Esperanto has native speakers
An invented language from 1887 has around a thousand people who grew up speaking it from birth, and both Hitler and Stalin persecuted it.
Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof grew up in Białystok, then part of the Russian Empire, where Poles, Russians, Germans and Jews lived side by side, often in mutual suspicion. He blamed part of the hostility on language barriers. His solution was a neutral, easy second language that belonged to no nation.
On 26 July 1887 he published it under the pen name Doktoro Esperanto: “one who hopes”. The name stuck to the language.
Designed to be easy
- Spelling is fully phonetic.
- Grammar has no irregular verbs.
- Word endings show the part of speech: nouns end in -o, adjectives in -a.
- Vocabulary is mostly drawn from Romance and Germanic languages.
Native speakers
Esperanto speakers meet at international congresses. Some marry, and their children grow up hearing Esperanto at home. These native speakers, called denaskuloj, number around a thousand. That makes Esperanto a rare case: an invented language with a living, native community.
Dangerous internationalism
Totalitarian regimes saw it as a threat. Hitler attacked it in Mein Kampf (Zamenhof was Jewish), and it was banned in Germany in 1935. Under Stalin, from 1937, many Soviet Esperantists were imprisoned or executed as suspected spies, because of their foreign correspondence.
Estimates of today’s speakers vary enormously, from tens of thousands to two million, because nobody agrees on what counts as “speaking” it.
Bring it up
“There are people whose first language is Esperanto. Their parents met at Esperanto conventions.”
Follow the thread
- In contrastThe language that came back after 1,700 years Two 1880s projects to create a spoken language: one revived an ancient tongue, the other invented a new one.
- RelatedLorem ipsum is a mangled Cicero quote Two kinds of language built on purpose: one to be read by everyone, one to be read by no one.
