Photo: Ziko/Wikimedia Commons.
Esperanto flags displaying the green star, verda stelo, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 2008.
Decades ago, when I was still active in local Esperanto meetings, a group of Esperantists came to the Boston area, and a bunch of us rode around with them on a beat-up green bus called the Green Tortoise, or verda testudo.
Today I no longer remember what the guests’ main goal for the visit was. To tour Boston’s historic sights with other Esperantists? Maybe just to find an inexpensive way to visit the US. Several people from Poland seemed to just melt away. They had friends or family in the country.
Although I don’t do much with Esperanto anymore, I know that the idea of a nonpolitical international second language is a good idea, one that despite ups and downs, never dies out completely. It’s too useful.
Katie Thornton wrote a long article about its uses at Harper’s magazine, and the Guardian reprinted it.
“One day, as a 16-year-old in the late 2000s,” she wrote, “I received an AOL instant message from my friend Kenyon. He wanted to know whether I had heard of Esperanto, the universal language. Kenyon was several years older than me, and something of a mentor. Like me, he was a musician – he engineered my teenage band’s first record – but unlike me, he had a head full of trivia that made him the confidently nerdy star of any Saturday-night gathering of outcasts.
“His pitch: Esperanto was invented in the late 19th century by a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist named LL Zamenhof, who aimed to create a language so irresistibly easy to learn that it would be adopted as a shared second tongue by people the world over. From a position of mutual understanding, world peace would surely follow. Yes, the language had been around for well over 100 years and, yes, universal fellowship had yet to be achieved. But the internet had inaugurated a new era of global connectivity, and users could learn through an abundance of online classes. Perhaps we were on the verge of an Esperanto renaissance. Kenyon had been practising for a few years and was practically flua.
“As a typical adolescent, I was in the midst of my own social awakening. I had begun to travel the US playing music, relying on nothing but the hospitality of friends of friends of friends. I was finding communion and what felt like boundless possibility in mass bike rides and sweaty dance parties in derelict churches. I was also dabbling in the world of hitchhiking and freight-train-hopping. … Goods needed to move, and I could move with them, thanks to the kindness of those who showed me the ropes just because I wanted to learn. Esperanto seemed comparable: another disparate social club with a baked-in rejection of the forces, writ large and ill-defined, that sought to divide us. But even then, its goals felt redundant: the internet had already given me new tools to communicate across distance and difference. Simple as it might be to learn the language, why bother?
“Eventually, the collective optimism of the early internet dissipated, and I forgot about Esperanto. Then, a few years ago, I acquired a shortwave radio, capable of picking up analogue broadcasts from around the world. Browsing the schedules of international programs – which, to this day, are transmitted by national governments and large missionary organizations – I learned that both the state-run China Radio International and, until recently, the Vatican ran regular shortwave broadcasts in Esperanto. …
“I decided to join the estimated million-plus people who have taken to Duolingo to try it out since Esperanto debuted on the platform a decade ago. Soon I was climbing the ranks of the app’s prestigious leaderboard, reading aloud what sounded like a dream-warped version of Spanish. Egged on by the company’s signature green owl, I translated sentence after sentence that seemed pulled from the index of a modern-day Little Red Songbook (‘Who is that worker?’, ‘Is the thief guilty?’, ‘Do the police help us?’), lofty one-liners reflecting peacenik aspirations (‘There are too many wars in the world’), and sentiments betraying a delusional sense of the language’s reach (‘Learn Esperanto to talk to the world’).
“For a satirist or a cynic, Esperantists are easy fodder. Many of its enthusiasts are undeniably eccentric … but Esperanto was once a force in global politics. Before facing heavy persecution during the second world war, it gained serious traction in international labor, anticolonial and anarchist movements. And most of today’s Esperanto adherents are neither naive nor even particularly batty. They include European social democrats and elder anarchists, Chinese communists, central African youth pacifists and Ukrainian-independence advocates. There are Esperantist gay-rights advocates, Bible translators, lawyers and Go players. Why, against all evidence to the contrary, would this motley group – many of whom are no strangers to global conflict – still believe that the widespread adoption of a century-and-a-half-old invented language may yet overpower the world’s divisions, particularly as the global order, by any reasonable account, appears to be rapidly disintegrating?”
The article at the Guardian is very long, and I’m not sure it answers that question. But it’s interesting, and like all Guardian articles, it’s free. Read it here. Subsequent letters to the editor are here.
