Since the passage of Loi 101 over 30 years ago, all advertising in the province of Québec must be in French, all signs must have French lettering that is bigger and more prominent than any other language, and anyone can insist on being served or spoken to in French.
While tourism flourishes in Montréal, and English and French generally co-exist peacefully in the city most of the time, violators of the law protecting French are routinely brought to justice. Esperanto speakers might well fear running afoul of the official language law, because over the years they have been persecuted for subversive activities in a number of countries.
But while the goal of Esperanto is to achieve peace and understanding through an artificial language, not a natural one like French, Montréal is actually rolling out the red carpet for the Esperanto conference-goers, an indication that French Canadians will support any language that’s challenging the position of English as a global language.
Québec’s language police will be watching conference-goers closely, to make sure they don’t commit subversive acts, like torching a deux-chevaux, j-walking, or PDE, public displays of Esperanto.
Montréalers must have sensed that they are in no danger from Esperanto. While it claims to be culturally neutral, favoring no language over any other, 80% of Esperanto’s vocabulary is drawn from the romance languages, so Canadians can safely treat Esperanto like just any other variety of French, like Cajun, Creole, or even Québecois itself.
Even so, things aren’t rosy for Esperanto. The official color of Esperanto is green, as we see in the t-shirt below. The theme of the Pan-American Esperanto Congress is green as well – conference sessions will focus on sustainability, both for the environment and for Esperanto. And, while both need all the help they can get, the language may actually be in more danger than the planet..
The earth, which is about 4.55 billion years old (+/- 5 million years), is being threatened by global warming, pollution, nuclear weapons, religious fanatics, and the subprime mortgage crisis. But the language whose goal is to save the planet is likely to disappear long before the planet it’s designed to protect.
It’s not Québec’s language law that threatens Esperanto. The impact of official language legislation pales in comparison to the threat of indifference that Esperanto faces not just from Canadians but from most of the world’s population.
The language has anywhere from a few hundred thousand to a million or more speakers world-wide, but only 200 of them made the journey to Montréal. More people are likely to show up at Star Trek convention, or a sale at Best Buy.
Those disappointing numbers suggest that Esperantists are just hobbyists who have glommed onto a particularly obscure hobby, like collecting Edsels or solving Rubik’s cube. Despite the occasional claim that a family is raising its children to speak Esperanto from birth, Esperanto’s no one’s native language: each generation of Esperanto speakers has to learn the language from teachers and books, just like they learn any second language.
And as with any language learned in school, students have to be convinced that Esperanto will be useful before they’ll make the effort to master it. Since almost everybody in the world goes through their day without encountering any Esperanto at all, it’s difficult to convince students that the language can serve any practical purpose for them.
As for the claim that Esperanto can lead to world peace, well, natural languages haven’t done much to foster peace, so what’s to say that a constructed language like Esperanto can do any better? And why not one of the other artificial languages, like Ido, Volapük, Novial, or Europanto? And sure, someone could decide to hold a peace conference in Esperanto. But what if nobody came?
Plus, it turns out that the language which is supposed to bring about world peace is itself not entirely free of conflict. Esperantists have spread the rumor that, unlike natural languages, they have no dialects, proof that they are able to agree on something as basic as the rules of language. But Esperanto factions have arisen. Conservatives, seeking to keep their language pure and undefiled, measure Esperanto correctness in terms of the rules laid out by the language’s creator over 120 years ago. In contrast, modernists embrace linguistic change, pushing Esperanto in a more international direction to make it more accessible to non-Europeans.
What’s worse, though, is that even if Esperanto could make good on the promise of peace, that’s probably not enough to get the world to adopt it. World peace is certainly desirable, but having to learn a new language to achieve it, well that’s just something most people are not going to be willing to do.
William Shatner and Ann Atmar speak only Esperanto in the 1965 sci-fi cult classic “Incubus.” In the film, Esperanto has absolutely nothing to do with either universal communication or world peace. It’s just there to make the actors sound like aliens. The movie is subtitled, but that’s not the only reason why it flopped. If someone had managed to invent the Star Trek Universal Translator for the film, Shatner wouldn’t have to appear today in all those priceline commercials.