Broadcast Sunday 28 October 2001 Australian Broadcasting Corporation
with Robyn Williams

Summary:

Kep Enderby Q.C., former Supreme Court judge and former Attorney General in the Australian federal government, makes the case for Esperanto, an international language that was launched more than 100 years ago in the hope that it would help to solve the world's language communication problem.

Transcript:
 

Robyn Williams: With all the new communications technology the world has become a village. I wonder whether anyone believes that now. We can certainly exchange messages with only the flick of a switch and reach privileged friends all over the world but there is still about a third of humanity who’ve not made phone calls ever, let alone played with the Internet.

So how do you make contact with other cultures in these difficult times? Kep Enderby QC has a suggestion. He’s a former Supreme Court judge and Federal Cabinet Minister as well as President of the Universal Esperanto Association. Kep Enderby.

Kep Enderby: Because many Australians have not even heard of Esperanto, I have to begin by saying it is an international language that was launched on the world more than 100 years ago in the hope that it would help solve the world’s communication problem. It is a language intended to serve as a neutral, fair, and relatively easy to learn lingua franca for people belonging to different language communities, people who otherwise would be unable to talk or communicate with each other.

The goal of the early pioneers of Esperanto was simple: People should cease fighting amongst themselves because of their national differences. Those belonging to different nations and espousing different religions should strive to understand one another. All people should try to do that on the basis of complete equality between nations, cultures and languages. As part of that, they believed that a neutral non-national language such as Esperanto was necessary.

Speaking about a totally different although related matter, one of our best known judges, Justice Michael Kirby, recently pleaded that one of the aims of our education system should be to produce a just, participatory, democratic and egalitarian society in Australia.

I want to make the same plea about the world at large, about the role played by understanding and tolerance and the ability to communicate, and language generally, in achieving a similar desirable social condition throughout our multinational, multi-religious, multicultural and multi-language world.

The attacks on America demonstrate how woefully inadequate is our appreciation of the difficulties in acquiring that understanding, that tolerance and that ability to communicate, particularly between people of different cultures.

Let me first describe what has provoked these thoughts.

During the last 12 years I have in turn been President of the Australian Esperanto Association and President of UEA, which is based in Rotterdam, in Holland. In those capacities I have participated in some 31 world congresses in some 20 different countries. Those congresses brought people together from more than 100 different countries, most having different first languages. Many held differing political and religious views. Without a common language or a mass of interpreters to help them, together with a strong belief in the importance of dialogue in overcoming differences, such congresses would have been impossible.

During the 12 years I became President of probably the world’s smallest lawyers’ association: the Esperanta Jura Asocio, which has members in 17 different countries. The systems of law represented are different, and most of us have different first languages.

By means of email, I receive between 20 and 30 messages daily from people in almost every part of the world, the topics varying enormously. 

Language is something we tend to take for granted as a basic means of communication. What we often forget is that language is also a great barrier to communication. It separates us from those who speak other languages and helps give us a separate identity.

The seriousness of this becomes clear when we remember that the peoples of the world between them use some 6,000 different languages. Some languages are used by great numbers of people, the majority by relatively small numbers.

Apart from the barrier aspect, what has been driven in on me during the 12 years is the extent to which a language like English has become hegemonic and how often that is resented. Other widely used languages, like Chinese or Hindi or Spanish are not internationally hegemonic, except in very limited parts of the world.

We all know that the ability to use language well is a significant factor in the acquisition of social status and wealth, and the gaining of political and economic power and influence. The same applies to language on the international scene. A multiplicity of languages not only creates barriers, it creates feelings in people using one language that they are different from people using another language. It reinforces and strengthens the power and influence of those who are fluent in the hegemonic language. It creates feelings of inadequacy and frustration in those using other languages.

Taken to its extreme, it can offend our notions of democracy and egalitarianism.

Applied to the world at large, it puts a brake on any extension of Justice Kirby’s pleading for a just, participatory, democratic, egalitarian Australia.

Awareness of this negative, barrier-type aspect of language varies enormously from country to country. The awareness varies depending on whether or not the people being considered belong to a large language group for whom there is less disadvantage, or whether to a small language group where the disadvantage is much greater.

The difference is very stark and when one thinks about a person whose first language is, say, one of the more than a thousand different languages of Papua New Guinea, when such a person wants to communicate with the outside world. A recent example of this type of relevance is the question of what should be the official language of East Timor? Should it be English or should it be Portuguese? No-one seriously suggests it be one of East Timor’s indigenous languages.

To further illustrate the differing degrees of awareness, let me describe the special, indeed unique, although from the point of view of being influential, largely irrelevant international events that are the world UEA Esperanto congresses that I have been attending.

The first aim of the congresses is to bring together people who would otherwise not be able to talk to each other so that they can do just that: be able to talk to each other and discuss serious and topical themes. In that, they are very successful.

In their second aim which is to demonstrate to the rest of the world that there is a solution to the world language problem which is Esperanto, they have been unsuccessful. 

With few exceptions, Cuba, Vietnam and Croatia spring to my mind as three, national governments ignore them, the mass media in most countries, (here Japan is the exception) gives them scant attention. Understandably they are most likely to receive attention from government and media in countries where the language of the country concerned is not used by the rest of the world.

Let me return to my last congress, this year’s, which was in Zagreb. The theme of the Congress was, I will say it in English, ‘The culture of dialogue. Dialogue between cultures’, an apt subject in a part of the world where violence and lack of dialogue have been so noticeable in recent years.

A congress I attended the previous year was in another troubled part of the world, Israel. It too had a similar theme, and again in English, ‘Language and the culture of peace.’ In the pursuit of understanding and dialogue, during the Israeli Congress a special seminar was organised in Jordan in which Israeli, Arab and Iranian Esperantists all participated. What a pity that that can’t be done on a wider scale.

Awareness of the inherent unfairness of the world’s linguistic order was particularly obvious in Zagreb where the President of Croatia, Stefan Mesic, came and spoke to the Congress. He ended up speaking in Esperanto but the main body of his speech was in Croatian, interpreted into Esperanto. While obviously very proud of his national language, he eloquently and emotionally described the seriousness of the international communication problem as experienced by Croatians. That awareness was obviously shared by many other Croatians.

Croatia’s population is about a fifth that of Australia. If other things were equal, you would expect to find five times more people attending an Esperanto Congress in Australia than in Croatia. The opposite has been the case.

Notwithstanding its small population, there were more Croatians at the Zagreb Congress than there were Australians when Adelaide hosted a similar Congress in Australia in 1997. 

Some personal experiences I had while in Zagreb may help further illustrate this awareness that I am talking about. 

While I was there, because of a health problem I have, I had to visit a pathology clinic. I can’t speak Croatian, and despite what people think, in Zagreb it is not easy to find someone who can speak English. Nevertheless, without difficulty, I found a doctor and a nurse at a pathology clinic who both spoke Esperanto. That would be most unlikely in Australia.

Another example: On the day after the Zagreb Congress finished, my wife and I visited the Zagreb Archaeological Museum. While wandering around looking at the exhibits, we spoke with a couple of other visitors whom we had overheard speaking to each other in Esperanto. The odds against that happening in Australia are very high.

During the closing ceremony of the Congress, I counted 151 Croatian volunteer helpers whom the organisers called onto the stage so that they could be thanked. They also called some 70 children who had been participating in a simultaneously occurring Esperanto Children’s Congress. Many of these children use Esperanto as a first language. Such numbers are unthinkable in Australia.

It is understandable that we, and English speaking peoples generally, are complacent and indifferent to this world language problem. We are the lucky ones. We believe that if and when we meet the problem, our knowledge of English will help us overcome it. We overlook the fact that it gives us an enormously unfair advantage often resented by others.

If you are wondering what all this has to do with the attacks on America, let me suggest that those attacks should remind us, if we can put aside feelings of vengeance and punishment and rooting out of evil, whatever that last reference may mean, that there are many in the world who do not see themselves as living and sharing in the kind of just, participatory, democratic and egalitarian society that Justice Kirby desires for Australia. They are resentful and some are full of hate.

The injustices associated with obscenely different degrees of wealth and other types of social disadvantage that exist in different parts of the world, with millions of refugees seeking havens in which to live, greatly outweigh the language injustices that I have been talking about.

Notwithstanding this, there can be no doubt that as globalisation proceeds apace, if the communication problem remains as it is, if the difference between rich and poor in the world remains or worsens, every particular feeling of being wronged will worsen others. Religious, cultural and feelings of identity difference will exacerbate. Resentment by the have-nots, with hatred by some, will increase. Religion and ideology will become the means to more and more express that resentment and sometimes hate.

In such a world there will be no culture of dialogue and no dialogue between cultures. We will have more tragedies like those that occurred on 11th September.
 
 

The well known linguistician Robert Phillipson has described one aspect of what I am talking about as Linguistic Imperialism. Another, David Chrystal, confining himself strictly to the language question, has written of Language Death. English is described more and more as a ‘killer language’, killing off other languages and other cultures. In Europe, non-English-speaking members of the European Parliament more and more complain about what is happening. No solutions are ever offered, except of course Esperanto, which keeps being rejected.

A German academic, Ulrich Lins, has been very honest about it all. He says the reality is that proposals for moving to a language level playing field type solution such as Esperanto might offer, are not accepted because the hegemonic great powers do not want such a solution. They do not want it because it would take away one of the advantages that they now have.

The tragedy and pity of it all is that the hegemonic forces I have referred to are the same as those that oppose taking the present international crisis fully and properly to the United Nations. They are the same as those who oppose the strengthening of the United Nations and making it more democratically representative of the peoples of the world. They are the same who refuse to accede to the Kyoto Accord and they are the same that oppose the creation of a neutral, independent, international criminal court.

Thank you.

Robyn Williams: And thank you. Interesting that English, that hegemonic language, as Kep Enderby puts it, turns out to be the hardest one to begin to read. Kep Enderby is a former Supreme Court judge and former President of the Universal Esperanto Association.

Guests:

Kep Enderby Q.C.
Former Supreme Court Judge,
Former Attorney General in the Australian Federal Government,
Sydney