Esperanto - The Language of Diplomacy and Equality that Could Have Been

By: Julian Olsen-Pendergast

The year was 1887. The world, as always, was a mess. Borders sliced and diced nations into fragile pieces, and people clung to their tiny patches of identity like lifeboats in a storm. Language? That was just another weapon—an excuse to misunderstand, distrust, and, if you were unlucky, go to war. But somewhere in the tangled stew of the Russian Empire, there was a guy who had the guts to dream of something better. His name was Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof, and he thought he could save us all with a language—a single, easy-to-learn way to talk to one another that would make borders meaningless and people, well, more human. This is the story of Esperanto, the little language that almost rewrote history.

Zamenhof wasn’t your typical savior figure. He was an eye doctor from Białystok—a place where Russian, Polish, Yiddish, and German all duked it out for supremacy. It wasn’t a melting pot; it was more like an overheated kettle, always on the edge of boiling over. Zamenhof, a linguistic prodigy who spoke over ten languages, couldn’t stop noticing how the chaos of communication seemed to breed mistrust and resentment. As he put it, "I was taught that all people were brothers, and this was always a great torment to my infant mind." Yeah, he was the kind of guy who’d say something like that.

At 28, Zamenhof decided to fix the world the only way he knew how: by building a better language. Something neutral. Something simple. Something anyone, anywhere, could pick up and use to say, “Hey, I’m just like you.” The result was Esperanto—a language so streamlined it was practically bulletproof. Its grammar? Three tenses—past, present, future. None of those pesky gendered nouns you find in German or Spanish. Words worked like Lego bricks: nouns ended in -o, adjectives in -a, adverbs in -e, and you could snap on prefixes and suffixes to mix and match meanings. Libera (free) could morph into malliberejo (prison) with a few tweaks. It was elegant. It was easy. It was revolutionary.

When Zamenhof dropped his invention in 1887 through a book called Unua Libro (First Book), he did so under the pen name "Dr. Esperanto," meaning “The One Who Hopes.” Hope was the right word because, at first, nobody cared. Zamenhof even tried to rally people with a pledge: learn Esperanto once 10 million others promised to do the same. (Spoiler: they didn’t.) But slowly, the idea began to catch fire. A few thousand brave souls signed up.

By the early 20th century, Esperanto wasn’t just a language—it was a movement. Clubs sprang up across Europe, hosting meetups and printing magazines. Big-name thinkers—Leo Tolstoy, Pope Pius X, even J.R.R. Tolkien—gave it the nod. Annual Esperanto conferences kicked off in 1905 and quickly became the Woodstock of their time for dreamers and idealists.

For a moment, it seemed like Esperanto might actually pull it off. In 1920, Iran proposed making it the official language of diplomacy at the League of Nations. This was it: the big time. But France, terrified of losing its spot as the world’s linguistic VIP, shut the whole thing down with a veto. That was the moment—the one where history tipped in the other direction.

Then came the real darkness. Totalitarian regimes have a way of crushing anything that smells like hope, and Esperanto’s internationalist vibe made it an easy target. Hitler called it a "Jewish plot," and Nazi Germany hunted down its speakers. Stalin wasn’t a fan either; Esperanto enthusiasts in the USSR were shipped off to gulags or simply disappeared. Even Franco’s Spain kept tabs on Esperanto’s underground gatherings.

But the language didn’t die—it refused to. In Nazi concentration camps, prisoners taught Esperanto to each other, disguising it as Italian to fool the guards. It was a small rebellion, but it mattered.

After World War II, though, the world had a new favorite lingua franca: English. Esperanto faded to the margins, a quirky relic of a forgotten dream. And yet, it never really went away. The internet, that great equalizer, gave Esperanto a second shot at life. By 2015, over a million people were studying it on Duolingo. Online forums and YouTube channels brought the language to a new generation of curious souls.

Today, Esperanto lives on—not as the world-changer Zamenhof imagined but as a vibrant, eccentric subculture. Somewhere between 200,000 and 2 million people speak it, including a lucky few who grew up with it as their native tongue. They gather at conferences, swap stories, and keep the dream alive.

Zamenhof’s vision was to create a world where understanding each other was easy, where language wasn’t a barrier but a bridge. Could Esperanto have succeeded if the world had given it a chance? Maybe. Maybe not. Even the simplest systems have a way of getting messy.

What’s undeniable is this: Esperanto was a gutsy experiment, a testament to one man’s belief that words could change the world. It didn’t become the global language, but it became a symbol—a reminder that we can, and should, try to communicate better. In the end, Esperanto wasn’t a miracle cure for humanity’s problems. But it dared to dream. And for that, it’s earned its little corner of history.