Esperanto is the most widely spoken artificial language. The name derives from Doktoro Esperanto, the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book of Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887. The word esperanto means 'one who hopes'. Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy and flexible language that would serve as a universal second language to foster peace and international understanding. Esperanto has a very regular structure. Words are often made from many other roots, and in this way the number of words which one must memorise is made much smaller. The language is phonetic, and the rules of pronunciation are very simple, so that everyone knows how to pronounce a written worde and vice-versa.Esperanto has had continuous usage by a community estimated at between 100,000 and 2 million speakers for over a century. By most estimates, there are approximately a thousand native speakers. No country has adopted the language officially. Today, Esperanto is employed in world travel, correspondence, cultural exchange, conventions, literature, language instruction, television (Internacia Televido), and radio broadcasting. Esperanto is also a language of internet websites, which can be explored from the Esperanto interface of Google Search.

Khmer, or Cambodian, is the language of the Khmer people and the official language of Cambodia. One of the more prominent Austroasiatic languages, the language has been considerably influenced by Sanskrit and Pali, especially in the royal and religious registers, through the vehicles of Hinduism and Buddhism. As a result of geographic proximity, the Khmer language has affected, and also been affected by, Thai, Lao, Vietnamese and Cham which all form a sprachbund in peninsular Southeast Asia. Khmer differs from neighboring languages such as Thai, Lao and Vietnamese in that it is not a tonal language. It has three main dialects that are mutually intelligible: * Battambang (considered the standard) * Phnom Penh * Northern Khmer, also known as Khmer Surin, spoken by ethnic Khmer native to Northeast Thailand * Cardamom Khmer, an archaic form spoken by a small population in the Cardamom Mountains of western Cambodia. History Linguistic study of the Khmer language divides its history into four periods. Pre-Angkorian Khmer, the language after its divergence from Proto-Mon-Khmer until the ninth century, is only known from words and phrases in Sanskrit texts of the era. Old Khmer (or Angkorian Khmer) is the language as it was spoken in the Khmer Empire from the 9th century until the weakening of the empire sometime in the 13th century. Old Khmer is attested by many primary sources and has been studied in depth by a few scholars, most notably Saveros Pou, Phillip Jenner and Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow. Following the end of the Khmer Empire the language lost the standardizing influence of being the language of government and accordingly underwent a turbulent period of change in morphology, phonology and lexicon. The language of this transition period, from about the 14th to 18th centuries, is referred to as Middle Khmer and saw borrowing from Thai, Lao and, to a lesser extent, Vietnamese. The changes during this period are so profound that the rules of Modern Khmer can not be applied to correctly understand the Old Khmer. The language became recognizable as the Modern Khmer spoken today in the 19th century. Khmer is classified as a member of the Eastern branch of the Mon-Khmer language family, itself a subdivision of the larger Austro-Asiatic language group, which has representatives in a large swath of land from Northeast India down through Southeast Asia to the Malay Peninsula and its islands. As such, its closest relatives are the languages of the Pearic, Bahnaric, and Katuic families spoken by the hill tribes of the region. The Vietic languages have also been classified as belonging to this family.