English is burdened with a culture that emphasize empirialism, capitalism, individualism and so on. A culture that ignores climate catostraphy, global inequality and brings disproportionate attention to countries with english as national language. Additionally english is the language of Trump, Boris Johnson, Margareth Thatcher and George Bush jr… Protest the english language by embracing esperanto.
Break language segregation! Today, the world is segregated by language. It is very resource heavy to learn a new ethnic language.
Esperanto is like other constructed languages made to be easy to learn through consistent grammer, phonetics and morphemes. You know how to pronounce a sentence. You can determine the type of word by looking at the last letter. Even if you havent seen a particular word before, the chances are that you can predict its meaning if you know the morphemes. It is estimated that it requires a tenth in time investment to learn esperanto compares to ethnic languages.
The world language is political and it enables english imperialism.
Look up your local esperanto group. Learn it. Talk about it. With collegues, friends, acquantances and family. Engage your local community. Influence!
Some useful resources: Dictionary https://lernu.net/vortaro ActivityPub https://esperanto.masto.host Nice esperanto course: Kurso de Esperanto
Lojban also has all these nice features, but better. It’s a newer, more sophisticated effort to do basically the same thing. It has some important good features that esperanto lacks.
There is a serious argument to make lojban the lingua-franca of the EU, to replace English. This would abort the erosion of the local languages. If the EU mandates that everybody learns lojban at school instead of english, it becomes a common second-language to everyone and a first language to no-one. Much more satisfactory situation.
I think it is great that you bring up lojban. This brings more nuance to the discussion.
I have not looked into lojban, could you describe some of the features you like that esperanto lacks?
I’ll look into it myself to get some impressions.
But that being said, constructed languages like these are very easy to learn. I don’t necessarily believe that we should only embrace a single conlang. Each language might have their own unique advantage over other constructed languages.
Could you give an article on this? Sounds potentially very interesting.
It’s a more modern attempt to do the same thing. I can skim wikipedia to find the main differences:
But TBH it doesn’t matter which one is chosen. The important thing is to agree on one constructed language, and create a large international body of speakers - larger than the body of English speakers.
Later on, it will be easy to refine the language, or switch to a different one.
And here is an actual list from the lojban wiki:
Lojban: