Coming to think of it, it may sound a bit odd that several people communicate, formulate ideas and establish relationships with each other using words and structures that started in a single person's desk. With this in mind, before tracing the uses of Esperanto in various places, times and circumstances, a more immediate question arises: what kind of language is Esperanto?
Often classified as an international auxiliary language, Esperanto in its phonology, grammar, vocabulary and semantics draws heavily on Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages.[3] In terms of vocabulary, Zamenhof attempted to choose the most international roots[4] for the initial Esperanto words he coined. In practice, this meant root words present in most European languages, so that Esperanto could sound familiar to speakers of those languages. Its alphabet is based on the Latin script, with some letters having diacritics. Its spelling is phonemic, each letter corresponding to one phoneme and with the stress always on the penultimate syllable. In terms of morphology and syntax, Esperanto is agglutinative, with compound words formed in a head-final order. Words in Esperanto consist of a stem, occasionally with suffixes and prefixes attached to it, followed by a grammatical ending: for instance, -o indi- cates nouns, -a adjectives, -e adverbs, -j plurals and an accusative case ending -n marks the direct object in a sentence. Its dominant word order is SVO (subject + verb + object). However, this order is relatively flex- ible due to the morphological marking of the accusative, which allows Esperanto speakers to recognise the constituents of a sentence irrespective of the order of words in the sentence.
While natural or ethnic languages have no 'publication date' and develop organically as they are used by particular human groups (Miner 2011), Esperanto and its fundamentals can be traced back to one man. As highlighted by an Esperantist who I met at the 101st Universal Congress of Esperanto, in Slovakia, in 2016: 'Esperanto is an inter- esting phenomenon, isn't it? Because the language created its population, whereas what usually happens is the opposite: a population creates its language'. This dissimilarity, when measured against natural languages, is what characterises Esperanto as a constructed or planned language, accounting for its alleged artificiality. Yet, as in natural languages, the regular use of Esperanto also produces changes, updates and variations, as its diversifying speech community has made Esperanto into a living language that evolves organically from its planned fundamentals.
Just as with natural languages, Esperanto is also spoken by children. Among parents from different linguistic backgrounds who meet each other through Esperanto, it is common practice to raise bilingual or multilingual children and to use Esperanto as a home language. In addition, it may be that younger generations of a family become inter- ested in Esperanto thanks to the older generations' engagement with it. Yet, however organic the language may have become, these cases are not prevalent: the stability of the Esperanto speech community is continuously called into question insofar as language transmission along generational lines cannot be assumed to ensure Esperantos continuity.
Moreover, Esperanto is neither supported by governments nor is it widely used for the provision of services or education. Without being extensively taught at home or schools, most people take up Esperanto through self-learning. In the language's early days, this occurred mostly through teach-yourself learning materials and books. These were—and still are—occasionally complemented by language tutoring by correspon- dence or phone, as well as by face-to-face courses offered at Esperanto associations. More recently, the Internet has enabled online language learning, which has brought a new wave of speakers to the community while reinforcing Esperanto's position outside the framework of formal education.
Another aspect that configures it as a rather singular language has to do with its relation to spatiality: Esperanto is not an official or customarily spoken language anywhere, in any bounded location, neighbourhood, region or country. Since nearly no one is fully immersed in an Esperanto- speaking environment, Esperanto has no native speakers—which raises a fierce linguistic debate about what it means to be a native speaker of a language. Following a formalist approach, Ken Miner (2011) draws a fundamental distinction between native speakers and speakers-from-birth. For Miner, being a native speaker entails learning a given language by receiving and using it continuously within a wider speech community during one's early childhood. By contrast, if some children only use Esperanto as a home language with their parents and siblings and use it in its spoken form significantly more than in writing, they are more likely to repeat the mannerisms, grammar mistakes and idioms coming from their close relatives, which characterises these children as speakers-from- birth. This is also the case of migrants' children, who use their parents' mother tongue at home and, outside home, the official language of where they live.
Native speakers occupy a prestigious position in formal language theory (Chomsky 2006). Unlike those who learn a language later in life, native speakers unconsciously develop certain cognitive systems that characterise their knowledge of the language and account for their norm- providing language use (Chomsky 2006: 23—25; Miner 2011). The same does not apply to speakers-from-birth, which, following Chomsky, results in Esperanto not being a 'language' and, according to Miner, makes Esperanto linguistics impossible.
In a rather contrasting approach, drawing upon the Esperanto word denaskulo,[5] Sabine Fiedler (2006, 2012) acknowledges that the status of someone who speaks Esperanto from birth cannot be equated with the status of a native speaker of an ethnic language and recognises that the linguistic competence of denaskuloj does not decide on the stan- dards of the language. However, in her view, this does not invalidate Esperanto linguistics, as the study of Esperanto-speaking children, for instance, can be useful to explore linguistic phenomena such as baby- talk, onomatopoeia and euphemisms (2012: 75—76). Esperanto may not be an object of study available for formal linguists, but this does not preclude the possibility of studying this language and speech community from other theoretical and analytical standpoints.
The lack of native speakers and the absence of a bounded Esperanto- speaking territory account for the difficulty to produce a reliable account of how many people speak Esperanto. According to one estimate, there are over two million L2 speakers—meaning those who have Esperanto as a second language—which places it as, presumably, the largest commu- nity of speakers of an international auxiliary language. This is the figure recurrently repeated by Esperantists since 1989, when Sidney Culbert disclosed, in a letter to David Wolff, the results of his loose survey on the number of Esperanto speakers in the world (Culbert 1989). More recently, the same figure was reiterated, in an equally vague survey, this time based on the online use of the language (Wandel 2015). Several factors prevent the production of a credible count of Esperanto speakers. Firstly, national surveys, when they include questions about linguistic background, tend to focus on one's first, rather than second languages. Secondly, not all of those who learn Esperanto become members of asso- ciations, go to international meetings or join online Esperanto groups, which are the spaces commonly analysed by Esperanto surveys. Thirdly, not all of those who study the language become proficient or come to use it effectively, which places them outside the framework of the de facto speech community. The figure of two million speakers cannot be easily validated, but the fact that Esperantists usually mention it to justify the strength of the language becomes in itself ethnographic data.