Why a language called Papiamentu might be the best solution to the world's language problem

Here's where Papiamentu is spoken.

Many aren't aware of this, but the world has a language problem: the problem is that there is no universal second language through which everybody can communicate. It's true that basic English will do fine for most airports and a lot of major cities in the world, but this is communication at its most basic level ("one coffee...and big size please"), and not even communication at this level is guaranteed.

Using interpreters costs the police in Suffolk £20,000 a month, translation costs the EU around a billion euros per year, and English hegemony isn't even guaranteed considering the growing strength of languages like Chinese and Spanish, plus French (French? Really? Yes - the number of French speakers in Africa is expected to increase to 600 million in 2050. French isn't going anywhere). Even Turkish is strengthening its position in Europe and throughout Central Asia.

Add all this together and you can see that the world is heading for a bit of a linguistic deadlock. One of the problems with the current situation is simply that the most prominent languages in the world are often extremely hard to learn for others - English orthography is a mess, French is only slightly better but has grammatical gender and weird verb conjugation, Spanish has excellent orthography but requires a lot of work on memorizing verb conjugation, Chinese...well, Chinese is written in Chinese.

One solution proposed to this problem is a constructed language, created to be easy for anyone to learn, and thus we have languages like Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, Lingua Franca Nova, Occidental, Novial, and so on. Though I and a lot of people like me do support this idea, the world on the whole doesn't seem to like constructed languages. The reasons for this are twofold: 1) they come across as being too artificial, and 2) they have very few speakers and thus almost no economic clout. It's hard to say whether any constructed languages will ever succeed.

Luckily, there may be another solution, and it's a language called Papiamentu. Papiamentu is spoken right here:

(plus a few other islands nearby)

This small corner of the world is part of the Netherlands Antilles, an overseas territory of the Netherlands where Papiamentu was born. Papiamentu is a creole, with vocabulary mostly from Portuguese and Spanish, with about another quarter of its vocabulary from Dutch and a few other words from various languages. And because it's a creole that means it has an extremely simplified grammar in addition to the large comprehensibility at first sight.

Let's compare the verb conjugation of Papiamentu with Spanish. First the Spanish verb comprar, to buy:

Presente yo compro tú compras él compra nosotros compramos vosotros compráis ellos compran	Pretérito perfecto compuesto yo he comprado tú has comprado él ha comprado nosotros hemos comprado vosotros habéis comprado ellos han comprado
Pretérito imperfecto yo compraba tú comprabas él compraba nosotros comprábamos vosotros comprabais ellos compraban	Pretérito pluscuamperfecto yo había comprado tú habías comprado él había comprado nosotros habíamos comprado vosotros habíais comprado ellos habían comprado
Pretérito perfecto simple yo compré tú compraste él compró nosotros compramos vosotros comprasteis ellos compraron	Pretérito anterior yo hube comprado tú hubiste comprado él hubo comprado nosotros hubimos comprado vosotros hubisteis comprado ellos hubieron comprado
Futuro yo compraré tú comprarás él comprará nosotros compraremos vosotros compraréis ellos comprarán	Futuro perfecto yo habré comprado tú habrás comprado él habrá comprado nosotros habremos comprado vosotros habréis comprado ellos habrán comprado

And now the same verb (kumpra) in Papiamentu:

	Present Continuous mi ta kumpra bo ta kumpra e ta kumpra nos ta kumpra boso ta kumpra nan ta kumpra	Future mi lo kumpra bo lo kumpra e lo kumpra nos lo kumpra boso lo kumpra nan lo kumpra
Past mi a kumpra bo a kumpra el a kumpra nos a kumpra boso a kumpra nan a kumpra	Past Continuous mi tabata kumpra bo tabata kumpra e tabata kumpra nos tabata kumpra boso tabata kumpra nan tabata kumpra

(the area on conjugation in Papiamentu is less complete than the one for Spanish, but even this small portion shows you how easy it is - conjugation is carried out by simply using an auxiliary in front of the main verb)

In addition to that you now don't have to worry about grammatical gender anymore. In short, Papiamentu is the language you wish you had learned in school instead of Spanish or French. It's not only easy to learn but because its vocabulary comes from prominent European languages it provides a benefit to students who intend to go on to other languages afterwards.

Okay then, what about neutrality? One of the common arguments given for a constructed language is that it provides a neutral playing field in that everyone is using the language as a second language, so those using it as a mother tongue will not be given an unfair advantage. This is true to a certain extent, however:

1) The definition of neutrality is always a pretty vague one. Does a language get to be considered neutral simply because nobody speaks it as a first language, or does the vocabulary itself have to be derived from languages around the world? If a language derives too much of its vocabulary from one source is it then not neutral? Neutrality is good to a certain extent, but focusing too much on the perfect neutral language is an impossible task. In reality, more neutral is about as good as we can hope to get.
2) Certainly Papiamentu would given an unfair advantage to the people that speak it as a mother tongue...but these people live on a few islands close to South America and number only about 300,000, hardly the same thing as giving an advantage to the hundreds of millions of people that speak other languages like English, French or Spanish.

Finally, how complete a language is Papiamentu? Can you do everything you can do with other languages using Papiamentu? The answer is yes. Here are some examples of Papiamentu being used in practice.

Here it is being used to give a code of ethics to journalists:



Here it is being used to give information on a drug bust:



Here it is being used to discuss languages in education:



And here it is sung:



So yes, Papiamentu is as complete and functional as any other language. You'll also notice that if you speak a fair amount of Spanish or Portuguese (and French/Italian/Latin etc. to a certain extent) that this language is already pretty easy to understand at first sight.

There are of course other creole languages in existence, and most of them are fairly easy to learn in comparison with other languages that are usually studied in school. None of these, however, have the advantages that Papiamentu has:

- Tok Pisin and Bislama (Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu) are spoken in a very isolated part of the world, and the countries in which they are spoken are still largely undeveloped
- Haiti speaks a creole as well, but once again the country is unstable and undeveloped
- Mauritius speaks a French-based creole, but isn't all that interested in promoting it as a written language
- Seychelles does a better job at promoting their French-based creole than Mauritius but it's once again quite isolated and the population there is quite low

Whereas Papiamentu is spoken in a stable and well-developed part of the world, is technically a part of the Netherlands which is an EU member, and it's also quite close to both North and South America. It also has a larger amount of non-Romance vocabulary and thus represents a more varied swath of population than other creoles do.


Okay, so Papiamentu is a pretty good candidate for a universal second language, but how could this be accomplished in practice? That's hard to say. At the moment since it's not even considered to be a candidate for a universal second language the best way to get the ball rolling would probably be to conduct studies on the use of the language as a bridge in between English and Spanish speakers in the United States. A few studies showing how easy it is for people with different linguistic backgrounds to learn the language to communicate would probably be the best way to get people thinking about this language's potential as an interlinguistic tool...or you could just write about it on your blog and see whether that gets people interested in the idea.