Interlingualism

[ Introduction | Criterias | Strategies | Give points | Result ]

Introduction

In this part you can read about interlingualism and the five related principles and strategies. Later you will have a chance to give points to the different strategies and see the opinions of other participants.

What is interlingualism?

There are many languages spoken by diverse nations and people around the world. From several viewpoints not every (national) language is of equal value today. For example, many must (often against their own will) learn a foreign language to get a job or to study, and not every delegate at the United Nations can speak his/her native language. In the "interlingual" world exists: language diversity (many different languages), language equality (no national language is more important than any other), language integration (many language work together with equal rights), language effectiveness (everyone can communicate with everyone else) and language stability (a system which always works according to the first four principles).

Is interlingualism even desirable or achievable?

Hopefully an "interlingual" world is self-evidently preferred by the majority of humanity. But certainly the majority also thinks that it's not realistic. It would be more difficult to reach language equality and language effectiveness at the same time. If you think that effectiveness is much more important than equality, you are probably not against one of the national languages becoming the "world language", but thinking that equality is very important would not be a good solution, because that language belongs to one or several of the world's people. We, who created this website, think that one non-national, international and neutral language would be a good solution for reaching the "interlingual" world. That language could be Esperanto or another language with similar properties and ideas.

What do you think?

It's important that we discuss interlingualism more and more because the world is becoming "smaller" everyday (many people can travel around the world and the Internet makes distances almost disappear). We hope that you'll want to express what you think about interlingualism and how humanity could reach this in the future! To make this easier, we have created a table where you can give points to the five interlingual strategies based on the five criteria.

More information

Related to the topic of "interlingualism" we recommend the article The interlinguistic challenge by Mark Fettes and Jonathan Pool of the Esperantic Studies Foundation.