After Britain’s historic vote to leave the EU, much discussion has been had over the implications of this exodus and how it relates to the lingua franca of the EU. A senior MEP has said that English will not be an official EU language after Brexit. Other languages have been discussed as possible replacements, such as French, which is currently being pushed by some French politicians. According to the Wall Street Journal, The European Commission has moved to focus on using French and German in communications. Amid this discussion, there have been murmurs of a language known as Esperanto.

What is Esperanto? Esperanto is an international ‘planned’ language designed to be easy to learn, and is already used by millions of people to forge friendships, write books and poems, and communicate and travel around the globe. Esperanto has a strong culture and rich history, filled with conventions, original music, organizations in most countries, along with a steadily growing international community. A website was even released very recently for Esperanto speakers to join in order to link to their accounts on social media and blogs. Esperanto is also the most widely used constructed, or planned, language. And it’s only growing larger and larger, with a literal influx of speakers recently. This is due to an English — Esperanto course that has garnered over 400,000 learners in just the past year alone. Around 1,000 learners join this course every day. What caused so many people to take notice? Well, the course was made on a popular language learning platform called Duolingo. It provides an absolutely free method of language learning that is gamified and fun. Duolingo is the most downloaded education app in the world and has been used in schools — in fact, more people learn languages on Duolingo than in the entire American school system altogether. Duolingo has seen the United States government curious about its potential.

Duolingo’s large userbase has led to many people taking notice of Esperanto. This is why a Spanish — Esperanto course is set to be released, expected to yield similar results to that of the English course. This course precedes more courses hopefully to come in the future. This guarantees a constant flow of learners. So, it’s a great time for someone to pick up the language, especially if that person wants to learn more languages after that, since just two weeks learning Esperanto gets you months ahead in another language. After all, Esperanto takes just months to learn to a comfortable level, it being designed to be several times easier than a natural language, which makes it a great ‘recorder’ of the language world. Despite a decent portion of its roots being European, the system of Esperanto itself makes learning it much easier for everyone.