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9
Coming to a Close, or How Not to Put an End to the Conversation
To come to a close means an opportunity to recapitulate some of the main foci of this study—not to summarise what has been argued, but to address the questions initially put forward from the angles proposed throughout this book. In the beginning of Esperanto was the word, and at the beginning of this inquiry was a broad interrogation about how Esperanto speakers and Esperantists perceive the potentialities and contingencies involving the practices related to the language. Catching this community at a moment of significant changes in the way people communicate and mobilise politically, the present research proposed a fresh look at the political impacts of communication technologies in everyday socialities, language politics and community-building at both the local and global levels.
Through an ethnographic approach that followed language users, words, communication technologies and political stances, this book fleshed out the connections between space and time that bring an inter- national auxiliary language into being. Shifting between, on the one hand, the regularity of annual congresses and weekly meetings and, on the other hand, the irregularity of informal gatherings and ubiquitous
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online settings, such connections between space and time have revealed how the time of Esperanto has been conveyed as something that has passed, will come or is now and here. Ultimately, this final chapter argues that Esperanto has something to say about language politics, media and community-building by putting forward the paradoxical ways in which ephemerality lies at the core of the endurance of this language and speech community.
9.1 Mediation, the Language of Politics and the Politics of Language
Esperanto as an international auxiliary language can only be used in all its glory in international settings, where it becomes a fully-fledged mediator between people from different national, linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Yet, communicating across boundaries depends on bound- aries being erected and made evident. For this purpose, Esperantists draw lines between peoples so that they can later use the language to cross these lines and overcome the features that divide peoples. This process entails nation-states and their languages, flags, anthems, traditional cuisine, clothing, dances, music and 'culture' being placed under the spotlight so that Esperantujos international character can be effectively materialised via amplified national features.
In these settings, an eventful slip takes place, as internationality becomes easily interchangeable with multiculturalism. In Esperanto- mediated conversations and practices, nation and culture are largely equated through cosmopolitan principles that overlook differences in terms of sex, gender, religion, disabilities and educational backgrounds. Along these lines, enacting Esperantujo is not about bringing people together through the erasure of diversity, but through the display and celebration of particular forms of difference. While certain forms of difference are underplayed, others can rise and shine, which makes room for privileging a specific kind of Other: the national Other. In valuing national otherness through openness, curiosity and respect towards diver- sity, Esperantists develop the core features they come to share aside from the language.
The way in which certain differences are valued is also perceived in terms of language use, as Esperantists tend to highlight how their inter- locutors' vocabulary choice, pronunciation, prosody, phrasal construc- tions and use of interjections when speaking Esperanto operate as indexes of their nationalities. For this to happen, another eventful slip needs to take place: one's mother tongue comes to be problemati- cally seen as an index of one's nationality. Drawing an explicit contrast between Esperanto and hegemonic languages, Esperantists highlight how language variation is welcomed and perceived as a constitutive feature of this diverse, international community, in which virtually everyone is a foreigner. As Esperantists often argue, those who communicate in a national language without using such a language's standard variety may be discriminated against, whereas, by contrast, the standard variety of Esperanto is always under construction and not equally sought.