Petitioning United Nations to recognize Esperanto as the international language

Every couple of years World Esperanto Association (UEA) makes a statement at United Nations to pay more attention to linguistic inequality and (at least a couple of years ago) to consider teaching Esperanto as per UNESCO’s recommendation in 1985. Usually nothing happens out of it. UEA is an NGO registered with United Nations, but there are many NGOs and many things they ask for.

Now, I have just discovered that there is an internet petition to United Nations to recognize Esperanto as the international language. Already, more than 4500 people signed.

It would be interesting to see how far it will get and what will come out of it, even if just as an indication of how many people are actively looking out for Esperanto issues.

I have voted, because I think that in some cases Esperanto is a much better option to teach than English. Or at least as an option before English/French/etc.

For example, if a piecekeeping missing is established in an area where natives don’t speak English/French/Spanish/etc. and the local language is difficult as well, teaching Esperanto for communication purposes would be much faster and more effective than trying to teach English or even fight for the limited number of interpreters available. At the moment, I believe these situations are treated as effectively unresolvable and the high costs and slow process caused are taken as granted. Esperanto might be just the right outside-the-square solution for this.

Tags: esperanto, languages