Uro: A new language for Europe
Why do we need Uro?
I am a proud European. I grew up in the Netherlands. When I was young, I spend my vacations in Spain and France. I studied in Germany, married a Polish girl, and now I am working in an international company with Dutch, Serbian and Portuguese.
That traveling is so easy is also because of the European Union. You can pay in most of the countries with the Euro and you can travel freely across borders.
Although things have progressed economically, I know from my own experience that there are still great differences between countries. One of those differences is language. Every country pretty much speaks its own one.
Lingua franca
After Brexit, it is almost ironic that English stayed the lingua franca of the European Union. On the other hand, it is also a positive thing that each must speak a foreign language to communicate with each other. For science and trade, this also works well, but English remains difficult for many Europeans.
For Dutch or Swedish it’s very common to speak English as a secondary language, in other countries like Spain or Slovakia this isn’t the case. English is a practical language, but it’s far from ideal.
One could argue that the UK had an advantage over other countries because it is their native language. With the Brexit being a fact, one could argue that English as most used language within the European Union is fairer. For all other countries, besides Ireland, it’s not their native language.
That it’s fairer, it does not make it ideal. English as an international language is still in favor of countries which speak it natively. Mainly the US and UK. Also, because it’s a Germanic language, it’s easier to learn it for the speakers in the same language group. Is there an alternative possible?
Imagine
An alternative is easy to imagine. English hasn’t always been the most dominant language. Two centuries ago, French was used much more. Before that, Latin was the preferred international language. And maybe in the future it will be Spanish, Swahili or Chinese. Who knows?
Still, all these languages are connected to a specific country or culture. Couldn’t there be an international language that is more neutral? A language that can be easily learned regardless of their native tongue?
The first thing that comes into mind is Esperanto. Created in Poland, it’s the most popular constructed language in the world. From Wikipedia:
Esperanto was created in the late 1870s and early 1880s by L. L. Zamenhof, a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist from Białystok, then part of the Russian Empire, but now part of Poland. In the 1870s, just a few years before Zamenhof created Esperanto, Polish was banned in public places in Białystok.
According to Zamenhof, he created the language to reduce the “time and labor we spend in learning foreign tongues”, and to foster harmony between people from different countries: “Were there but an international language, all translations would be made into it alone … and all nations would be united in a common brotherhood.”
There have been discussion of making Esperanto an official language of the European Union, but this has not happened. There was some traction among scholars, but national tendencies, no economical or cultural backing and no broad education made its adoption hard.
But it’s not only the backing of the language. The language itself has its design flaws, as for example discussed on this website. Like English is a Germanic language (and thus much easier to learn from another Germanic language like Swedish or Dutch), Esperanto has a Romanic language feel (a lot of words were derived from Latin).
To make it easier to learn, Esperanto also applies very strict rules, for example that nouns must end with the letter “o”. This makes the language very artificial and unnatural. Besides, Esperanto has some very uncommon letters like ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ,ŝ and ŭ. This makes it look strange and doesn’t live up to its simplicity. Another constructed language like Ido doesn’t have this, but this has an even more Romanic-feel than Esperanto.
A current artificial language should be more international and neutral. What if there was a joint effort by the EU to create such language? Alone, from a linguistic point of view, this is interesting. But also from political and social point of view. Could there be a language that is acceptable and learnable by most citizens in Europe?
My approach: Uro
I want to propose a new language, “Uro”. This language uses as much as possible internationalisms. Otherwise, it looks at words that are recognizable for most Europeans or take English as a base.
I will look at the 24 official EU languages as well as Russian, Ukrainian, and Turkish. This covers most of the native speakers in Europe. I’ll try to make the language a bit more logical than natural languages, but I do not pretend to be 100% consistent. Nor am I trying to be. It must have a natural feel.
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