IT is a no-holds-barred battle to be recognised as the world’s global language and the smiley faces appear to be winning hands down. Esperanto has the venerable pedigree and heavyweight academic background but Emoji has a pizazz and youthful vitality that effortlessly captures the popular vote.
Statistics tell the story better than words: there are estimated to be around two million Esperanto speakers worldwide while more than six billion Emojis are exchanged online every day.
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Of course, neither of the big E’s compares to national languages where Chinese comes out on top with 1.2bn native speakers. Spanish comes second with 400m native speakers, edging English with 360m native speakers, unless you count another 500m who have it as a second language while only around 125m have Spanish as their second language.
It is the second language spot that both Emoji and Esperanto aspire to. The reason Emoji thrives – not to mention being a suitable subject for big budget Hollywood films – is that it is easy for anyone to understand and operate.
The reason that Esperanto is just about clinging on is that it depends on learning a basic 900-word vocabulary with associated grammatical constructions that are not instantly intuitive. According to some, Esperanto may be 10 times easier to learn than other languages with no genders or complex verb endings, but you still have to put the work in to learn it in the first place.
Vyvyan Evans, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, Washington DC and author of the Emoji Code, puts it simply when he explains that Emojis, which are celebrated with World Emoji Day on Wednesday, are capable of endowing an otherwise emotionless text message with layers of complexity that help to better frame an actual face-to-face encounter in a digital context.
“70% of the meaning of an oral conversation comes from non-verbal cues,” Evans says. “Emojis add personality to the text and generate empathy among users, an essential thing for effective communication.”
In other words, the little single character glyphs seriously influence how a message should be interpreted, adding invaluable information about nuance, mood, intonation, sarcasm that is not present in the bare text. In many cases text (i.e. old fashioned words) is not necessary at all.
If it sounds simplistic, it is because it is supposed to be and hundreds more emojis are included in the official canon each year once approved by a joint committee set up by Apple, Facebook, Google and other internet monoliths. It is also universal because, while there will always be cultural differences, a smiley or a sad face in one country has the same meaning as a smiley or a sad face in any other.
Emojis haven’t taken long to challenge for the high ground of the world’s dominant language as the global population expands. They have evolved from emoticons (emotion + icon) which were first proposed by Emeritus Professor Scott Falham of the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science in 1982. He proposed an arrangement of punctuation symbols to add “richness” to emails, such as “:-)” and “:-(“.
These evolved into modern-day Emojis via a Japanese computer scientist called Shigetaka Kurita who developed some icons for his company’s mobile internet in 1998. Emoji is Japanese for picture or pictograph.
Esperanto has a more long-standing claim to be a global language, long pre-dating the digital age. Its strongest argument is that it offers a grammatical system where Emoji has none, just picture labels to accompany the meat of the message. Emoji enthusiasts point to the publication of books like Moby Dick and Alice in Wonderland in Emoji, not grammar as we know it but products of unconventional thinking.
Ludwig Zamenhof was thinking out of the box when in 1887 he first published his grammar of a new global language under the pseudonym Dr Esperanto, a name that soon caught on for the language, not the person. It means Dr Hopeful.
He was a practising ophthalmologist at the time but had been immersed since birth in a melting pot of overlapping languages and cultural traditions. He was born into a Jewish family in the town of Bialystok, then part of the Russian Empire but now in eastern Poland. He spoke Yiddish, Russian and Polish but he was soon to learn Hebrew, German, French, Greek and Latin. What he experienced as a polyglot boy convinced him a universal language was the solution to a litany of linguistic mistakes and misunderstandings that prevented peaceful co-existence of peoples and cultures. He wrote down the grammatical principles of his new language while he was still at school. His motivation could not have been more lofty and idealistic: world peace underpinned by a common language spoken by all mankind.
Once published his ideas spread quickly and were widely promoted. The first International Esperanto Congress was held in 1905, Zamenhof was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1910, but as the spectre of world war loomed mankind had other priorities and the momentum behind Esperanto’s initial surge in popularity faded and never really recovered.
Zamenhof’s legacy lives on though, the hope remains. There are many monuments and streets named after him in mostly European cities. Stubborn Esperanto-speaking enthusiasts celebrate Zamenhof Day on December 15 each year.
There are even some persistent roots remaining in the unlikely soil of Scotland, where the Scottish Esperanto Association (Esperanto-Asocio de Skotlando) carries a smouldering torch. Their latest Congress was held at the Robertson Arms Hotel in Carnwath earlier this year. In 2020 their 115th Congress will be in Inverness. The year after that the International Congress is planned for Belfast.
Numbers are falling but the SEA still has between 20 and 30 signed up members.
“Esperantists and Emoji-users are doing different things,” says Hugh Reid, SEA president. “There is no real competition between them. For a start it is a voice medium and you have to appreciate that Esperanto doesn’t seek to compete with English and French and German and other national languages. It was devised not to supplant people’s native language but to be in addition to it as a common second language.”
It may never have achieved that goal but neither has it died away. “Our numbers in the association are declining but more and more young people are taking up Esperanto through online courses that are now available,” Reid says. “So it is hard to put a clear figure on numbers but safe to say Esperanto is pretty much holding its own after all this time.”
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