Have you ever heard of La lingvo internacia?. Perhaps it will be easier to recognise by its most common name: Esperanto.
Esperanto is probably the most famous conlang, a Constructed International Auxiliary Language (although not the only one!), where 'constructed' basically means somebody invented it. That person was the Polish ophthalmologist Ludwik Łazarz Zamenhof (a.k.a. Doctor Esperanto) who believed an international language would lead humanity towards a world in peace.
Zamenhof began working on the idea for his 'language of hope' while he was still in school, back in 1873, and he finally published it in his Doctor Esperanto's International Language or Unua Libro, probably influenced by 'World Speak' or Volapük (another conlang, invented by Martin Schleyer, a German Catholic priest).
Doctor Esperanto designed his conlang by picking common elements among Western Indo-European languages. In this way, Esperanto's syntax and vocabulary would be easier for Westerners to learn. But, of course, this ignored Western speakers of non-Indo-European languages, such as Euskara, Hungarian, Estonian, Finnish or basically any speaker of any language outside of the Indo-European family anywhere else in the world. So much for an international language!
Jokes aside, his idea was revolutionary and not only it opened the gates for invented-language enthusiasts, but he developed an incredible tool to improve foreign language acquisition.
How come??
The Paderborn Method: A language acquisition experiment using Esperanto!
Hypothesized back in 1922 and tested several times in Great Britain, Finland and some other Central-European countries, Esperanto was considered and tested as a tool for language acquisition with apparently great results. But it was in the late 1970's when the Paderborn Experiment took place.
Named after the University of Paderborn and directed by Professor Helmar Frank at the Institute of Pedagogic Cybernetics, The Paderborn Experiment consisted in teaching a simple language (Esperanto) to a group of students for a definite period of time and check whether that improved their second language acquisition in comparison to another group that didn't study the language.
The Paderborn experiment results:
Although at first sight one could interpret the results as a great success (obviously Group B improved at second language acquisition) there is space for debate and controversy.
In this case, the student's first language was German and their target language was English. Both languages belong to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages and share lots of characteristics in terms of grammar and vocabulary. On the other hand, as we saw before, Esperanto was constructed using different elements of Western Indo-European languages and therefore it shares many characteristics with both English and German. This could lead to the conclusion that learning Esperanto could probably help with second language acquisition when the target language was any of the Western Indo-European languages Esperanto was build with, but it wouldn't work as effectively for speakers of other non-Indo-European languages like Chinese whose target language was Japanese, for instance.
Conclusions
Learning Esperanto may improve the learning process of languages in the Indo-European family, specially those in the same branch as the learner's mother-tongue. However, learning Esperanto did show an increase in metalinguistic awareness thanks to its easier grammar and structure and the similarity of its vocabulary to those of other Indo-European languages.
References and further reading
The Paderborn Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paderborn_method
Esperanto as an International Auxiliary Language. https://ia800909.us.archive.org/15/items/esperantoasinter00leagrich/esperantoasinter00leagrich.pdf
Esperanto as a tool in classroom foreign language learning in England.
Charters, D: Teaching and learning of Esperanto.
Esperanto: The Wonderful Horrible History of the Universal Language. Owlcation.com
Quale lingua prima? Per un esperimento CEE che utilizzi l'esperanto.
Comentarios