If, strictly speaking, rationality recommends learning the language of your neighbor, or, perhaps better, an international language, what drove Volapukists, Esperantists, and Idists to invest so much time and energy to learn and pro- mote their languages, when many others deemed it preposterous, when not anti-patriotic? Were they sharing the same dream, or were artificial languages going to serve different purposes and interests? Why were there so many ar- tificial languages, and how was it that the Esperantists managed to crowd out their rivals? Was it because Esperanto was a better language, or because the Esperantists proved to have the best strategy?
As detailed in this book, the battle of artificial languages was fought nei- ther by marginal people nor in an institutional vacuum. Rather, the battle of artificial languages was entwined with the intellectual dilemmas of the time, reflecting the anxieties that traversed the European mindset amid the dras- tic economic, social, and political transformations taking place in every corner of the continent. Whether these anxieties were based on the effects of science on human relations, the fate of spirituality and religion in a more secularized world, the importance of ethnicity and national identity, the so- called "Jewish problem," the prospects for peace, or the place of nature in a more mechanized world, artificial languages supporters liked to think that they had the cure.
Among all the artificial languages created between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of World War II, only Esperanto is still thriving; its former rivals are only ghosts on the Internet.5 And after more than 100 years of face-to-face interactions and an impressive literary corpus, Esperanto has been transformed into a full-fledged language, with its own irregularities, ambiguities, exceptions, and conventions.6
Although Esperanto won the battle of artificial languages, it did not become a global language. Today, English holds that position. But at the time the battle of artificial languages began, nobody could tell which, if any, of the three main national languages, English, German, and French, would become the global language. In fact, it was the fierce competition between English, German, and French, and the national rivalries between their speak- ers that opened a window of opportunity for the cause of an artificial lan- guage. A non-ethnic lingua franca would not only assuage national rivalries but also put everybody on equal footing. Since a lingua franca is a collective good, we might then wonder why a neutral language such as Esperanto did not prevail. If linguistic fairness recommends a neutral language, then Es- peranto or any of its rivals would seem like a better choice for an interna- tional language. This book explores how Esperanto won the battle for supremacy among competing artificial languages, but lost the war to become a lingua franca.
Confident that the balance of power among leading nations and interna- tional rivalries would prevent a national language from becoming the lingua franca, Volapukists, Esperantists, and Idists worked hard to make their case. They set up journals, collected membership fees, organized language courses, issued language certificates, created their respective language academies, or- ganized at the local, national, and international level, convened international congresses, participated in special interest organizations, lobbied international bodies, forged links with other social movements, and fought bitterly against each other.
In this fight and the fight for universal acclaim, Volapukists, Esperantists, and Idists pushed forward different strategies. It is around the role of the move- ment leaders in the imprinting and implementation of these different strate- gies that the narrative of the book unfolds. This focus on strategy and leaders helps to explain the strength and weaknesses of each of the movements, their inception, reception, and eventual failure. In one respect, the battle for su- premacy among Volapukists, Esperantists, and Idists resembled other "stan- dardization" battles. Readers may well remember the long battle between VHS and Betamax to become the standard videotape recording system. Similar standardization battles have taken place in the past, including the QWERTY versus the Dvorak keyboard, the light water design for power reactors versus other choices, or the alternating versus direct current for electrical supply systems.7
Economic historians have tried to explain the mechanisms of these stan- dardization battles. In their words, the adoption of one standard over an- other is "path dependent." Path-dependent processes occur where positive feedback mechanisms operate; in other words, where one persons decision to adopt one technology instead of another increases the probability that the next person will follow suit. People follow the path that others have opened for them—in a sense, the path of least resistance. At a certain point, the pro- cess tips over and one technology takes a clear lead over its alternatives, making it practically impossible for losing options to dislodge the probable winner.
Interestingly, however, the winning technology is not necessarily the best or the most efficient. Its victory is largely the result of decisions made at the beginning of the process, under conditions of relative uncertainty as to both the qualities and the real potential of competitors, and the eventual result of the contest. This means that first movers have an advantage, but nothing makes it inevitable that they will emerge as the final winners. As the economic his- torian Brian Arthur put it, the final outcome of a path-dependent process is not "guaranteed to be efficient." Nor is it "easily altered" or "predictable in advance."8
Since languages are technologies of communication, we can interpret the battle of artificial languages as another example of a path-dependent process.
This battle, however, differs from other standardization battles in three important respects. First, whereas a typewriter, for example, is a single-purpose technology—it only serves to create a document—an artificial language might serve two or many purposes. Very much like natural languages, artificial languages are instruments of communication, but might also serve non- communicative purposes and become identity markers.9 In this sense, an artificial language can be marketed as a purely neutral instrument of com- munication, or be symbolically attached to a social or political agenda, such as universalism, pacifism, the advancement of science, the promotion of mi- nority languages and nations, ecumenism, socialism, and so on. Unlike type- writers, artificial languages can have multiple purposes.
Second, in addition to being single-purpose instruments, typewriters and video recorders are end products. They do not change after use. Artificial lan- guage speakers, on the contrary, do not "buy" an end product. Using the lan- guage they have chosen to learn, they can try to change it regardless of the opinions or priorities of the language's inventor or other speakers. All lan- guages are conventional, but the conventional nature of languages is most visible in the case of artificial ones. Some may be happy to say "et" to mean "and," others might prefer the Greek "kai," and the same goes for grammar or any other component of the language. Not being an end product, an arti- ficial language can mutate in a thousand directions. Whereas changes in the design of end products are in the hands of the producers, changes in an ar- tificial language are in the hands of the users, who, for the survival of their language should be willing to reach a collective agreement as to its basic characteristics.
Third, whereas it is difficult to imagine VHS or Betamax adopters in the pre-blog and social media age launching periodicals and setting up local or- ganizations or sites dedicated to promoting and extolling their chosen prod- uct, this is indeed what happened among international language supporters. Artificial language users committed their time and effort in varying de- grees to their language's success. In the case of artificial languages, unlike other standardization battles, we find collective action rather than individual adoptions.