Chinese whispers: How language travels (part 1)

Language travels in time and in space. It moves people. It moves with people. It's a gatekeeper of cultures, the messenger and the message.

"Chinese Whispers" wants to grab hold of a speech balloon and travel to all corners of the planet. Our endeavour is to lay bare what makes us who we are, analysing the never ending broadcast of our human brains.

We start our language travels in the heart of Europe. Brussels is the seat of the European Union and the capital of Belgium, a country on the brink of disintegration over language troubles. All this makes Brussels linguistically an interesting case. Even though the majority of its inhabitants speak French, the old Brussels dialect is an uncanny reflection of the country's linguistic schizophrenia. Hence the unlikely mix of French and Flemish/Dutch expressions.

Only a few blocks away from the cradle of this remarkable dialect we find ourselves in Brussels' European district. In this part of town, not so long ago, a similar attempt was made to blend different languages into one smooth (albeit artificial) linguistic concoction. This idea was conceived in The Berlaymont building, headquarters of the European Commission and Europe's version of the "tower of Babel". Here, working for the EU's official institutions, operate hundreds of translators and interpreters of the union's 25 official languages.

Interestingly, one of them turned out to be a bit of a rebel. Around 1996 Diego Marani witnessed with growing unease how English established itself as Lingua Franca inside Europe's corridors of power. An ever growing number of diplomats and civil servants started to use English as their preferred vehicle of communication, even if none of the parties involved were native English speakers.

Marani realised that no other European language could compete with Anglo-Saxon supremacy, so he came up with an altogether different solution. He decided to start eroding the English language from within. Like Esperanto, many years ago, he developed and promoted a functional "European language". Unlike Esperanto, however, there were no fixed set of rules to follow, nor grammar or vocabulary to study. Structurally, Europanto uses English as a departing point. From there onwards, anything goes. Its vocabulary is an amalgam taken from several European languages, the only rationale being that the words used have to be "recognizable" by other Europanto-speakers.

Marani himself published several newspaper columns in Europanto as well as a novel. In 2005 he stopped promoting the language actively.

Here's a sample of Europanto. If you can make sense of this, you can probably speak the language too..

"Que would happen if, wenn Du open your computero, finde eine message in esta lingua? No est Englando, no est Germano, no est Espano, no est Franzo, no est keine known lingua aber Du understande! Wat happen zo! Habe your computero eine virus catched? Habe Du sudden BSE gedeveloped? No, Du esse lezendo la neue europese lingua: de Europanto! Europanto ist uno melangio van de meer importantes Europese linguas mit also eine poquito van andere europese linguas, sommige Latinus, sommige old grec. "