Can you please give me a good argument supporting the idea that Esperanto is NOT a (real) language?

Question

WOW!
Let's see. Navajo is not spoken by a lot of people either. Does that stop it from being a language (or... a REAL language?)

I think the words "good" and "argument" have lost some of their original meaning...

Rabidus... you first give me one link. Okay. That one deals with vocabulary and grammar origins (not being universal), diacritic letters (many languages have diacritics), lack of culture / culturaly European, too large vocabulary, that it is sexist, that it is (or looks or sounds) artificial. But I don't read anything about it not being a language.
Then you edit and give me a link in support of Esperanto. Then you delete it and give me another.. supporting Esperanto!!
I am asking for arguments about it NOT BEING A (REAL) LANGUAGE.

lol Rabidus. While I was adding details you decided to delete the last one. and leave the one that doesn't address the issue. Okay.

Who cares about the goals of the language. I am only looking for reasons of it not being a language!

Answer 1

Maybe you need to define "real"?

Sorry, as I further read the links I posted, I realized they didn't pertain. I thought the Wiki article contained enough info that a reasonably intelligent person could use for creating their own argument...

You aren't going to find a GOOD argument for it not being a real language - too many people speak it for it not to be real.
Prof. Culbert of Washington University concluded that Esperanto has about two million speakers worldwide.

That makes it pretty real...

I did manage to find ONE article that supports that it is not a language - the NYC Board of Schools says it is a CODE, not a language.

Wow - what you can find on Google, huh?

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-7902(193801)22%3A4%3C285%3AEALL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-7

Answer 2

No, because Esperanto is a real language.

I've studied it just a little, and it is by far the easiest languange in the world to learn. The only thing I can say to your question is that it is an artificial language, created by a man, as opposed to a natural language, developed over time by a group of people.

Answer 3

Esperanto is not a natuyral but an artificial language. The fact that not so many people can speak it doesn't stop it from being a language. As far as I'm concerned it is.

Answer 4

It is not a real language or an official language in any institution, country or any other organization.

Esperanto is an international auxiliar language - IAL or a language for communication between people from different natios (as it is clarify in dictionaries), also, a language is considered as a la language if it is related to any culture or, in other words, born for natural reasons in comparison to "constructed laguages" such Esperanto or Ido, including elves, the language maded by Tolkien of Lord of the Ring.

Answer 5

I can't, but Noam Chomsky says he can:

The interest of linguists, as linguists, in universal language was based on an illusion, which linguists had but no longer
have. That was the illusion that Esperanto is a language, and it isn’t. Yeah, Esperanto has a couple of hints that people who know language can use based on their own linguistic knowledge to make a language out of it, but nobody can tell
you what the rules of Esperanto are. If they could tell you that, they could tell you what the rules of Spanish are, and that turns out to be an extremely hard problem, a hard problem of the sciences, to find out what’s really in the head of a Spanish
speaker that enables them to speak and understand and think the way they do. That’s a problem at the edge of science. I mean, a Spanish speaker knows it intuitively, but that doesn’t help. I mean, a desert ant knows how to navigate, but that doesn’t help the insect scientist. You got to figure out what the ant is doing, and it’s now understood that that’s an extremely hard problem. You go back a generation or two, it was considered a trivial problem because of lack of
understanding of the nature of language. To take a kind of analogue, if you go back to pre-Galilean times, there’s no problem about why if I let this go, it’s going to fall to the ground. It’s going to its natural place. What else is there to say? Well, it turned out that there was a lot to say. To be puzzled by simple questions is a very hard step, and it’s the first step in science, really. And the same is true about the
nature of Esperanto, or Spanish, on which it’s based, and so on. We don’t know the answers to the questions of what the principles of Esperanto do because if we did, we would know the answer to how language works, and that’s much harder than knowing how a desert ant navigates, which is hard enough. So, now it is understood that Esperanto is not a language. It’s just parasitic on other languages.

(Chomsky On Linguistics, Mark Aronoff, Department of Linguistics, Stony Brook University, March 2003)

There you have the argument of Noam Chomsky. And now, spanish speaking desert ants, please tell me: do you agree?

Answer 6

Of course it's a language but it seems pretty useless to me when English has become a more universal language.

Esperanto was suppose to be an international language, right?

Answer 7

hello
hello i went esperano last week
oh did you have to speak esperanto/
no it is not real

like that?

Answer 8

It isn't spoken by very many people.