Next, Pascal—a middle-aged statistician who worked at the French Ministry of Agriculture and Fishing—contributed to the debate with an article about Jose Mujica, a former president of Uruguay. He had found the text on a previous issue of Sennaciulo (The Non-National), an Esperanto periodical edited by Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda (SAT, the World Non-National Esperanto Association, an association linked to SAT-Amikaro). The article argued that Mujica was one of the few twenty-first-century politicians who legitimately stood for minorities and the working classes. Pascal's comments about the article elicited vibrant reactions from other participants and quickly became the focus of that evening's discussion. As I was the only Latin American in a room filled with French nationals, one Croatian and one Tunisian, Pascal turned to me to ask a number of questions about politics, electoral systems and protests against past and current presidents in Latin America.
The participants were surprised with some of the things I said, and Pascal complained: 'We don't hear much about Latin America in the mainstream French media, that's why we need this kind of debate here!' Later, wielding his copy of Sennaciulo, he added: 'Without Sennaciulo and our debates here, I would have known nothing about him [Mujica] and Uruguayan politics!' Using Esperanto as a means to gain access to information they would perhaps not obtain otherwise, the Esperanto speakers gathered at SAT-Amikaro frame these weekly debates as hori- zontal learning spaces, where federalist postmen, communist manual labourers, anarchist public servants—and, sometimes, an anthropolo- gist—discuss left-leaning political topics and learn from each other's perspectives and experiences.
Yet Esperanto also bears relevance beyond the framework of political debates and activism. In online settings, for instance, young speakers frequently use Esperanto to talk about travelling and programming or to practise foreign languages with Esperanto speakers from different linguistic backgrounds. Posting online in other languages to reach out to non-Esperanto-speaking publics, Esperanto speakers also mock their own niche interest in a 'useless' language. A commonplace way of expressing such form of self-deprecating humour is through one of the most popular and fast-spreading tools to transmit ideas online: Internet memes consisting of humorous image posts (Fig. 1.1).
Whether to foster political debates, share the latest world news or make jokes, this international auxiliary language constructed in the late nineteenth century has consolidated its presence in the early twenty- first century. While it does not compete directly with languages more widely spoken in international contexts, such as English, Spanish, Arabic or Swahili, Esperanto has secured its existence as a living language through its continuous use in spoken and written forms by a lively speech community.
As a nationalism-free constructed language, Esperanto is not meant to replace hegemonic or minority languages, but rather to establish a linguistic middle ground for foreigners to communicate without resorting to anyone's mother tongue. Esperanto is assumed to be no one's first language, as nobody is raised in an Esperanto-speaking neigh- bourhood or similarly, fluency in it is not normally a requirement when people apply for jobs or move abroad. Esperanto is generally placed outside the realm of coercion, since people who do not want to learn or speak it are unlikely to feel some sort of constraint or an external obligation to do so. Initially supported by the bourgeoisie, intellectuals, revolutionaries and left-wing activists, Esperanto currently also draws the attention of young polyglots and geeks attracted by non-mainstream
Fig. 1.1 Comic strip in English, based on a widely used exploitable (i.e. an image easy to replicate and edit) and adapted by young Esperanto speakers, joking about several parent's reactions towards Esperanto language learning (Source Facebook page Steve the silly and vagabond linguist, retrieved September 2017) intellectual activities. The latter groups often come across, study and use Esperanto through online courses and digital media, and occasionally compare it to fictional languages such as Tolkiens Elvish (The Lord ofthe Rings), Marc Okrand's Klingon (Star Trek) and George R. R. Martins Dothraki (Game of Thrones). In its 130 years of existence, Esperanto has developed into a set of cosmopolitan principles, a widespread speech community and a language-based social movement, being alternatively seen as a hobby, an intellectual game and a language-based critique of the contemporary.
Those who are sceptical about Esperanto's present-day relevance tend to regard it as a utopian project that went wrong—an artificial language that aspired to universality but that ended up forgotten. Several of its enthusiastic supporters, by contrast, see it as a living language that contributes to fairer and more egalitarian communication, as a peace-promoting tool to bring together forward-thinkers committed to building a better world. Between a failed project circumscribed to the past and a future-oriented global justice movement, what is the place of Esperanto in the present?
Beyond such contrasting perceptions of 'the language of the past' and 'the language of the future', this book aims to map out the various constituencies in which Esperanto bears relevance in the present, taking the reader from left-leaning debate groups and alterglobal- isation movements to international Esperanto meetings and online forums. Unpacking Esperanto-mediated relationships, code-switching and cosmopolitan sociabilities, this book asks: if Esperanto has been historically linked with radical politics, what is its current political rele- vance? Given that this speech community is unbounded and dispersed by definition, how do speakers gather and create contexts to commu- nicate in the language? Relatedly, what impacts have communication technologies such as digital media had on the organisation of this speech community and language movement?
Research for this book was conducted through 13 months of face-to- face ethnographic fieldwork in 2016—2017 and a longer period of digital ethnography, from 2016 to 2020. This included long-term participant observation and semi-structured interviews, as well as complementary archival research. Concentrating my ethnographic fieldwork in Paris,
France—a place where, since the early twentieth century, this language has been closely associated with left-wing activism—this study tran- scended French territory as I followed Esperanto speakers, gatherings and publications, as well as online and face-to-face instances of communica- tion in other places in Europe and in Asia.
This book proposes a novel approach to language politics and community-building by tracing Esperanto speakers' perceptions and practices regarding cosmopolitanism, digital media use, language ideolo- gies and radical politics. At the heart of this inquiry is the question of what it takes to ensure the stability of a language that nearly no one is required to speak and of a speech community that cannot rely on inter- generational language transmission. I argue that the unsteady status of this language and the transient character of the materialisations of its speech community are actually central to what fuels the perception of Esperanto as a language that yields more egalitarian communication and an inclusive community.
1.1 Whereto Beginthe Construction of a Language?
It was in the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire, through the pen of Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, that a language called Esperanto began to take shape. Aiming to bring about a rapprochement of people from different national and linguistic backgrounds through mutual understanding, Zamenhof conceived Esperanto as a rational language that could address the nationalist-laden clashes between people living in Zamenhof's home- town, Bialystok. With fewer basic grammar rules and being more regular than the already existing languages at the time, Esperanto came to be linked to its creator's pacifist ideals of fraternity, solidarity and world peace, as analysed in the chapters to come. Throughout its history, Esperanto has been widely learned, spoken, forgotten and taken up again, having aroused the interest and support of people such as Leo Tolstoy, Jules Verne, Charles Chaplin, Marshal Tito and Tivadar Soros, as well as the disavowal of Ludwig Wittgenstein, George Orwell and Noam Chomsky. Whatever it is and whatever it is capable of, Esperanto seems to have succeeded in continuously attracting people's attention and in gathering speakers, making it a phenomenon remarkable in itself.