The Price of a Neutral Tongue

When the founders of this Republic chose Esperanto as the federal language, they were not choosing a winner. They were, deliberately and with some melancholy, choosing a language that belonged to no region and therefore to all of them equally. The Spanish of Tierra Verde, the English of Costa Mar's administrative corridors, the Scandinavian cadences of Nord Europa, the layered tongues of Oriente Moderno — each was set aside at the federal threshold, not abolished, but asked to wait outside while the common business of the Republic proceeded in a constructed grammar that no citizen had inherited from a grandmother.

That arrangement has served us well in the Federal Assembly, in the courts of Meridian, in the daily work of the Federal Translation Centre, whose translators move between six or seven working languages before noon. It has prevented the quiet dominance that comes when one natural language is elevated above others — the slow erosion of dignity that follows when a citizen must conduct her most serious affairs in a tongue she learned as a second or third language while her neighbour conducts the same affairs in his mother tongue. Esperanto levels that particular field.

But we should not pretend the field is perfectly level. Esperanto is itself a learned language, and it is not learned equally. Citizens in regions where formal education has longer invested in its teaching arrive at federal institutions with a fluency that citizens from more recently integrated communities do not share. The neutrality of the language does not neutralise the inequalities of access to it. The Federal Translation Centre exists precisely to bridge that gap, and we believe it is underfunded for the scale of the task.

What we ask of the Federal Assembly, as it prepares its budget review this autumn, is a frank accounting of where Esperanto fluency is weakest among our citizens and what investment would be required to close that distance within a generation. A neutral tongue is only as neutral as the conditions under which it is taught. The motto of this Republic — Uneco en Diverseco — is not a description of what we have achieved. It is a direction of travel. We should be honest about how far we still have to go.