International Auxiliary Language – Necessity.

International Auxiliary Language – Necessity

International Auxiliary Language, the IAL need, current linguistic chaos in the world.

Human language is based on the ability of human beings to express their experiences and communicate them to others through linguistic signs, usually sound sequences, but also gestures and signs, as well as graphic signs.

Human communication was initially only verbal and gestural, transmitting the knowledge and experiences of each individual to their descendants by oral tradition. The emergence of writing allowed man to fix this knowledge more permanently, which led to accumulation of knowledge that contributed to the progress of mankind.

The diversity of languages in the world has been, and still is, a barrier to human communication in the most diverse fields, both culturally and commercially. In ancient times the communication between peoples speaking different languages was very limited, generally restricted to the commercial field. They were the merchants who, in search of a profit, traveled to buy goods in one place and sell them in another where those products didn’t exist. For the communication, they learned a very elementary vocabulary and some basic grammatical constructions, enough to be understood, without much concern about its grammatical correctness.

The colonial expansion spread some European languages by wide areas of the planet through the evangelizing action of the monks or through the schools implanted in the colonies. In Europe, the diplomatic language for several centuries has been French and the commercial language English.

It is in the twentieth century, when the ease of communication and transportation, the internationalization of business and cultural exchanges or collaborations have made international communication a problem of the utmost importance. It is estimated that there are more than 7000 languages or dialects in the world, where more than 90% do not reach 100,000 speakers. There are only 23 languages with more than 50 million speakers, among which there are several spoken in large regions of China or India other than the official language of those countries. Only in Europe 255 languages are spoken, of which 128 are in danger of extinction. There are 24 official languages in the European Union.

Confronting this linguistic chaos, one could wonder how it is possible that, at a time when we are seeing normalization in many fields in order to allow international exchange, we do not have a global common language of communication. In the 19th century the Decimal Metric System was created, which meant uniformity of weights and measures in Europe, eliminating hundreds of different measures in each country, or even regions or cities. This modernization brought not only the uniformity of weights and measures, but also a rationalization of the multiples and divisors that substantially facilitated mercantile calculations. Today the decimal metric system, renamed International System of Units in 1960, is adopted all over the world with the exception of the United Kingdom and United States, where curiously in some States coexist officially the two systems.

In a world as much interdependent as it is today, it’s inconceivable that a logical solution to the problem of a common language has not yet been found. When there are so many experts in any field of science, technology or culture, why not put to work a team of experts to find a definitive and universal solution. It should be noted that there are already many projects developed in that sense, such as Esperanto and Interlingua. In 1922, the Third Assembly of the League of Nations accepted a report on Esperanto as an international auxiliary language, in which it was recognized as a "living language of easy learning". The French delegate Gabriel Hanotaux was the only one to veto Esperanto as a working language as a threat to French, the international language at that time.

The need for an international auxiliary language is evident. It’d be an auxiliary language that wouldn’t exclude any of the other existing languages, and should also have the following characteristics:

- Learnability. - An international auxiliary language should be easy to learn, with a simple grammar and without exceptions, where each letter corresponds to a sound.

- Familiarity.- It should include a vocabulary and grammatical structure familiar to as many speakers as possible.

- Neutrality. - It should be neutral both linguistically and culturally in relation with the existing languages.

- Expressive.- It should have the necessary vocabulary to express with enough precision and nuances the same concepts of a natural language, but improving accuracy that eliminates ambiguities.

-Flexible.- It should have the necessary flexibility to allow a literary use giving freedom to sentence construction.

- Clarity.- The terms used and the construction of the sentences should offer clear concepts without the ambiguity sometimes existing in the natural languages.

An international auxiliary language should be easily assimilated by most students. Being a language of all, but of no particular country, all citizens would be in equal opportunities in their learning and use. The advantages of their learning are evident in light of data from the study by The Institute of Cybernetic Pedagoy in Paderborn (Germany). According to this study, the time required for Francophone students to reach an equivalent level in the following languages is a strong argument for the adoption of an international auxiliary language:

German: 2000 hours

English: 1500 hours

Italian: 1000 hours

Esperanto: 150 hours

Accepted the fact of the need to have an international auxiliary language, it can be considered if the solution is to adopt some of the existing languages or use a new built one.

Within the languages spoken today, they try to impose English as a common language, based on the fact that it’s the language of the dominant economic and technological power of our time. English is studied in most schools as the first foreign language because it is the most spoken language in the developed world, just as Windows is adopted for being the O.S. more used, which it doesn’t imply that it is the best one.

In its favor has the fact of having a relatively simple grammar, but against the complexity of its spelling and pronunciation, the innumerable exceptions, irregularities and constructions of its own, as phrasal verbs, only mastered by natives.

First of all we must clarify what we mean by “speaking English”. If we only want is to take a tourist trip and understand people at an A1 level, we can admit that it is an easy language. If the objective is to communicate with others in a purely technical domain, where the effectiveness of the work are mostly calculations and technical solutions in the field of engineering or any other scientific domain, with a B2 level may enough. But if we aspire to a managerial position where communication is an essential element in conjunction with technical knowledge, then speaking is essential. This level of communication is not easily reached, not to say that it is in fact very difficult to reach for most students, unless they were born in polyglot family or had an English governess in their infancy.

To accept English as an international auxiliary language is to admit the relative advantage of English speakers, who with no effort will be in a privileged position in relation to native speakers of another language. The principle of neutrality is broken, while we should all start from the same position.

On the other hand only the economic elite will be able to attend an university in an English-speaking country, which will mean that the privileged ones of the country will perpetuate itself as such elite, stopping the promotion of the less favored classes. And yet, that study doesn’t guarantee a total command of the language. Fluency is possibly achieved but never the command of a native. We can’t ignore the enormous amount of resources flowing to these English-speaking countries in terms of university fees from foreign students, as well as the cultural dependence that this entails.

The stark reality is that, the vast majority of people who study English will never reach a real C1 level, despite spending a significant amount of time of their lives and a not negligible amount of money.