What is Esperanto? <a name="what">Esperanto is a planned (constructed) language intended for use between people who speak different native languages.

</a><a name="who">Who constructed Esperanto?</a>
<a name="who">Esperanto was developed during the period 1877-1885 by L.L. Zamenhof of Warsaw, Poland (then Russia). Zamenhof, who grew up in a polyglot society, was convinced that a common language would be necessary to resolve many of the problems that lead to strife and conflict. He rejected the major languages of his day (French, German, English, Russian) because they were difficult to learn and would put their native speakers at an advantage in discussion with respect to those who did not speak them natively; and he rejected the two "dead" languages with which he was familiar, Latin and Greek, because they were even more complicated and unwieldy than the currently extant major languages. He began work on his planned language, which he would eventually call "Lingvo Internacia", as a junior in high school, and eventually published the first textbook of the language (for speakers of Russian) in the 1887, at the time of his marriage and early in his medical career.

</a><a name="origin">Where does the name "Esperanto" come from?</a>
<a name="origin">This word, which in Esperanto means "a person who is hoping", was adopted by Zamenhof as a pseudonym for his first book. It was gradually adopted in popular parlance as the name of the language itself.

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