Esperanto, like open-source software, makes more room for its users to transform the language/source code as they use it. In line with Esperantos language ideology (as discussed in Chapter 5), there are people who find in Esperanto a language they can access and contribute to at the same time, both by simply speaking it on a more levelled playing field or by innovating through neologisms and wordplay. To a certain degree, the rights that speakers have to transform the Esperanto language through use are more comprehensive than when one speaks a national, hegemonic language. When Maxime wordplays or makes Internet memes in Esperanto by creatively mobilising word-formation processes, for instance, Esperantists tend to find his humorous mate- rials funny. He may display a French accent if this takes place in a voice chat or face-to-face conversation, but this only shows that French is his mother tongue, hardly raising critical comments from his inter- locutors. However, in a conversation with native speakers of English that he narrated to me, when he wordplayed in English displaying his French accent, his interlocutors did not understand the joke and doubted his English skills, thinking that he had made a mistake instead, which produced an embarrassing situation.
As with open-source software, when a neologism is needed to name something new or specific in Esperanto, despite the existence of the language council Akademio de Esperanto, virtually any Esperantist can have a say in how to coin new vocabulary and contribute to spreading new words virally.[30] Mimicking the distinction between open-source and proprietary software, Esperanto is set apart from more stable and hegemonic languages that are closely regulated by powerful language councils. If modifiability is what characterises the reorientation of power and knowledge implemented by open-source software (Kelty 2008: 10— 13), the same applies to Esperanto, which appears as a language that does not belong to any commercial enterprise or national group and that provides for considerable leeway to be modified, personalised and updated through use.
Accordingly, when British Esperantists planned their trip to the 2016 British Esperanto Conference in Liverpool and referred to the city's name in Esperanto as Hepatbaseno (a word-for-word translation of 'liver' + 'pool', as analysed in Chapter 5), they were not concerned whether their neologism would make it into dictionaries and common parlance. Rather, they were simply providing their group of friends (as well as the members of the mailing list of the Esperanto Association of Britain where that e-mail exchange took place) with some fun, through wordplay. Being no one's language and no one's property, Esperanto emerges as a code permanently under construction. The same freedom to contribute to language development manifests in non-standard words commonly used among young people, for whom maltrinki (the inverse of 'to drink') jokingly (and, some would argue, more respectfully) refers to the act of urinating (pisi). A further illustration of Esperanto as an open-source language appeared in a talk at the association Esperanto-France in Paris, in 2017, when a visiting Argentinian Esperantist referred to the northern hemisphere as malsuda hemisfero. In replacing the standard norda with the neologism malsuda (the inverse of 'south'), the speaker used the creative freedom allowed by the language to place the Global South at the heart of his narrative, in an entertaining post-colonial stance.
Analysing activism for open-source software, Gabriella Coleman (2013: 13—14) argues that the creative acts of hackers and geeks are oriented towards practices that enhance the utility of software while retaining a commitment to free speech and aesthetic experiences. Simi- larly, Esperantists address free speech through the language ideology of fairer and more egalitarian communication, and its aesthetic aspects are present in their creative use of the language. This perception of Esperanto as an ever-developing endeavour produces ties whereby both human languages and computer programming languages seem to call for practices of modifiability.
As much as with open-source software, Esperanto is rendered trans- parent and flexible, allowing its users to understand it fully and to occasionally contribute to its development. For Maxime and the several volunteers collaborating with the expansion of Vikipedio and the multi- lingual subtitling of YouTube videos, the key is to use Esperanto as a tool to build participatory cultures. Through decentralised, networked prac- tices, laypeople with diverse sets of expertise and interests co-produce knowledge and make information available to other Esperanto speakers and neglected audiences such as minority language speakers and deaf people. The same rationale applies to translating software and developing apps and interfaces, whereby freedom to code works in conjunction with freedom of speech. And by freedom of speech I mean not necessarily the right to express ideas without fear of sanctions or censorship (Boyer 2003; Candea 2019). In preventing users from modifying it, proprietary software codes do not allow users to express themselves fully using the computer programming language they 'speak'. Along analogous lines, the authority of powerful language councils and of native speakers of hege- monic languages prevents speakers from making use of such languages in ungrammatical or uncommon ways. Therefore, the freedom of speech pursued by Esperantist geeks refers to the freedom to use languages and media as one sees fit, through open-source software and an open-source language.
Preparing articles for the Esperanto Wikipedia, as well as subtitling videos in Esperanto and in minority languages, helps make knowledge more multilingual and accessible while also building community through participatory cultures. As Esperanto's links with free speech and fairer communication gain ground online, such initiatives propose novel ways to understand the connections between this language and internation- alist agendas, bringing to the fore radical, political ways of making communication and the media more collaborative and democratic.
7.3 Mind the (Age) Gap
Despite the baby boomers having launched the Internet, it was the gener- ations X, Y, Z and Millennials who took the lead in developing it and turning it into the present-day interactive and collaborative Web 2.0. By opening new venues for communication, technologies such as online language courses, social media and instant messaging apps emerged as alternatives to correspondence exchange, as well as to face-to-face language courses and meetings. Recent years have seen the first genera- tions of digital natives (Prensky 2001) becoming Esperantists. As people learn the language and make Esperantist friends from around the world online, few ever attend face-to-face gatherings or become members of associations.
In April 2017, halfway through my field research, a new mobile phone app came into being, shifting the materiality of Esperantujo. Chuck Smith, along with Richard Delamore (an Esperantist YouTuber known by the alias Evildea), launched Amikumu—a GPS-based app, originally designed for Esperanto speakers, aimed at bringing together language speakers and learners. Free of charge but built on propri- etary, closed-source code, the app consists of a directory of users located by their mobile phones' GPS and displayed according to proximity to ego. Each user has a social media-like profile, with a profile picture, short personal description and information on one's spoken languages and level of fluency in each of them. From this data, users nearby can practice a language by exchanging private texts on the app or arranging a meeting. Currently, Amikumu has a multilingual interface and is open to users of several languages (including sign languages). However, since its Esperanto version was the first to be launched, the app gained prominence in Esperantujo, with Amikumu's statistics reporting 14,258 Esperanto-speaking registered users as of early 2021, only behind English-speaking users.