When I lately saw a news message about the fact that the United States is not neatly divisible by racial lines any more, this is only one aspect of the undeniable fact that the world is more and more one country in its essence, just not reflected in politics. One of my Esperanto friends we jokingly considered the wildcard for nationalities lately, because nobody including herself knows any nationality that reflects really who she is: hungarian father, french mother, born and studying in the Netherlands, parents living in Luxembourg and a french passport. Even I, undeniably Dutch by origin and also living her right now, am called often enough a world citizen because I manage to get around quite well in 11 languages, and I don't really regard borders in my everyday life.
We must thus regard that the practical organization of our world doesn't reflect this reality yet. Sure, out of necessity we adopt the English language in practice to get around. This doesn't work universally as a solution yet, because it's both hard to learn and very much divided in itself between all the countries that speak it and sometimes don't really understand each other. Yet it has many things to teach us about what we need in a World Language, and it does show us THAT we need one. If no Universal Language is chosen officially, we still have a provisorial one in practice, because we cannot do without in our current society.
For one thing, English has elements in it that are easy: basic vocabulary, when learned, is easy to use and doesn't change. For basic usage this often is enough. As a language for very basic communication, World English (Globish) certainly already succeeds really well. As a Universal Language for everything though, it falls terribly short. Still most aviation accidents are found to depend on communication problems, and the messages in the plane itself are far from universally understandable. English phonetics are terrible for international communication and spelling English also brings its own share of problems. We hardly have an internationally understood vocabulary, and the full English dictionary for general use is huge. Only few manage to get to a really decent level.
Esperantists plead for the introduction of Esperanto as an international language from 1887, and it is an effort that has a lot we can learn from. I speak it myself, and I must say that learning it teaches a lot both about the language problem itself and about what we need to solve it. Esperanto is an old project, and there are things we know now that weren't taken into account when creating Esperanto, but still I think it's the best project that works today, and one that I would heartly recommend to learn if you are truly interested in creating World Peace.
The Bahá'í faith has the introduction of a Universal Language among the firm beliefs of things we need to get world peace. Many things have been said about this, and the importance of Esperanto has been confirmed in what has been said about the Universal Language we need to have.
The Universal Language with all the elements that such a language should have doesn't exist yet, but I believe such a language is being created right now in the form of Pandunia, a project that takes into account everything we have learned about learnability of languages, fairness of language, it searches to take elements that make the language really feel to be of everyone from the start. The working language of most of its creation is Esperanto, and we have people from all over the world participating in deciding the fitness of the way of expression for the whole world. If you speak Esperanto and you are from a part of the world with interesting language and culture traits, you are very welcome to join, and everybody can already try to learn it.
What do you think about the need of a Universal Language? Do you think we are already there? What do you think is the role of Esperanto in this? How do you solve language problems in your daily life?