The limits of language planning

The case of Esperanto shows that language planning understood as the creation of a new communication tool for international use can indeed produce a workable result. As long as the language is used and sheltered by a community of practice of moderate dimensions, it will preserve a high degree of stability. Nevertheless, changes do occur. They are slow, but noticeable, and occur in different areas of the grammar. They are addressed in two of the case studies in this paper and concern shifts in the language’s parts-of-speech system, and differences in interpretation of the valency of verbs. A third case study addresses the issue of epenthesis in compounds, which reveals an unresolved area of arbitrary choices made by the speaker. In the former two areas the stability of a fundamental design principle of Esperanto may be at stake, i.e. its relatively transparent and exceptionless rule-based system, which is claimed to be the cornerstone of its easy learnability. It is predictable that such a process of deregulation would be greatly accelerated if the language were to be adopted on a much larger scale beyond the limits of its present community.