decades that a single shared second language (as is common in Africa and India), taught to every EU citizen from childhood, could cut that bill drastically.

Whether anyone in Brussels will ever try it is a different question. Politics moves slower than logic.

Esperanto hands you a small toolbox of sixteen grammar rules and around two thousand roots, and from that you can build tens of thousands of words on your own, correctly, without ever opening a dictionary to check.

That’s the real trick behind the hope in the name. Not that everyone would suddenly love each other. Just that the tool for talking to each other would finally stop getting in the way.

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Sources drawn from Wikipedia, the University of Paderborn’s Esperanto research (Helmar Frank), Pasporta Servo records, the World Esperanto Association, and European Parliament budget reports.

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