Esperanto

Esperanto is a constructed (or 'artificial') language created by L.L. Zamenhof in the 1870s and 1880s. Zamenhof envisaged Esperanto as an artificial lingua franca that would facilitate easier global communication. Despite this, he chose to derive much of its vocabulary from Romance and other Indo-European language families such as Germanic and Slavic.

Ido is a constructed language which has been derived from Esperanto.

Grammar

Esperanto grammar is very regular. For example, there is only one conjugated form of the verb and no grammatical gender, so all nouns have the same article (la). All nouns end in -o in the subject form and in -on in the object form, while all adjectives end in -a (subject form) or in -an (object form). Moreover, most antonyms of a word are formed just by adding the prefix mal- to the original word. So nova means for example "new", while malnova means old.

Esperanto grammar includes features which are rare in European languages. One example is the explicit distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs, i.e. verbs with or without a direct object. For example, while la domo brulas means 'the house burns', mi bruligas la domon means 'I burn the house', incorporating -ig- into the verb to redundantly indicate that the verb has an object. Similarly, since word order can also indicate the role a word or phrase plays in a sentence, the -n indicating the accusative case is redundant.

Use

Today, the users of the languages number at least in the tens of thousands, of whom a few have been identified as native speakers. However, the dominance of several natural languages in the world, especially English, has meant that Esperanto is yet to emerge as a true global tongue.

For Esperanto speakers there are several international organizations, of which the Universal Esperanto Association is the most important. Moreover, there also exists literature and music in Esperanto as well as Esperanto radio stations.