Intercultural communication in Europe: English and Esperanto as alternative communication tools

Dr. Ilona Koutny

Summary

Europe is characterized by a valuable multiculturalism and multilingualism. International communication is crucial at the political, economical and cultural levels, but multilingual settings with the 20 official languages of the extended European Union create a Babylonian situation (Eurobabel) and the costs of the desirable goal of giving equal status to every language exceed those a reasonable budget. Several models have been proposed to solve the problem of equal and cost-effective communication in Europe: from the use of every language to the selection of a single common language. This paper deals with two alternatives – English and the planned, therefore neutral language Esperanto – from the viewpoint of intercultural communication.

English is the mother tongue of only about 10 % of European inhabitants, its gravity in Europe is due to the overwhelming power of USA in the world. Its exclusive use in a European context would give unjust (cultural, economical and political) advantages to its speakers (linguistic imperialism) and would impose huge investments of time and costs to the remaining part of Europe. Esperanto offers a cost-effective solution on equal rank for European citizens. English is a quite difficult language due to its phonetics, rich vocabulary and ambiguous syntactic and semantic structures. EIL (English as an International language) a simplified version of English (mainly on phonetic level) does not change this situation. It is about 10 times easier to attain a high linguistic and communicative competence in Esperanto due to its regular phonetics, grammatical structures and word-formation.

Culture (values, mentality, behavioral norms, common knowledge, etc.) plays a large role in communication. Language reflects the culture of its speech community and at the same time, gives frames to the thinking. Presuppositions loose their validity in other language communities. English has an encoded special culture, therefore it is difficult to transmit other cultures by means of it. Esperanto has grown out of European culture and is fed permanently by other cultures because of its international use. It was created for intercultural communication, and has functioned in this spirit for 117 years.

At the beginning of intercultural communication, differences are manifested and a kind of uncertainty and anxiety appear. The communication act can be successful only if these differences are understood and accepted, and a common basis can be found for co-operation. The communication strategies used in Esperanto are based on directness and openness whose source is the feeling of solidarity and community of its speakers (voluntarily joining the community).

In the current historical moment, English has penetrated every field of the life, and enables effective communication for many Europeans, but not for the majority(!), furthermore intercultural communication in English is not based on equality, and is not cost-effective. On the other side, Esperanto is rather used in the private sphere (language of friendship) as a cost-effective communication tool that grants equality to all its users. For other purposes not enough use of Esperanto is made at present, although it contains a great potential as a reasonable solution for the European linguistic situation from the viewpoint of cultural and linguistic equality and costs.

Ilona Koutny

doktor, językoznawca, adiunkt w Instytucie Językoznawstwa (Zakład Hungarystyki) Uniwersytetu im. Adam Mickiewicza w Poznaniu i kierownik podyplomowego Studium Interlingwistyki; docent Międzynarodowej Akademii Nauk AIS, członek Akademii Esperanta; miedzy 1987-95 adiunkt na Katedrze Lingwistyki Uniwersytetu im. Eötvösa Loránda, w Budapeście. Dziedzine badawcze: komputerowa lingwistyka, leksikografia, interlingwistyka i komunikacja międzykulturowa. Wybrane publikacje:

doctor, linguist, lecturer at the Linguistics Department (Hungarian Studies) of Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan., and head of the Interlinguistic Postgraduate Studies; associate professor of the International Academy of Sciences AIS, member of the Academy of Esperanto; 1987-95: lecturer at the Linguistics Department of the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Research fields: computational linguistics, lexicography, interlinguistics and intercultural communication.

Selected publications:

Parsing Hungarian Sentences in order to Determine their Prosodic Structures in a Multilingual TTS System. In: Proceedings of Eurospeech ’99. 1999 Budapest, 2091–2094. ??

Speech Processing and Esperanto. In: Interface. Journal of Applied Linguistics 2000/1, 99-120. and In: Planned Languages: From Concept to Reality. Klaus Schubert (red.) 2001. Brussel: Hogeschool voor Wetenschap en Kunst. ??

Syntax and prosody: Case-study of Hungarian. In: S. Puppel – G. Demenko (red.): Prosody 2000. Poznań: UAM. 2001. 119-125.

Lexikography und die Bedeutung eines Esperanto-korpus. GIL-Konferenz. Berlin. 2002. In: Beiheft der Interlinguistischen Informationen. Red. Detlev Blanke 2003. 77-97

Hungarian greetings and addressing forms in a cross-cultural approach. to appear in Modern Filológiai Közlemények 2004/1 !!

–, J. Jarmołowicz, Cs. Gizińska, Emília Fórizs: Węgiersko-polski słownik tematyczny. 2000. Poznań: ProDruk. 438 p. !!

English-Esperanto-Hungarian mini-dictionary on Language and Communication. Poznan: ProDruk. 2003. 126 p. !!