Yes! And it’s likely that scores of other people have, too, considering that the language is estimated to have about two million speakers across the world. Esperanto is a constructed language, which means pretty much what it sounds like; it didn’t arise as a product of humans’ natural linguistic evolution. Rather, it’s an innovation built virtually from scratch—drawing on other widely spoken languages—that still functions as other non-artificial human languages do. Though history has not always been kind to Esperanto, it’s regarded today as the most successful constructed language in the world, and it’s experiencing somewhat of a comeback.

(L.L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto.)

As my colleague Thomas has written, Esperanto was the brainchild of late-19th-century Polish eye doctor and linguist L.L. Zamenhof, one of history’s most famous polyglots. A native speaker of Russian, a fluent speaker of Polish and Yiddish and a student of French, Italian, Lithuanian, German, Spanish, English and the classical Latin, Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew, he was no stranger to language studies, having even picked up the contemporaneous constructed language Volapük. With this knowledge in tow, he set his sights on creating what he wanted to be a new means of communication for everyone—Esperanto. Though he hadn’t yet lived to see World War I, Zamenhof had plenty of direct exposure with the destruction wreaked by human intolerance, oppression and hatred—he was, after all, a Jew in Poland, then part of the pogrom-plagued Russian Federation. He envisioned a world without war and wanted a way to break down linguistic and ethnic barriers, to encourage global unity and human connection on a macro scale. In creating Esperanto, his idea was that a constructed international auxiliary language could serve as a neutral means of communication, one that wouldn’t give an inherent advantage to any speaker. It would be, he imagined, a supplement to natural human languages, not a replacement.

In July 1887 he published Unua Libro (“First Book”) in Warsaw under the name Doktoro Esperanto, or ”Doctor Hopeful.” His book laid out just short of one thousand root words and a bit more than a dozen grammar rules for combining them to make tens of thousands more words. To create his language, he borrowed elements from English, German, Russian, Polish and a lot of Latin, which helped speakers of Romance languages to pick it up with ease. Some critics at the time and today claim that these speakers of Latin-based languages are at an inherent advantage over, say, speakers of Asian languages because so much of Esperanto’s vocabulary is influenced by Latin. But others say that regardless of this bias, it’s a very easy language to pick up for most people across the world.

Esperanto first saw tempered success, catching on in parts of North America and Europe, where a small principality between Belgium and Germany called Neutral Moresnet adopted the tongue as an official language and changed its name to Amikejo, meaning “friendship.” But World War I was a sobering reminder that one language alone could not prevent international conflict. Amikejo dissolved after annexation by Belgium. Despite revival efforts, even from the League of Nations, the language faltered. Zamenhof, who died in 1917, never saw his idea of a utopian language come to full fruition. The language was nearly squashed entirely out of existence under the Soviet and Nazi regimes, which painted it as a conduit for a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. After World War II, only a small group of Esperantists kept the language alive.

(The first World Esperanto Congress in 1905.)

Now, it’s very much on the rise. Zamenhof likely would have been proud to know that today the language has more than a million speakers and roughly one thousand native speakers, including the billionaire Hungarian-American philanthropist George Soros. There’s a worldwide Esperanto community that hosts the Universala Kongreso in a different city around the world each year and has been doing so since 1905. There are Esperanto books, movies, radio stations and even internet communities that keep the language alive and thriving. Among those who practice the language, there’s a strong sense that it’s worth preserving and promoting.

The concept of constructed languages isn’t one that began or ended with Zamenhof’s great endeavor. In fact, humans have for generations been building languages from the ground up as hobbies, academic pursuits, and pop culture projects. The world of “conlangs” is vast and innovative. There’s Klingon from the Star Trek universe and High Valyrian from Game of Thrones. Long before the era of film and television, a 17th-century Anglican bishop named John Wilkins sought to make international communication easier by creating a language that divided everything in the observable universe into 40 categories with corresponding syllables. (Spoiler alert: it failed pretty miserably.) Creating languages is an art form in and of itself, and there are people like David J. Peterson who make a living designing conlangs for your favorite movies and TV shows. What better way to appreciate language than by creating your own?