This leads to a reflection on the Esperanto-movado, the Esperanto movement, through which the language is conveyed as a proposed solu- tion to a certain situation of strain (Forster 1982: 5—7). This movement is made up of Esperantists who are committed to promoting and/or contin- uously using the language, which transforms Esperanto into a cause to be advanced. Just as is the case with minority languages—as Jacqueline Urla (1988: 382—385; 1993) discusses in the case of Basque—what matters for the liveliness of a speech community, more than the skills and ability to use the language, is the effective and constant use of the language by its already existing speakers. In this sense, the Esperanto movement seeks to transform non esperantophones into esperantophones, the latter into esperantistes and esperantistoj into aktivaj esperantistoj.
Promoting Esperanto without imposing it places Esperantujo politi- cally in relation to the fight against linguistic discrimination and for more egalitarian international communication. Even though the Esperanto community and movement feed each other through a feedback loop, the key difference between them lies in the fact that the movement, as ethnographically defined, is more institutionalised and goal-oriented. It draws on membership in Esperanto associations and on promoting the language (at stalls at events, for instance) and spreading the word about it, which is not something that every member of the community would be inclined to do.
An ideal-typical Esperantist learns this international auxiliary language because they want to establish communicative exchanges with people from different national, linguistic and cultural backgrounds in an alter- native way, without resorting to anyone's mother tongues. Accordingly, if a Brazilian and an Italian communicate in English, English works for them as a neutral language, as it is neither of their mother tongues. Yet, when an Englishman joins the conversation, English is no longer neutral territory, as one of the participants has an advantage over others, feeling at home in their linguistic comfort zone. Since Esperanto is no one's mother tongue, potentially everyone who speaks it has to learn it as a second language. By softening the links between language native- ness, proficiency and power, Esperanto is meant to help levelling out the uneven playing field of international communication. Moreover, when a native speaker of Portuguese learns French, they do not acquire the same status as a native speaker of French, as French is someone else's language, not theirs. By contrast, anyone can potentially achieve the status of Esperantist, as well as join and withdraw from Esperantujo at any time.
Nonetheless, as my interlocutors in France frequently stressed, there is no point in speaking an international auxiliary language in one's home country or neighbourhood, in which one could as well be using one's mother tongue. Hence, travelling and communicating beyond borders become imperative. In effect, Esperantos very raison d'etre lies in its unboundedness and internationality, which are made concrete through the creation of contexts where the language can be meaning- fully mobilised, such as Esperanto congresses, music festivals and online groups.
In international settings, Esperanto is used as a pivot language (Gazzola 2006: 414—415) to mediate between people who speak different mother tongues and who would otherwise be unable to communi- cate. This brings us to the language's foundational role of mediation. One could argue that any language can be a mediator, which is true. Yet, Esperanto is embedded in sets of cosmopolitan principles that place mediation at the core of its intended use, rendering this language effective not only to overcome language barriers, but also to preclude discrimination, nationalisms and xenophobia.
The category mediation is often thought of in terms of tension management and conflict resolution. In cases of child custody disputes, peace-keeping and civil wars, a mediator is a third party who facili- tates interactions between two or more disputants, while also letting the disputants themselves reach an agreement or define the outcomes of the negotiation (Wall and Dunne 2012: 217—221). Such conceptualisa- tion of mediation goes beyond Western settings: Edward Evans-Pritchard (1940: 162—177) also used this term to describe the role of the leopard- skin chief and the elders in settling disputes among the Nuer in early twentieth-century Sudan. Leopard-skin chiefs were considered particu- larly prestigious as conflict mediators because of their religious powers, and their not belonging to the system of dominant lineages made them more suitable to facilitate interactions between the parties in conflict.
Another use of mediation is recurrent in media anthropology. As Dominic Boyer (2012) argues, mediation is the modus operandi of communicational media such as print, television, radio and the Internet, which places media anthropology as the study of anything that media- tes—language included. Along these lines, in the case of Esperanto, mediation often takes the shape of bridging—which is the category that Esperantists evoke when referring to Esperanto as a ponta lingvo (bridge language). To bridge between people with different mother tongues through an international auxiliary language; between people of different nationalities through a cosmopolitan outlook that connects them through their differences. From persons to peoples and from languages to nationalities, Esperanto was conceived of as a mediator to both enable communication—like any other language—and promote meeting points, settings in which people from different backgrounds would feel equally at home. Bridging worlds through words, then, appears as key in Esperantos existence since at least the Third Universal Congress of Esperanto, in Cambridge, in 1907, when Zamenhof's opening speech (1929: 378) pointed out that Esperanto was not meant to interfere in peoples' internal dynamics, but rather to create 'bridges of words' (Schor 2016) to connect peoples with one another.
Thinking through such a concept—and partly in line with Bruno Latour's (2005) distinction between intermediaries and mediators— yields an outlook on languages not as simple codes carrying messages, but as mediators that also have the power to transform, distort and modify the messages they carry. This calls for a consideration of how communication in Esperanto is widely rooted in translation (Burghelea 2018): everything has to be translated from Esperantists' mother tongues and working languages into Esperanto as a precondition for this speech community to come into fully-fledged existence.
Given the mediating role of the Esperanto language and calling into question Latour's suggestion (1996, 2005) of keeping the social flat, there are specific settings and communication technologies playing ancillary mediating roles, in a hierarchy of levels. Taking into account also what is beyond and behind this language enables us to consider the existence of hubs or major nodes in these networks—such as Esperanto associations, international gatherings and Facebook groups. As ancillary mediators, these settings and technologies enable Esperanto to work as the major mediator that connects people, places and things. Flattening Esperan- tujo—along the lines of Latour's approach—would mean losing sight of these dimensions.