[LINK] On the worldwide fanbase of the Esperanto language

[rfmcdonald]

In the post "Esperanto Fans", Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution linked to an article in The Verge talking about how Esperanto lives even in the 21st century. The discussion at Marginal Revolution focuses on ways in which the language is still useful.

Like its vastly more successful digital cousins — C++, HTML, Python — Esperanto is an artificial language, designed to have perfectly regular grammar, with none of the messy exceptions of natural tongues. Out loud, all that regularity creates strange cadences, like someone speaking Italian slowly while chewing gum. William Auld, the Modernist Scottish poet who wrote his greatest work in Esperanto, was nominated for the Nobel Prize multiple times, but never won. But it is supremely easy to learn, like a puzzle piece formed to fit into the human brain.

Invented at the end of the 19th century, in many ways it presaged the early online society that the web would bring to life at the end of the 20th. It’s only ever been spoken by an assortment of fans and true believers spread across the globe, but to speak Esperanto is to become an automatic citizen in the most welcoming non-nation on Earth.

Decades before Couchsurfing became a website (or the word website existed), Esperantists had an international homestay service called Pasporta Servo, in which friendly hosts around the world listed their phone numbers and home addresses in a central directory available to traveling Esperantists. It may be a small, widely dispersed, and self-selected diaspora, but wherever you go, there are Esperantists who are excited that you exist.

It sounds hokey, but this is the central appeal of Esperanto. It’s as if the initial utopian vibes of the World Wide Web had never reached a wider audience. There’s no money, no power, no marketing, no prestige — Esperanto speakers speak Esperanto because they believe in it, and because it’s fun to speak a foreign language almost instantly, after a couple months of rolling the words around in your mouth.

The internet, though, has been a mixed blessing for Esperanto. While providing a place for Esperantists to convene without the hassle of traveling to conventions or local club meetings, some Esperantists believe those meatspace meet ups were what held the community together. The Esperanto Society of New York has 214 members on Facebook, but only eight of them showed up for the meeting. The shift to the web, meanwhile, has been haphazard, consisting mostly of message boards, listservs, and scattered blogs. A website called Lernu! — Esperanto for the imperative "learn!" — is the center of the Esperanto internet, with online classes and an active forum. But it’s stuck with a Web 1.0 aesthetic, and the forum is prone to trolls, a byproduct of Esperanto’s culture of openness to almost any conversation as long as it’s conducted in — or even tangentially related to — Esperanto.