Abstract

Sceptics of the international planned language Esperanto have recently raised objections to its neutrality and simplicity. Among other things, they prognosticate that in the case of Esperanto’s widespread dissemination, the number of native speakers will grow enormously and that the planned language will become increasingly irregular and borrow massively from English. Drawing on findings from case study and corpus analysis research, the authors suggest that such predictions, lacking the support of empirical data, are not based on a correct evaluation of the realities of Esperanto communication and are no more than speculation.