Among what are now more than 1000 efforts to create an international language, primarily the project of L. L. Zamenhof (1887) has developed into a living and flexible language. Although Zamenhof’s hopes for a language accepted worldwide were not fulfilled, Esperanto proves that in principle it is possible to create a new language through language planning and bring it to practical use. This is an important fact for linguistics. Esperanto’s success also lies in the fact that so far it has been able to resist competition from other systems of planned language. The factors that explain this success relate in part to linguistic structures (e.g. the system’s potential for development) and in part to sociolinguistic and language policy considerations. Of particular significance was Zamenhof’s language-policy role: he saw language as primarily a social phenomenon, he linked humanistic ideals to his language, and he passed Esperanto on to an emerging language community with all of its evolving and varied communicative needs. Zamenhof intuitively understood several important factors that contributed to Esperanto’s stability, for example the need for a standard and its codification. Over the past decades, the scholarly literature of Esperanto studies has grown in quality and is regularly recorded in the bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA).
2015. How Not to Reinvent the Wheel: ... The Essential Scholarly Literature in Interlinguistics and Esperantology. Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems 13:2 ► pp. 200 ff.
Brosch, Cyril & Sabine Fiedler
2018. Esperanto and Linguistic Justice: An Empirical Response to Sceptics. In Language Policy and Linguistic Justice, ► pp. 499 ff.
Fiedler, Sabine
2010. Approaches to fair linguistic communication. European Journal of Language Policy 2:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
2015. Esperanto Phraseology. Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems 13:2 ► pp. 250 ff.
Fiedler, Sabine
2018. Linguistic and pragmatic influence of English: Does Esperanto resist it?. Journal of Pragmatics 133 ► pp. 166 ff.
Gobbo, Federico
2023. Corpus at the Core: The Epistemology of Language Planning. In Epistemological and Theoretical Foundations in Language Policy and Planning, ► pp. 73 ff.
Goodall, Grant
2023. Constructed Languages. Annual Review of Linguistics 9:1 ► pp. 419 ff.
2022. Theorizing Language Evolution Using NCT and Conlangs: An Etiological Study. Journal on Asian Linguistic Anthropology 4:2 ► pp. 70 ff.
Schreyer, Christine
2020. Artificial Languages. In The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, ► pp. 1 ff.
Schreyer, Christine
2021. Constructed Languages. Annual Review of Anthropology 50:1 ► pp. 327 ff.
Schreyer, Christine & David Adger
2021. Comparing prehistoric constructed languages: world-building and its role in understanding prehistoric languages. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 376:1824
Tonkin, Humphrey
2012. Invented Languages in Language Policy and Planning. In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics,
Tonkin, Humphrey
2015. Introduction: In Search of Esperanto. Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems 13:2 ► pp. 182 ff.
Tonkin, Humphrey
2015. Language Planning and Planned Languages: How Can Planned Languages Inform Language Planning?. Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems 13:2 ► pp. 193 ff.
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