The development of Duolingo Esperanto courses relies on the work of volunteers who are fluent both in Esperanto and in the source language of the course under preparation. They translate words, build example sentences, record audio samples and liaise with the Duolingo technical team to ensure the sociotechnical functionality of the courses.
Another collaborative project that has mobilised Esperantists on a large scale is the ongoing expansion ofVikipedio, the Esperanto language Wikipedia created in 2001—also initiated by Chuck Smith. In early 2021, Vikipedio ranked 35 in number of articles among Wikipedias in other languages, counting 178,210 contributors.
Alongside online language courses and encyclopaedias, other online Esperanto contents too have mushroomed in recent years. This includes the activity of Esperanto YouTubers, podcasters, gamers responsible for creating Esperanto servers on the virtual worlds Minecraft and Second Life and lively Twitter profiles (re)tweeting about nearly anything in the language, as well as of websites and Esperanto Facebook groups where people debate politics and polyamory, kick-start collaborations between Esperantist artists or simply ask for language advice.
The Internet provided a new space for the learning and use of the language—which, in turn, brought about changes in language use. The fact that Duolingo language learning is based on a functional rather than a structural approach—emphasising real-life language use rather than grammar—means that its users learn to introduce themselves and list things they like since their first climb of Duolingo's skill tree. A number of such beginners thus immediately take their chance exchanging ideas through text on StackExchange forums and on Facebook groups such as Esperanto and Duolingo Esperanto Learners (counting 22,410 and 14,082 members, respectively, as of December 2020). Groups such as these allow beginners to practice the language in busy online spaces where conver- sations tend to be short and superficial, and typos, generally accepted. Messages in Esperanto along the lines of 'Hi, I'm an Esperanto beginner. I'm here to practice the language' are the norm. Such strong online presence of enthusiastic beginners, on the one hand, nurtures positive appraisals from experienced language users excited about the new batch of learners. On the other hand, it raises concerns over the 'degeneration' of the language—an issue sometimes raised on Internet memes (Fig. 7.1), online posts and news articles at Esperanto magazines.
Another important feature of most online Esperanto courses is that they contribute to consolidating the influence of English over Esperanto. Since Esperanto on Duolingo was first offered in English and became a major gateway for new learners, Anglicisms such as 'Kio la fek?' became popular among young Esperantists. A rough translation of the English 'What the fuck?', expressions like these ended up gaining ground due to being widely understood also by Esperanto speakers who are not native speakers of English, even though such expressions do not follow Esperanto's grammatical norms.
There is a parallel between correspondence courses (via post) and these novel language learning processes, for online communication also favours text over voice (Boellstorff 2008: 152—156). As a consequence, those who study through iKurso or Duolingo are likely to develop their
Fig. 7.1 Meme in Esperanto (based on a scene from the cartoon Family Guy) that jokingly refers to Noah's Ark. This kind of meme is called object labelling exploitable, as the humour comes from the labels added to the image. In this case, the animals to the left stand for Facebook experts, courses on YouTube, Lernu.net, apps, online courses, 'teach yourself' books and Duolingo, whereas Noah points at the hybrid resulting from their crossbreed ('my language skills') and asks 'What is that?' (Source Facebook group Esperantaj Memeoj, retrieved December 2020)
writing more than their speaking skills. This has led Esperanto to be a language potentially more frequently used in written than in spoken form on the Internet. However, a defining difference between these learning processes is that the fast pace of online communication—which is often synchronic, in the case of instant messaging and live chats— allows for faster learning and an almost immediate use of the language. More importantly, Esperantists I spoke with listed two major advantages of digital media for language learning and use. Firstly, social media and instant messaging apps bring about the possibility of communicating in an international language with a truly international audience. By posting or producing content in Esperanto online, most of one's followers, inter- locutors and friends are Esperantists from distinct national and linguistic backgrounds, which brings Esperantujo closer to its ideal of consistent internationality.
Secondly, digital media allow for a certain level of anonymity of its users (Turkle 1995), enabling people to be identified with profiles, avatars and aliases instead of their actual identities. Still, whether or not one uses their actual name and profile photo, the Internet facili- tates instances of communication in which one's identity does not matter as much as in the actual world.[29] These forms of anonymity, to a large extent, make online spaces more welcoming to those who want to put themselves to the test using a language they do not master in brief chats with strangers.
In addition to changes in language use, a distinct learning pace, enhanced internationality and a certain level of anonymity, the Internet has also complexified the meaning of 'language' itself. Elements such as emojis, gifs and Internet memes frequently complement written messages, helping texters convey feelings, add visual cues to their messages and express humour. As David Crystal (2008) notes on the use of English on mobile phones and computers, the fact that written communication online was initially popular among young people resulted in the association of emojis, acronyms and shortenings with youth language. However, even though emojis might be a novelty brought by digital media, abbreviations have existed since much before the Web 2.0. In Esperanto, this is no different: texters often shorten the standard Esperanto greeting saluton—present in the fundamentals of the language—as sal. Another common shortening is ' kiel vi?', from ' kiel vi fartas?' ('how are you?'). This also applies to a tendency in online written communication to verbalise adjectives more frequently than in hand- writing. In this sense, 'vi estas bela' ('you are beautiful') and Ha vetero estis aca hierau ( 'the weather was awful yesterday') are recurrently conveyed, respectively, as 'vi belas' and 'La vetero aCis hierau .
Informal and innovative registers of the language are hardly new: Claude Piron (1989) underlines that abbreviation and word compres- sion are widely present in Esperanto literature, particularly in poetry, and are a general feature of change in Esperanto. Similarly, already in 1946, in a half-page comment at the Esperanto periodical Sennaciulo (The Non-National), the Esperantist W F. Kruit (1946) criticised at length the use of k as a compression of kaj ( 'and'), used in the periodical and in books published by SAT. However, a trend that may be intrinsi- cally linked to texting and online communication relates to combinations of letters and numbers, where words like nokto ( 'night') become n8t' and sendu ( 'to send' in the imperative form) becomes sen2, just as the English m8 for mate or db8 for debate. The propensity to use abbrevi- ated language may have initially been a strategy to make typing faster and less costly, motivated by the unease to type long texts on tiny keys on T9 mobile phone keyboards and by the fact that, with SMS, the longer the text, the more the sender would have to pay to send it. Yet, abbreviated language endured both the replacement of T9 with QWERTY/AZERTY keyboards and the shift from SMS to instant messaging apps for another reason: because it is fun (Crystal 2008: 65). Even though abbreviated language may not be new, online communication technologies have lent a new twist to it, making it more recurrent, amusing and salient, espe- cially through practices of wordplay followed by visual cues such as 'winking face' and 'face with tears of joy' emojis.