Europanto

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Europanto
Created by:	Diego Marani	1996
Setting and usage:	European Union administration
Total speakers:	—
Category (purpose):	constructed languages int. auxiliary languages Europanto
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`art`
ISO 639-3:	`eur`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Europanto is a linguistic jest presented as a "constructed language" with a hodge-podge vocabulary from many European languages. It was created in 1996 by Diego Marani, a journalist, author and translator for the European Council of Ministers in Brussels. Marani created it in response to the perceived dominance of the English language; 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 feature 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 and grammar between himself and the audience and to make himself understood.

Europanto is a parody of the international auxiliary language genre, particularly the "Euroclone" variety, namely their perceived tendency to very strongly formalize speech, and impose strict, but arbitrary rules on it. The name Europanto is a portmanteau combination of European and the Greek stem πάντ- (all), and resembles Esperanto.

Marani wrote regular newspaper columns about the language and published a novel using it. As of 2005, he no longer actively promotes it.