It is also worth noting that, as a constructed language, Esperanto goes against the theoretical principle of the priority of spoken language over the written form.[6] As John Lyons (1968: 38-39) argues, there has never been any known bounded human group lacking the capacity for speech. By contrast, several languages have historically existed without a writing system, some of them up to the point they encountered missionaries and linguists who proposed written forms for them. The contrasting feature of Esperanto in this regard is that, for being a constructed language, it was first designed in written form and only effectively spoken when a second person (other than Zamenhof) learned it.
In sum, the Esperanto language—as well as the other international auxiliary languages to be discussed in Chapter 2—came before its speech community, was first developed in written form and does not count norm-providing native speakers. Esperanto was made for everyone but does not belong to anyone (i.e. it is not the first language of any ethnic or national group), and no human group feels any immediate need or constraint to speak it. Esperanto is no one's language and, technically, can become anyone's—which does not mean it will well be everyone's in practice. Most importantly, Esperanto became, as many of its supporters argue, 'more than a language', developing a set of cosmopolitan princi- ples, a speech community and a language-based social movement that moves in different directions. Against this background, how can this language yield assemblages and sociabilities and how do these take shape in practice?
1.2 Encounters: On Community, Movement and Mediation
One can travel, play certain games, cultivate hobbies, read literature or enact one's political convictions on one's own. Yet, using a language in all its glory requires both receptive and productive skills, which turns any meaningful engagement with verbal communication into a collec- tive endeavour and establish the speech community as a precondition for fully-fledged language use. However, contrasting with how scholars analysing Esperanto tend to treat the emic concept of Esperanto commu- nity as largely self-evident, it is worth outlining how Esperanto speakers effectively see themselves as part of the same relational assemblage.
Thinking of community as a social configuration whose members have something in common, the most striking feature Esperantists share is the language. Such as in speech communities (Duranti 1997), members of the Esperanto community share certain linguistic norms and resources that enable them to communicate among themselves in spoken and written forms, recognise one's level of fluency, refer to comparable sets of books and media and tentatively guess one's mother tongue based
on one's way of speaking Esperanto. Yet, for not being geographi- cally bounded, the Esperanto community has a feeble materiality and a transient character (Mortensen 2017). Bringing it into being involves 'work[ing] on some form of shared activity which will often be the reason why the social configuration was formed in the first place' (Mortensen
2017: 274).
Such labour involved in building community, then, gains currency. Analogous to the communities of practice (Wenger 1998; Eckert 2006; Gobbo 2021) that members of bowling teams, book clubs and church congregations bring into being through meeting and devoting time together to their shared interests, the Esperanto community relies on assumedly shared cosmopolitan orientations and on episodes of chatting, meeting and travelling to take shape. To these recursive practices (Kelty 2008) that help overcome the geographical dispersion of Esperantists, another paramount feature should be added: the shared history, litera- ture and symbols that help sustain this community (Anderson 2006). As I analyse in detail in the chapters to come, these elements and prac- tices constitute Esperantists as a community—however idiosyncratic it may be (Stria 2015), in both socio-anthropological and linguistic terms. Combining the community of practice, speech community and imagined community approaches yields a thicker analysis of community-building in conjunction with language use, making for considerations of how language variation plays out in spoken and written forms according to speakers' mother tongue, age, allegiance to specific Esperanto associations and use of diverse communication technologies.
Having clarified these analytical concepts, it is worth considering the emic categories Esperantujo and Esperantio—which I analyse etymo- logically in Chapter 2—used by Esperanto speakers to refer to their community. Mobilising the categories Esperantujo and Esperantio entails referring to the language as the element that triggers people's desire to gather as a community, but also to the sets of cosmopolitan principles and sociabilities normally expected to be displayed by the ideal-typical Esperantist. These include a language ideology that values alternative and more egalitarian forms of international communication; openness to the world; and kindness and hospitality deriving from an enhanced drive to meet and welcome people from different national, linguistic and cultural
backgrounds. Through joining Esperantujo, Esperantists are expected to express these stereotypical and romanticised traits, thus partially turning national, linguistic and cultural Others into peers, fellow members of a community that is inclusive and diverse by definition.
At this point, another previously used term demands explanation: Esperantist. If those who speak French or Portuguese are French or Portuguese speakers, why say Esperantist rather than Esperanto speaker? The suffix -ist in words such as Africanist, communist or journalist denotes a field of expertise, political conviction or occupation. In Esper- antist, in turn, the suffix is used to establish a difference in meaning between Esperanto-parolanto (Esperanto speaker) and esperantisto (Esper- antist).
The term esperantisto was first formalised in the fifth paragraph of the Declaration of Boulogne, issued at the First Universal Congress of Esperanto, in Boulogne-sur-Mer, in 1905:
An Esperantist is a person who knows and uses the Esperanto language with complete exactness, for whatever aim he uses it for. Membership in an active Esperantist social circle or organisation is recommended for all Esperantists, but is not obligatory. (Zamenhof in Boulet 1905; English translation retrieved from Forster 1982: 90)
Despite this definition, in Esperanto, esperantisto is ordinarily used as an umbrella term to refer to both Esperanto speakers and Esperan- tists. Among my French-speaking research participants, however, such a distinction was more commonly drawn, in French, between esperan- tophone and esperantiste, following from the use of the suffix -phone in words such as francophone or anglophone. Building on these emic concepts, throughout this book I use Esperanto speaker to characterise those who are learning or who can speak Esperanto, regardless of fluency, but who do not use it regularly nor claim to participate in the Esperanto community. By Esperantist, in turn, I designate those who speak the language regularly, join Esperanto associations and the movement as activists, volunteers and members, and/or participate in the community. The more one uses the language and becomes involved with Esperantujo, the more one is seen as an aktiva esperantisto (active Esperantist).