Esperanto is not the model
Esperanto was once the big, coming thing, but is clearly not now. Its decline from its early promise is a fascinating story of idealism meeting reality.
It suffered from the network problem. Esperanto's core value depended on widespread adoption: you would only want to learn it if others spoke it, but others wouldn't learn it unless you did first. No language authority, nation-state, or institution ever broke that deadlock by mandating its use. Natural languages like English had empires, trade routes, and armies behind them. Esperanto had only volunteers.
The 20th century's biggest blow was the global rise of English as a de facto international language, the lingua franca of the modern world (joke). It was fostered by American economic and cultural dominance, Hollywood, the internet, and international science. The practical argument for Esperanto ("we need a neutral common tongue") evaporated when the world settled, imperfectly but functionally, on English. Why should anyone learn a constructed language when the world's airports, universities, and business deals already run in something useful?
Esperanto never had institutional backing. The League of Nations considered adopting it in 1921, but France vetoed it, fearing displacement of French as the language of diplomacy. UNESCO flirted with it. But no major body ever committed to it. Without institutional weight in schools, governments, and international organisations, a language is not self-sustaining.
Esperanto never had a central authority to enforce standards or drive adoption campaigns effectively. For the average person, Esperanto solves a coordination problem they handle well enough already, through English, translation apps, or simply staying local. The emotional and practical investment required to learn any language is high, and Esperanto offered no literature, no culture, no homeland, no economic opportunity, and no social community of the scale needed to justify that investment for most people.
Esperanto isn't entirely dead, with estimates suggesting 1-2 million speakers worldwide, with an active online community and annual congresses. But it occupies a curious niche: a hobby language for idealists and language enthusiasts, rather than the universal second language. Its story is ultimately one of a genuinely elegant idea that arrived too early and then found its moment stolen by historical accident and Anglo-American power.
Its lesson is that planed artificial systems almost never win out over the spontaneous ones. Jane Jacobs expressed this truth for cities. The ones that arrive over centuries tend to be more vibrant, creative, and buzzing with life. Those created artificially are sometimes described as ‘soulless,’ and seem to lack the same vitality.
Esperanto was the kind of thing scholars dream up, and bureaucrats then spend billions promoting. As Hayek told us, spontaneous orders have more information in them, people fit naturally within them, and they win out over planned and imposed orders.
Madsen Pirie