How do you get that from the cite? It just 200 - 2000 “population”. I didn’t see anything that indicated they “spoke it as their first language”.
The phrase “native speaker” is a complicated one; there’s a great deal of variation in how much competence a native speaker might show in different areas. You could make a case that someone is a native speaker of Esperanto, if they grew up using it in the home, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be able to use it fluently in every context. I can’t imagine an Esperanto speaker would maintain their ability to use it once their environment extends out of the home - just like with kids of immigrants, who may lose some of their ability to speak their native language when they go to school.
So I agree with you - it’s doubtful that many people are truly fluent in Esperanto the way you and I are in English.
Scroll down on the page and you will see an entry for users of that language as a second language.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you on this point, but I still don’t see how you deduce that the first number means native speakers. Is that the way the ethnolog entries work? The other line that you mention also has “WA” attached to it. What does that mean-- world average? I may consciously decide to switch to Esperanto as my preferred means of communication, but that doesn’t make me a native speaker-- ie, in the sense that **Excalibre **implied that parents were raising their kids to speak Esperanto.
Yes, that’s how the Ethnologue entries work. Number given for population is for native speakers. The number for second language speakers is either indicated as a secondary entry in the population entry or in the language use entry.
For those individuals who find it strange, creepy, or just plain odd that there are individuals who speak Esperanto as a first language (usint that term to mean the one the individual learns at home), consider how that probably happens. The individuals parents have just one common language between them as the parents are from different language communities. The common language will then be the one the parents use in the home. In this case, it’s Esperanto. There are, no doubt, scores if not thousands of other languages in the same situation.
My apologies, John Mace; I failed to address two things you mentioned.
It’s an abbreviation for World Almanac. Here’s the list of abbreviations from the Ethnologue site.
Of coure not. It makes Esperanto a second language for you, just as English is a second language for those immigrant parents who decide to speak only English at home. Those parents’ native language is not English; however, their children’s native language is English.
OK, got it.
BTW, I don’t see any reason to dis parents for teaching their kids Esperanto as a first language. Would we dis Native American parents for teaching their kids their ancestral language, many of which have far fewer speakers than Esperanto does? If they tried to prevent their kids from learning the language of the country they lived in, that would another thing altogether.
That’s one possibility. Another possibility is that the parents are Esperanto idealists who believe that they’re advancing the cause of world harmony by raising their child to speak Esperanto. Honestly, the latter seems much more likely to me, but I don’t have statistics to show.
Comparing Esperanto to folks who teach their kids a rare native language? Yeah, I can see what you’re getting at, John, but somehow the two just feel different to me. I know my feelings aren’t a real strong argument in Great Debates :). I’ll see if I can articulate what the difference is later.
Daniel
Oh, I know exactly what you mean. I should’ve couched my statement with a few caveats-- ie, if these are whack-job parents who just revel in being different, then they shouldn’t subject their kids to their nuttiness. I’m sure there are more than a few Esperanto speakers who fall in that category. 
As far as I know, what really happens is that two people who already know Esperanto meet and fall in love and get married and have kids. If their only language in common is Esperanto, that becomes the default family language. The kids learn both parental languages from the two parents and their sets of relatives, plus the language of the street where they live. So that’s at least three languages right there. Sounds like an advantage, not a disadvantage to me…
I’m sorry: you are factually incorrect. I repeat: Esperanto did not die. I have personal experience of this, which is an additional cite over and above the examples of living cultural activities in Esperanto which I linked to earlier. Today I and a friend were showing a visitor from Venezuela around Toronto, and we went to a house party… speaking only in Esperanto. I own CDs in Esperanto. I have been to concerts in Esperanto. It is not dead.
I wonder whether you feel that the original foundation of Esperanto as a deliberately-created, planned language makes Esperanto unnatural? Do you feel then, that any conscious manipulation or planning of language is unnatural?
But there are manipulations and manipulations, plans and plans. Is a slang based on conscious wordplay, like leetspeak, unnatural? Is an academy that proposes words for a official standard vocabulary, like the Académie Française, acting unnaturally? Is a spelling reform, like the German one of a few years ago, unnatural? Is the deliberate creation of a new writing system, like the Deseret or Shavian alphabets for English, or the Hangul syllabary of the 15th century for Korean, unnatural?
To me, the source of a language, or a language feature like an alphabet, does not matter.
Does the language have an active community of users? Are works written and published in it? Are there jokes unique to the language and its users? Are there reference works and magazines in it? If so, there’s a good chance the language may support a culture.
If that happens, that makes sense. As far as I know, you’ve got no more statistical support for this theory than I have for mine, though.
A quibble. My point was that it wasn’t dictators trying to murder it (your assertion) responsible for its obscurity. I shouldn’t have said “death,” although I don’t think it’s anywhere near as alive as most languages are.
Daniel
I’ve met more couples and families in my category than yours, though. (Yeah, yeah, I know, “the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data’…”)
If you’d said ‘obscurity’ in the beginning, I would have agreed with you! It’s not the same as death, you know.
And if by ‘aliveness’ you mean ‘having a large number of speakers as compared to other world languages’, I would have agreed with that, too. A large number of speakers implies a greater chance of the language continuing into the future: through day-to-day use, through children being brought up in the language, through works being completed in the language… and through attractiveness of the language to potential students.
But I think there is more than one definition of ‘aliveness’ for a language. We can look at it as an organization, so to speak, trying to grow and maintain itself in competition with other languages. But I was looking at it more by itself: does it fulfil all the functions of a language among its people? There are many smaller languages, such as Finnish and Icelandic, that will never have the numbers of speakers of English or Chinese, but they are still alive. I count Esperanto among those smaller languages.
Esperanto, though, is unusual: it gets most of its speakers through second-language learners, not through native births. In my case, I was attracted by the ‘internal idea’ behind it: egalitarian peer-to-peer communications, and the rejection of boundaries between people.
That ‘internal idea’ has become part of the culture of the Esperanto-speaking community, and I believe goes a long way to explain why it has survived when other constructed-language projects haven’t, why some people are attracted to it, and why some people were opposed to it.
There is a book called The Dangerous Language that described how Hitler and Stalin tried to suppress Esperanto in the early 20th century. I’ll have to go to the library to get it, but I can come back with cites later. IMHO, that so reduced the number of speakers that it was much easier for the language to remain obscure. But the rise of egalitarian peer-to-peer communications in the form of the internet made it much easier for people to find it again. ;).
That’s not a culture any more than “Star Trek” is a culture. Esperanto is a hobby, like many other hobbies, with works published about it, reference books, jokes about it, and an active community of participants.
Nothing against Esperantists (the language itself, though - that’s another story) but claims that Esperanto represents a culture are a bit of an exaggeration in my ever so humble opinion.
Please note that I did not mention jokes, reference works, etc about Esperanto; I mentioned jokes, reference works, etc, in it. This is a critical distinction. I maintain that Esperanto is a living language and supports a living culture because its speakers do enough in Esperanto to give it one. What writings, jokes, etc about Esperanto occur outside it are irrelevant to whether Esperanto speakers themselves support a culture in Esperanto.
On what do you base this opinion?
I don’t think that’s a relevant distinction; if we want to establish a set of criteria to decide whether a language’s users are “hobbyists” or “members of a culture”, the fact that books (etc.) exist in the language doesn’t matter, because while I can publish a book on fishing, I can’t publish a book in fishing. It’s not logically possible. So the existence of books in Esperanto has no probitive value; there’s no way for it to demonstrate that a true culture exists.
So I think that books in Esperanto, jokes in Esperanto, conventions on Esperanto, etc., don’t indicate anything more than, say, books set in the Star Trek universe, or jokes that require background knowledge of Star Trek, or Star Trek conventions. It just doesn’t demonstrate the existence of a culture.
Perhaps it should be called a subculture.
Of course, by far the most common mutual language is English, which is why we English speakers may be oblivious to such situations.
How can you demonstrate the existence of a culture? What signs say to you, this is a culture, and this is not?
I maintain that a shared language is one of the most powerful ways to define a culture: not sufficent in itself, or even strictly necessary, but very effective when present.
Look at the difficulty that English Canada has in defining itself as a separate culture from the USA, because it has a common language with the USA. Now look at the ease with which Quebec sets itself apart: it has a different language.
Another thing that helps to build a culture is history. Canada has a different history than the US, so that’s one reason it has a different culture.
Too, history often brings struggle, and cultures can be created or defined in struggle. Look at how the First World War helped shape the histories of Canada (Vimy Ridge) and Australia (Gallipoli).
Esperanto started as the creation of one man, L.L. Zamenhof. Zamenhof grew up in a town where four linguistic groups were at each others’ throats, so he explicitly aimed his language at the idealistic goal of crosscultural communications to help the walls between peoples come down. This idealistic goal was another thing that attracted interest and students–another component of what would become Esperanto culture.
After Zamenhof published his first book on Esperanto in 1887, interest in the language spread, and people began learning it. But Zamenhof lived in the then-Russian Empire, and the Czarist censors took a dim view of a Jew publishing a newspaper in a language they couldn’t read… so publishing Esperanto newspapers was forbidden. Similar things would happen in Nazi Germany, in Stalinist Russia, and elsewhere. Esperanto’s students were faced with a question: how much do we really mean it when we say we are for freedom and communication and breaking down the barriers? No doubt many set the language aside… but others didn’t.
This is the kind of struggle that builds communities and cultures. See La Danĝera Lingvo by Ulrich Lins (1988; Bleicher Eldonejo, Gerlingen, Germany; ISBN 3-88350-505-6) for a 500-page history of movements against Esperanto. I went down to the public library today and borrowed it, but it’s going to take me some time to get through it.
I thought not unlike you when I found Esperanto, Excalibre: I thought Esperanto was one of those idealistic things left over from the sixties, something that had never gone anywhere; and, after exploring it a while, I would move on to other things.
Imagine my surprise when I started learning the language and found that it was much older than that, and that there had been original literary works, original music, plays even, not just translations, composed in Esperanto since the 1890s.
There’s a book called Esperanto: Language, Cunture, and Community by Pierre Janton (State University of New York Press, 1992; ISBN: 0791412547) which gives, among other things, a fine history of cultural activities in Esperanto.
I’d give direct quotes from Janton, but I lent my copy out for a few weeks. I’ll see whether I can round up another one.
In the meantine, consider the number of organizations that pursue their goals in Esperanto. My year-2000 edition of the UEA Yearbook (Jarlibro 2000; Universala Esperanto-Asocio, Rotterdam, 2000; ISSN 0075-3491) lists at least sixty, covering everything from astronomy to tourism.
So Esperanto has at least five elements that help define a culture:[ul][]A shared language.[]A shared ideal.[]A shared history.[]A shared struggle.[*]Shared activity.[/ul]I think there’s a damn good chance Esperanto has a culture. I won’t even mention the shared symbols, such as the flag.
In the same sense that Klingon has a culture, I’ll agree. In the same sense that Japan has a culture, I’ll disagree.
I know there are different definitions for a language’s being alive; it seems to me that the corollary is that there are different definitions for a language’s being dead. Generally, if a language has extremely few first-language speakers, that qualifies it according to a looser definition as “dead.” The archetypal dead language, the only one whose death is prominently featured in a well-known poem, is Latin; yet Latin almost certainly has more speakers than Esperanto.
And the fact that Hitler and Stalin opposed something is certainly no indication that the something is dangerous. Those dudes were crazy.
Daniel
I don’t think that there is a definitive line between ‘having a culture’ and ‘not having a culture’. I think theis is one of those gradations, like the difference between ‘living’ and ‘non-living’.
As far as I can tell (having been acquainted with some Esperanto-speakers, communications, and organizations for the past five years), the only thing completely missing from the Esperanto community that Japan has is a country. And there have been attempts to correct this.
True. But as I mentioned upthread, Esperanto is unusual in that it acquires most of its speakers through second-language learners, not through first-language births. If Esperanto’s survival depended on those 200-2000 ‘native’ speakers that Ethnologue mentioned, it would be endangered.
But does Latin have as much community activity as Esperanto? That’s an interesting question I’d like to find the answer to.
They’re just the most well-known examples. I have a copy of The Dangerous Language (La Danĝera Lingvo) from the library now. It’s going to be a while before I get through it, but I’ll see whether I can come back with cites within the week. My point was that Esperanto went against the then political tendencies towards isolation, state control, nationalism, and demonising the Other, so it was going to be a target.