Why do some linguists say negative things about Esperanto?
Linguists are the people best placed to understand the complexities of language. And this may be exactly why so many of them – who are otherwise extremely competent – fail to believe that Esperanto can work as a fully fledged living language, and that it’s worthy of any attention or research. Languages are such complex and delicate things that it seems amazingly unlikely that a genuinely rich, living language could have emerged from one young man’s project. (Zamenhof was 27 when he published Esperanto, having spent more than ten years working on it.) So it’s natural to be sceptical. But if you look into the reality of it, you’ll see that Esperanto works incredibly well for global communication. It would be great if more linguists and researchers decided to study Esperanto and research its community in the future.
