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February 16, 2012

When you were in school, there was likely a requirement to learn a language, with choices ranging from Spanish to French and German to Spanish. That's because Spanish was on the upswing three decades ago with immigration from Latin America booming in the decade between 1970 and 1980. Now, kids are encouraged to learn Chinese dialects like Mandarin as the future of business is believed to be held by that country's 1.35 billion residents.

Suddenly, the concept behind Esperanto makes perfect sense. Why struggle with the gutteral German or search fruitlessly for someone who understands Arabic or pay big for a Chinese interpreter if we all knew Esperanto, the common language?

Yes, it's more than a punchline for Leno. Esperanto was conceived more than 120 years ago as a way for people from different regions to communicate. In fact, the first Esperanto Society was established in Boston 107 years ago today. Of course it was adopted by the brainy intellectuals, probably as a parlor trick of sorts, but it was also learned by many Europeans as a way to overcome regional dialects and is spoken by about 2 million today.

Yet Esperanto doesn't show up as one of the languages spoken by the nearly 6 million who call Massachusetts home. And to put it in perspective, English is the third-most spoken language in the world, far behind the 1.1 billion who speak some form of Chinese and 366,000,000 who speak Hindi and barely holding on against the continued spread of Spanish, which is spoken by 322,000,000-358,000,000.

Of course it's early to throw in the towel on Esperanto. Just think: a few hundred years ago, nobody in Massachusetts spoke English, they spoke Wampanoag or Mohegan or Mahican.  A hundred years ago, English was just one of many languages heard on the streets of Boston as a wave of European immigration washed over the city. Next: Chinese? Suddenly the common tongue of Esperanto makes more sense than ever.