After having received several valuable comments from readers, I’ve looked into Ideal Nol and Esperanto a bit more in an effort to differentiate their purposes, current and projected usage, and challenges that the languages face.

Esperanto was created with the most honorable of ambitions: promote international understanding in an effort to foster wold peace. Creator Dr. Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof’s  romantic and idealistic goal for the language was for it to become the world’s second language. Ideal Nol was also of course created for a sort of international understanding, but more so between college students texting one another than the entire world. Another significant difference is that while Ideal Nol can be spoken, it’s niche lies more in the digital realm of SMS and MSN.

Finding current (and accurate) figures on the number of Esperanto speakers is quite difficult, but the most widely-circulated statistic puts the number of Esperanto speakers at somewhere between one and two million. There are songs in Esperanto, films produced completely in Esperanto and numerous books and magazines in the language. Ideal Nol is quite young, so there are no figures  available for it yet, but what the creators lack in followers, they make up for in optimism (talk of a Nobel Prize). The idea of a native Ideal Nol speaker sounds preposterous, but who knows..

Esperanto’s biggest foes have been Hitler, Stalin and English. While the first two made active efforts to suppress “the language of spies,” the latter has crept into a position as the world’s unofficial second language. Ideal Nol also has its detractors, as can be evidenced by the comments on last week’s post, and may prove to be nothing more than a flash in the pan.