Shouldn't a blog about teaching Esperanto, be in Esperanto?
Well we could do that, but we would be duplicating other channels for no good reason: Edukado.net and a the Facebook page esperanto + edukado ilei are convenient places to communicate about education in Esperanto.
This blog is in English because it can be understood by the majority of the citizens of Oceania. Of nearly 42.5 million people, over half live in Australia, nearly a third live in Papua New Guinea or New Zealand, and the rest live in Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia.
Admittedly, English serves some parts of Oceania better than others.
Australia
Nearly 25 million people live in Australia and at least 96% of them can understand English, which is not to say that some would not be more comfortable in another language!
There are 290–363 languages spoken by Indigenous Australians, three languages spoken in the Torres Strait Islands alone. Seven of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages, such as Warlpiri, Murrinh-patha and Tiwi, retain between 1,000 and 3,000 speakers. Apart from English (32.6%), the most popular languages spoken by newly arrived migrants are Mandarin (10.8%), Punjabi (3.7%), Hindi (3.3%), and Arabic (3.0%). In the Australian population, the most spoken language except English is Mandarin (2.5%), Arabic (1.4%), Cantonese (1.2%), Vietnamese (1.2%) and Italian (1.2%). The population of Mandarin speakers in Australia is over 600 thousand.
Papua New Guinea
Although English is an official language of Papua New Guinea, it is only spoken by 1–2% of the population, which was well over 8 million in 2017, and rising steeply. 4-6 million people use Tok Pisin, mostly as a lingua franca, in PNG. Besides these, Papua New Guinea has another 830 living languages, making it the most linguistically diverse country on Earth. Its official languages are Tok Pisin, English, Hiri Motu, and Papua New Guinean Sign Language.
New Zealand
About 5 million people live in NZ of whom 96.1% speak English , 3.7% use Te reo Māori, 2.2% use Samoan, 1.7% Hindi, 1.3% Mandarin and 1.2% French. There is a New Zealand Sign Language too.
The remaining 2 million people live in the Pacific Islands.
Melanesia
Melanesia has well over 1000 languages, by far the most dense rate of languages in relation to land mass on earth, as well as a number of pidgins and creoles. Most notable among these are Tok Pisin, Hiri Motu, Solomon Islands Pijin, Bislama, and Papuan Malay. The largest language is Eastern Fijian with over 600,000 speakers.
Polynesia
The second-largest, exclusively Oceanic, language is Samoan, with an estimated 400,000 speakers.There are also around 40 other Polynesian languages, including Kiribati (Gilbertese), Tongan, Tahitian, Māori, Western Fijian and Kuanua (Tolai) languages, which each have over 100,000 speakers. English, French and Chilean Spanish are colonial languages in use.
Micronesia
There are about 20 languages in Micronesia, including Nauruan (6 000 people), Kosraean, Kiribati, Marshallese, Chuukese , Yapese and Pohnapeian. English is the official and most widely spoken language in Micronesia.
The number of Esperanto speakers in Oceania is currently only a few hundred, but it would be good if that number were to grow because, mighty though it seems, English only gives you access to 15% of the world's people.
English is so expensive to learn, in both time and money, that many will never afford it, or will sacrifice competence in their mother tongue, as the price they have to pay for English (or French, or whatever colonial language applies).
Esperanto was designed to be learnt quickly and well so that we can keep our home languages and have a global one to use outside our home community.
If you don't know Esperanto yet, Lernu.net is an excellent (free!) place to start, in any of about 40 languages.
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