Esperanto speakers – an unclassifiable community? [last draft]

Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems, 2015

After almost one hundred years of continuous use, Esperanto has achieved the status and character of a fully-fledged language, functioning much as any other language does. Research on Esperanto is hampered because knowledge of the subject is often regarded, ipso facto, as evidence of a lack of objectivity, and also because Esperanto, as largely an L2, is elusive, and its speakers hard to quantify. The problem is compounded by the rapid shift in its community from membership-based organizations to decentralized, informal web-based communication. Also shifting are the community's ideological underpinnings: it began as a response to lack of communication across languages but is now often perceived by its users as an alternative, more equitable means of communication than the increasingly ubiquitous English. Underlying these changes is a flourishing cultural base, including an extensive literature and periodical press. There is a need for more research-linguistic, sociolinguistic, and in the history of ideas. In intellectual history, Esperanto and related ideas have played a larger role than is generally recognized, intersecting with, and influencing, such movements as modernization in Japan, the development of international organizations, socialism in many parts of the world, and, in our own day, machine translation.

To our knowledge, there is to date no significant number of sociological studies dealing with the Esperanto movement, and there are even fewer sociolinguistic explorations of the whole Esperanto phenomenon. Concentrating on the Croatian Esperanto movement, we conducted an extensive study of Croatian Esperantistsʼ attitudes towards the structure of Esperanto, and their perception of the Esperanto movement and the overall Esperanto phenomenon -aspects still conspicuously missing in recent Esperantological research. This study offers invaluable insight into these under-researched interlinguistic areas, and also into the specific outlook of the traditional Croatian Esperanto movement.

Esperanto documents, 1996

University of Manchester eTheses, 2019

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among Esperanto speakers and Esperantists – mostly, but not only, in Paris – this thesis asks: how can the Esperanto community and movement come into being in practice if Esperanto speakers are scattered all over the world and may, at times, not share much beyond the language? Created in the late nineteenth century and alternatively supported by intellectuals and left-wing activists since its early days, Esperanto has currently also attracted the interest of young people through its online use. Coming to be more than a language, it has developed a widespread, geographically scattered speech community, a language-based social movement, and a set of cosmopolitan principles and sociabilities linked to it. I aim to contribute to debates about cosmopolitanism, globalisation, international communication, mobilities, and hopes for the future, as well as political, digital and language activism, by analysing perspectives of Esperanto speakers and Esperantists. Addressing the contrasting ideas that posit Esperanto as ‘a thing of the past’ and ‘the language of the future’, I look at the ways the language has been used in the present, through everyday practices, to mediate between people from different national backgrounds. France, particularly Paris, provides a setting in which my research questions resonate with national debates on politics and languages. This creates a fruitful environment to analyse how Esperanto is frequently seen through the lenses of either engagements with traditional social movements (such as communism, anarchism and pacifism) or as an intellectual game and tool to build sociability networks that extrapolate French territory. From these issues, my main argument is that the ephemeral nature of the enactments of the Esperanto community is what makes engagements with this language particularly appealing and productive for its speakers and supporters.

Język. Komunikacja. Informacja

Unlike most projectors of planned international languages, the creator of Esperanto, L.L. Zamenhof, was as interested in status planning as in corpus planning. Zamenhof’s project was complete enough to be used as a means of communication, but incomplete enough to allow the community of Esperanto speakers to do much of the work of turning his project into a full-fledged language. Zamenhof himself saw the language as a means to an end, and, quite early on, entrusted the development of the language to its speakers while he pursued more lofty ideological goals. Recently scholars have turned their attention to the ideological side of the Esperanto community in general, including the strong commitment of Esperanto speakers to linguistic justice and to a greater awareness of the value of multilingualism and linguistic diversity.

This final project aims to analyse the impact that the establishment of English as a lingua franca is having on linguistic diversity and to study whether Esperanto could guarantee this diversity. To this end, this paper will trace the history of English as a lingua franca, and will analyse its linguistic, social, cultural and economic implications. Besides, the feasibility of implementing Esperanto as a lingua franca will be studied. Considering its current situation in the linguistic landscape, a plan for its implementation will be proposed and its possible implications will be analysed in comparison with those of English. Previous work on English and globalisation by authors such as David Crystal and Jennifer Jenkins will be taken into account to analyse the position of English in our globalised society. In addition, in order to better understand the relevance of Esperanto, a series of interviews with Esperantists have been carried out. By analysing the sources consulted and the interviews, it will be possible to clarify how English poses a real risk to linguistic diversity and how the implementation of Esperanto could be more than a utopia.

Contested Languages, 2021

This is a contribution from Contested Languages. The hidden multilingualism of Europe. Edited by Marco Tamburelli and Mauro Tosco.

Knowledge about language, 1997

MARK FETTES ESPERANTO AND LANGUAGE AWARENESS Esperanto, designed as a neutral lingua franca (ie second language) for worldwide use, has been taught and learned for over a century, to such an extent that a flourishing oral and written culture is associated with ...

1996

The history and development of research on Esperanto, a language created for universal communication, are reviewed. Discussion begins with the early context and intellectual tradition of efforts to create a universal language and prroceeds to the creation of an Esperanto community and the context in which it operates currently. Expansion of the field is chronicled, focusing on two factors: growing academic respectability and interest in Esperanto as a means or a model for machine translation. Growth in the creation of basic Esperanto tools is also examined. Distribution of interest throughout the world is noted. It is concluded that ignorance of the scope and possibilities of Esperanto has hindered progress of the Esperanto movement. Contains seven pages of references. (MSE)