PAU Catalunya –A Language for All
IH-014-643
PAU Practice Examination (Catalunya)
A Language for All
The European Union has over 20 official languages, as well as more than 60 regional and minority
languages, which results in an enormous amount of money being spent every day on translations and
interpreting. The Swiss economist François Grin was asked to look into this issue, and in 2005, he
published a report which concluded, not surprisingly, that using just one country’s language – only
German, for example – would give an unfair advantage to speakers of that language. Moreover, if the
EU chose three languages that would still be unfair on the many other countries whose language was
not chosen. The best option, the report concludes, would be to use a “constructed language” – that is,
an artificial language which has been specially invented for the purpose of making communication
easier. By far the best-known constructed language is Esperanto. The report concludes that in addition
to the ideological advantages, the adoption of Esperanto would save the European Union an astonishing
25 billion euros a year.
Esperanto was invented in 1877 by L. L. Zamenhof, a Polish eye doctor. It is an artificial language
which aims to facilitate international understanding, co-operation and to promote harmony and peace
between countries. Zamenhof wanted to make learning Esperanto as easy as possible, so its vocabulary
and grammar are simple. Linguists estimate that Esperanto can be learned in 5%-25% of the time
required to learn other languages. For example, one study suggested that French school students would
need to study English for 1,500 hours, but Esperanto for only 150 hours, to reach the same level of
proficiency. That is, for those students it would be ten times easier to learn Esperanto than English. It
has also been shown that learning Esperanto makes it easier to learn a third language. In one study, a
group of students learned Esperanto for one year and then French for three years. At the end of the four
years, they were significantly better at French than a control group which had studied French for all
four years.
Despite all these good reasons for learning Esperanto, the fact remains that it still isn’t spoken by
many people: there are probably only between one to two thousand native speakers of Esperanto – that
is, people who have learned the language as small children from their Esperanto-speaking parents – and
it is estimated that the number of people who have “some knowledge” of Esperanto is probably only
somewhere between one and two million speakers at the most. In contrast, there are about 400 million
native English-speakers and perhaps 1.1 billion people speak it as a secondary language. The problem
for Esperanto is one of co-ordination – it is an idea which can only really work if a lot of people adopt
it simultaneously. There is no point in learning Esperanto unless many other people do as well. Zamenhof
himself said that it might take “many centuries” for Esperanto to become a universal language.
to result in: comportar
to look into: estudiar, investigar
unfair: injust / injusto
to aim to: tenir com a objectiu / tener el objetivo de
proficiency: competència / competencia
