On October 11th The Christian Science Monitor published a brief article titled The (impossible?) dream of a universal language, in which author Melissa Mohr touches on a few highlights in the long history of human attempts to create a viable interlanguage. Naturally, she mentions Esperanto:

Perhaps the most famous universal language was created in 1887 by Ludwik Zamenhof: Esperanto. Zamenhof had a “dream of the unity of humankind,” believing that a single language could bring lasting peace to the world.

To facilitate its spread, he designed Esperanto to be easy to learn – he thought the basics could be mastered in a week – with a predictable grammar and a lexicon derived from common European languages. Of all the universal languages, this one has been the most successful, boasting around 100,000 speakers and a place in Google Translate.