Lingua Franca English vs Esperanto

When it comes to LFE, I would always recall an artificial language, Esperanto. The questions that would always be called to the fore in the discussion of LFE are “Who owns English?” and “Is it possible to teach the language without imposing the culture from which the language originated and derived?”, for the simple reason that those who ask those questions are knowledgeable about the colonization process with which English had been spread around the world and at the same time very conscious of the imminent threat posed by a possibly sinister conspiracy of soft power exertion in the form of language colonization. This was why and how Esperanto was created.

 Esperanto was created in 1887 by Dr. L. L. Zamenhof of Poland to be a second language that would allow people who speak different native languages to communicate, yet at the same time to retain their own languages and cultural identities. The language is said to be easy for most people to learn, due to it's logical, regular design. For example, Esperanto has 16 regular and exception-free rules of grammar and a regular phonetic spelling. Unlike many other languages, you can depend on the rules to be constantly applied, instead of sporadically. (http://esperanto.org/us/USEJ/world/index.html (Links to an external site.))

 The very fact that no one knew what Esperanto was when I brought it out in our group discussion in an earlier session proves the failure in dissemination of this ideal language that was supposed to be technically easy for everyone to learn without endangering the learners’ original national, ethical, racial or whatever identities. Why was it so? (Would it be easy for me to appeal to God’s intention for explanation after He frustrated Men’s attempt to build a tower to reach Him by confounding their speech?) I can still remember the occasion in which I discussed it with my former academic advisor more than ten years ago, and he explained to me that there was no soil for the seed. By soil, he meant the rich heritage of literacy experiences and practices created, accumulated and exploited by those practitioners: some of them were prominent enough to be immortal in history, such as Shakespeare, Confucius, Dostoyevsky, Marquez and etc.; the majority of them are just you and me. This resonates so much with our understanding of literacy as an in-situ social practice in that any language, however perfectly designed, will not survive and prosper without the iterative and recursive practical process of creation and exploitation.