Esperanto

• 1. Introduction

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  Esperanto is a language invented by a single person, published in a slim pamphlet in the summer of 1887, that has since acquired an estimated one to two million speakers, a body of more than 25,000 books, annual global congresses, and even a small population of children who grew up speaking it from birth. How does a language built from scratch, by one ophthalmologist in a city on the edge of the Russian Empire, outlast empires, survive Nazi bans, Stalinist purges, and the derision of governments, to find itself on Duolingo, Google Translate, and the Vatican's podcast feed? What kind of person attempts to heal the world's divisions by inventing a new tongue? And who, a century and a third later, still chooses to learn it?

• 2. One Man in Bialystok

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  Ludwik Lazarz Zamenhof grew up in Bialystok, a city then inside the Russian Empire, now in northeastern Poland. He was Jewish, he was trained as an eye doctor, and he spoke something in the range of thirteen languages. He studied German, Hebrew, Latin, English, Spanish, Lithuanian, Italian, French, Aramaic, Volapuk, and more, alongside his native Yiddish and Russian. That breadth was not a parlor trick. It was a response to the world outside his window.

  In a letter to a friend named Nikolai Borovko, Zamenhof described what Bialystok felt like as a child. The city's inhabitants divided themselves into four groups: Russians, Poles, Germans, and Jews, each speaking their own language, each regarding the others as enemies. "I was brought up as an idealist," he wrote, "I was taught that all people were brothers, while outside in the street at every step I felt that there were no people, only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews, and so on." Language division, he believed, was the first and most influential basis for the separation of human beings into groups of enemies.

  He began working on the language in the late 1870s and early 1880s, refining it through what scholars now call Proto-Esperanto. On the 26th of July 1887, he self-published the first grammar booklet, which he titled Dr. Esperanto's International Language and called in the language itself Unua Libro, the "first book". He published it under a pseudonym: Doktoro Esperanto, meaning "one who hopes". He simply called the language "the international language" (la lingvo internacia). The people who found the book kept the pseudonym and gave it to the language itself.

  Zamenhof's three stated goals, written in 1887, were to create an easy language, to create one ready for immediate use by a small community whether or not it was ever universally accepted, and to find some way to get people to start learning it in the first place. On that third problem he struggled. Because people were reluctant to learn a language that almost nobody spoke, he asked readers to sign a pledge to begin learning once ten million others had made the same commitment. He received roughly a thousand signatures.

• 3. The Language Before Esperanto

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  Johann Martin Schleyer, born in 1831, had the same idea before Zamenhof did. The language Schleyer built was called Volapuk, and in the 19th century it briefly achieved something remarkable: widespread, active usage. Schleyer's movement demonstrated that real demand existed for a neutral common tongue. Many Volapuk clubs formed across Europe.

  What killed Volapuk was not the competition from Esperanto but an internal collapse of the movement itself. The clubs, one by one, converted into Esperanto clubs. The reason was structural: Esperanto was linguistically simpler, and unlike Volapuk it lacked central control, which made it harder to splinter over authority disputes.

  The debt Esperanto owes to Volapuk is genuine. Without Schleyer's experiment proving that a constructed language could attract serious community adoption, Zamenhof's project might have looked like pure fantasy. The Volapukists set the stage. Their gradual departure from Volapuk and arrival in Esperanto gave the newer language its first critical mass of experienced constructed-language speakers.

• 4. Design of the Language

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  Unua Libro, that first 1887 pamphlet, listed 917 roots. Those roots could be expanded into tens of thousands of words using prefixes, suffixes, and compounding. The rules for doing so were regular enough that speakers could coin new words on the fly and be understood. Zamenhof also published an Esperanto dictionary in 1894, and in 1905 he issued the Fundamento de Esperanto as the language's definitive reference.

  Roughly 80% of Esperanto's vocabulary comes from Romance languages, with the remainder drawn from Germanic, Greek, and Slavic sources. Linguist Ilona Koutny and scholar Humphrey Tonkin have both noted that while the vocabulary and syntax feel broadly European, the morphology is agglutinative, meaning words are built by stacking pieces together, which is actually atypical of European languages. Claude Piron argued that the word-formation logic has more in common with Chinese than with typical European tongues, and identified what he called a "Middle Plane" of Slavic-derived structure running through the language. A 2010 typological study concluded that Esperanto is somewhat European in character but considerably less so than actual European languages.

  Grammar is regular and suffix-driven. All common nouns end in -o, adjectives in -a, derived adverbs in -e. Verbs take one of six tense-and-mood suffixes: -as for the present, -is for the past, -os for the future, -i for the infinitive, -us for the conditional, and -u for commands and wishes. Verbs are not marked for person or number. So "mi kantas", "vi kantas", and "ili kantas" are all formed the same way; only the pronoun changes.

  The alphabet uses the Latin script on a one-sound-one-letter principle, with six letters carrying diacritics, including the circumflexes over c, g, h, j, and s. These marks cause practical problems on keyboards not designed for them. Zamenhof himself introduced an "h-convention" as a workaround, substituting digraphs like ch and sh for the accented characters. A more recent "x-convention" has gained ground in computing contexts, using the otherwise absent letter x to produce unambiguous digraphs. Software like Amiketo for Windows and Mac, and Gboard for Android, can convert these automatically.

• 5. Political Storms

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  After the First World War, Esperanto came closer to institutional adoption than it ever would again. An Iranian delegation to the League of Nations proposed the language for international relations, following a report by a Japanese delegate named Nitobe Inazo delivered in the context of the 13th World Congress of Esperanto in Prague. Ten delegates supported the proposal. One voted against it: Gabriel Hanotaux, the French delegate. Hanotaux opposed every League recognition of Esperanto from the first resolution on the 18th of December 1920 through all subsequent attempts over the following three years. The French Ministry of Public Instruction went further, banning Esperanto instruction in all French schools and universities, warning that "French and English would perish and the literary standard of the world would be debased."

  Nazi Germany took a different kind of interest. Adolf Hitler mentioned Esperanto by name in Mein Kampf as an example of a language that could be weaponized by an international Jewish conspiracy. The fact that Zamenhof was Jewish made the language a target. Zamenhof's own family was singled out for killing during the Holocaust. A minority of German Esperantists attempted to expel their Jewish colleagues and align themselves with the regime. It did not save the language from legal prohibition, which came in 1935. Esperantists held in German concentration camps continued to teach the language to fellow prisoners, telling guards they were teaching Italian.

  In the Soviet Union, the story moved in two directions. After the October Revolution of 1917, the new communist government gave Esperanto a degree of official support. The Soviet Esperantist Union was recognized as an organization. Leon Trotsky's biography of Stalin records that Stalin himself had studied the language. Then came 1937 and the height of the Great Purge. Stalin reversed all Soviet policy on Esperanto. Speakers were executed, exiled, or sent to the Gulag. A common accusation ran: "You are an active member of an international spy organization which hides itself under the name of 'Association of Soviet Esperantists'." The repression lasted until the end of the Stalin era in 1956. In 1920s Korea, socialist thinkers had used columns in the newspaper The Dong-a Ilbo to promote Esperanto as resistance to Japanese occupation, until the Mukden Incident in 1931 brought an outright colonial ban on Esperanto education.

• 6. Community and Culture

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  The first World Esperanto Congress took place in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, in 1905, with Zamenhof himself participating. French Esperantists organized it, and it was there that the green-star flag, proposed originally by Richard Geoghegan in 1887 and approved at the conference, became the recognized symbol of the movement. The flag features a green five-pointed star against a white canton on a field of green. The star by itself, known as la verda stelo, is still worn as a buttonhole emblem by many Esperantists to signal their identity to other speakers in the wider world.

  World congresses have been held in different countries every year since 1905, with interruptions only during the two World Wars and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, when the event moved online. Since the Second World War, attendance has averaged more than 2,000 people, with peaks reaching up to 6,000.

  The cultural output is substantial. There are more than 25,000 Esperanto books, both original works and translations. Composer Lou Harrison used Esperanto titles and texts in several works, most notably La Koro-Sutro in 1973. David Gaines used Esperanto poems and an excerpt from a Zamenhof speech for his Symphony No. One (Esperanto), composed between 1994 and 1998, and wrote original Esperanto text for his unaccompanied choral work Povas plori mi ne plu in 1994. A museum dedicated to Esperanto opened in China in 2013.

  The Esperanto community also has its own calendar holidays. Zamenhof Day falls on the 15th of December, also known as Esperanto Book Day. Esperanto Day is observed on the 26th of July, the anniversary of the Unua Libro. Speakers use a network called Pasporta Servo to arrange free accommodations with Esperantists in 92 countries. Scotland contributed William Auld, a late Scottish Esperanto author who argued that the language is "the expression of a common human culture, unencumbered by national frontiers", and thus constitutes a culture on its own terms.

• 7. How Many Speakers?

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  Counting Esperanto speakers is genuinely difficult, and the published estimates vary enormously. Sidney S. Culbert, a retired psychology professor at the University of Washington who was himself a longtime Esperantist, spent twenty years tracking down and testing speakers in sample areas across dozens of countries. His conclusion was that between one and two million people speak Esperanto at what he defined as Foreign Service Level 3, meaning professionally proficient: able to communicate moderately complex ideas without hesitation, and to follow speeches and radio broadcasts. That figure was rounded to two million in the World Almanac and Book of Facts, where Culbert published annual language estimates.

  Challenges to this figure have been sharp. Marcus Sikosek, now known as Ziko van Dijk, estimated that if one million speakers were evenly distributed worldwide, the city of Cologne alone should have roughly 180 fluent speakers. He found about 30. Jouko Lindstedt, a Finnish linguist who specializes in native-born Esperanto speakers, offered a layered scheme in 1996: around 1,000 have it as a native family language, 10,000 speak it fluently, 100,000 can use it actively, one million understand a large amount passively, and ten million have studied it to some extent at some point. A 2017 doctoral study by Svend Nielsen put the number of active speakers at around 63,000, though the statistician Sten Johansson questioned the source data. Nielsen himself agreed the margin of error was wide.

  Native speakers, called denaskuloj, represent a tiny subset: roughly 2,000 children in about a thousand families used Esperanto as one of their languages as of 2004. They typically grow up in international families where Esperanto serves as the common household tongue. Interestingly, native speakers do not hold an authoritative position in the Esperanto community the way native speakers typically do in other language communities, which creates an unusual challenge for linguists who normally rely on native-speaker judgments to settle questions of grammar and meaning.

• 8. Esperanto in the Digital Age

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  On the 28th of May 2015, the language-learning platform Duolingo launched a free Esperanto course for English speakers. By the time that course completed its beta-testing phase on the 25th of March 2016, it had 350,000 registered learners. By July 2018, that number had risen to 1.36 million. The Lernu! platform, another dedicated Esperanto learning resource, had 320,000 registered users and nearly 75,000 monthly visits as of October 2018. Google Translate added Esperanto as its 64th language on the 22nd of February 2012. Yandex Translate followed on the 25th of July 2016.

  The Esperanto Wikipedia, known as Vikipedio, contained articles placing it as the 37th-largest Wikipedia as of January 2025, measured by article count, and the largest Wikipedia in any constructed language. In October 2019, it attracted 117,366 unique individual visitors per month through desktop access, plus an additional 33,572 mobile visitors.

  In 2005, Swiss economist Francois Grin published a report commissioned by the French Haut conseil de l'education estimating that the use of English as the European Union's lingua franca costs billions annually and confers a significant financial advantage on English-speaking countries. The report modeled a scenario in which Esperanto served as that lingua franca and found it would offer substantial economic and ideological advantages. That analysis remains a reference point for the Europe-Democracy-Esperanto movement, which campaigns for Esperanto to become an official language of the European Union. Poland added Esperanto to its national list of intangible cultural heritage in 2014, and the asteroid 1421 Esperanto, discovered by Finnish astronomer and Esperantist Yrjo Vaisala, has been orbiting the sun under that name since its discovery.