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Esperanto Revolutionaries and Geeks pp 1–31Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

In the Beginning Was the Word

Abstract

Is Esperanto, the ‘universal language of peace’, still spoken? Where, how and why do people learn and speak it? Esperanto Revolutionaries and Geeks begins to address these questions by reassessing the idea that ‘nobody speaks Esperanto anymore’. Esperanto was originally designed by a single man in the late nineteenth century who envisaged it to be a nationalism-free language for international communication. Supported since its early days by the bourgeoisie, intellectuals and left-wing activists, Esperanto currently draws the attention of young polyglots and geeks. Outlining the particularities that set Esperanto apart from other languages, this chapter unpacks language politics, digital media use and community-building among Esperanto speakers to understand how a language with no native speakers and a dispersed speech community can find stability and endurance.

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Fig. 1.1

(Source Facebook page Steve the silly and vagabond linguist, retrieved September 2017)

Notes

  1. 1.

    All the personal names in this book are pseudonyms in order to preserve the identity of my interlocutors. These pseudonyms are based on popular names according to my interlocutors’ nationality, age and sex. The exceptions are historical and public figures, to which I refer by name and surname.

  2. 2.

    Unless otherwise indicated, the conversations referred to concern linguistic exchanges originally carried out in Esperanto translated into English by myself. Throughout the book, direct transcriptions and quotes that were originally in a language other than Esperanto will be indicated.

  3. 3.

    Esperanto has been comprehensively presented in both descriptive and prescriptive grammars. For my purposes here, I only approach its core linguistic features, partly based on Wells (2006).

  4. 4.

    Such claims of internationality are frequently questioned by those who argue that Esperanto is not equidistant from all existing languages (Van Parijs 2011: 40–42) and that its European typology makes it less accessible to speakers of non-European languages (see Parkvall 2010). It is worth keeping in mind that Esperanto was created in a specific place and time and Zamenhof had more access to European languages than to any others, which accounts for the European weight in Esperanto’s phonology, grammar and vocabulary.

  5. 5.

    The ‘from-birth person’, as in de ‘from’, nask ‘birth’, ul ‘person’, o ‘noun’.

  6. 6.

    Sign languages are excluded from this principle.

  7. 7.

    Such an approach was suggested by Helge Jordheim’s discussion (2014) on synchronisation and the multiplicity of regimes of temporal reasoning, and was further developed by the same author’s latest work (2018).

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  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Brasília, Brasília, Brazil

    Guilherme Fians

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Fians, G. (2021). In the Beginning Was the Word. In: Esperanto Revolutionaries and Geeks. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84230-7_1

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