Europanto is a

macaronic language Macaronic language uses a mixture of languages, particularly bilingual puns or situations in which the languages are otherwise used in the same context (rather than simply discrete segments of a text being in different languages). Hybrid words ...

concept with a fluid vocabulary from

European languages Most languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European language family. Out of a total European population of 744 million as of 2018, some 94% are native speakers of an Indo-European language. Within Indo-European, the three largest phyla are Rom ...

of the user's choice or need. It was conceived in 1996 by

Diego Marani Diego Marani (born 1959) is an Italian novelist and European civil servant. Biography Born in Tresigallo, Marani attended the Liceo Ginnasio Ariosto in Ferrara till 1978 and graduated in interpretation and translation from the ''Scuola superior ...

(a journalist, author and translator for the

European Council of Ministers The Council of the European Union, often referred to in the treaties and other official documents simply as the Council, and informally known as the Council of Ministers, is the third of the seven Institutions of the European Union (EU) as ...

Brussels Brussels (french: Bruxelles or ; nl, Brussel ), officially the Brussels-Capital Region (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) (french: link=no, Région de Bruxelles-Capitale; nl, link=no, Bruss ...

) based on the common practice of word-borrowing usage of many European languages. Marani used it in response to the perceived dominance of the

English language English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the is ...

; it is an emulation of the effect that non-native speakers struggling to learn a language typically add words and phrases from their native language to express their meanings clearly. The main concept of Europanto is that there are no fixed rules—merely a set of suggestions. This means that anybody can start to speak Europanto immediately; on the other hand, it is the speaker's responsibility to draw on an assumed common

vocabulary A vocabulary is a set of familiar words within a person's language. A vocabulary, usually developed with age, serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge. Acquiring an extensive vocabulary is one of the la ...

and

grammar In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structure, structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clause (linguistics), clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraint ...

communicate Communication (from la, communicare, meaning "to share" or "to be in relation with") is usually defined as the transmission of information. The term may also refer to the message communicated through such transmissions or the field of inquir ...

. Marani wrote regular

newspaper A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as politics, business, sports a ...

columns about the language and published a

novel A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itsel ...

using it. As of 2005 he was no longer actively promoting it.

Origin of the name

The language's name "europanto" is a

portmanteau A portmanteau word, or portmanteau (, ) is a blend of wordsEurope Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

in some European languages) and the

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

root ''παντώς-'' ("pantos-"; in

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

"all", "whole") and bears an intentional similarity with the name of the most widely spoken constructed

international auxiliary language An international auxiliary language (sometimes acronymized as IAL or contracted as auxlang) is a language meant for communication between people from all different nations, who do not share a common first language. An auxiliary language is primaril ...

Esperanto Esperanto ( or ) is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by the Warsaw-based ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it was intended to be a universal second language for international communi ...

Language code

The ISO 639-3 standard draft used to have the code eur for this constructed language, but it was retired on 16 January 2009, with the reason “Nonexistent”. For this reason, it is also not a valid language subtag for BCP 47 as it was not registered in the IANA Language Subtags Registry (waiting for a decision for the deletion request that was initiated in 2008, but also because ISO 639-3 was still a draft, as well as ISO 5646 which was still not published to allow importing standard ISO 639-3 codes in this registry on 29 July 2009).

Example text

From Diego Marani's article ''Ein Europanto Sample Documento'' (1997):

Notes and references

External links

* . * . * {{Citation , url = http://www.europanto.be/gram.en.html , title = Europanto , contribution = Europanto: From productive process to language, or how to cause international English to implode , author-link = Diego Marani , first = Diego , last = Marani , place = BE. Macaronic language Constructed languages introduced in the 1990s 1996 introductions Constructed languages

Origin of the name

Language code

Example text

See also

Notes and references

External links