In 1887, L. L. Zamenhof, a Polish physician writing under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto, meaning “one who hopes,” published a slim volume laying out the complete grammar rules of a new universal language. In his vision, this would be a tongue “unconditionally accepted by everyone, and the common property of the whole world.” By all accounts, such idealism should have consigned it to the dustbin of history. But in the early twentieth century, amid the convulsions of world wars, anticolonial struggle, and the rise of totalitarianism, the Esperantist movement found a global audience, often attracting those with left-wing politics and yearnings for international peace. 

Today, Esperanto no longer occupies the cultural mainstream, as Katie Thornton writes in her dispatch from the 110th World Esperanto Congress in the June issue. Translation devices are ubiquitous; the internet offers instant connection with people living thousands of miles away. What is the value proposition of Esperanto today? Are its utopian aspirations still communicable? I spoke with Thornton to discuss these questions, language learning, and Esperanto’s aversion to slang.

Jasmine Liu: Are you still studying or practicing Esperanto?

Katie Thornton: Communicating with the folks I spoke with for the piece after the fact has helped me continue speaking it. I’m not actively practicing Esperanto on Duolingo, but I have been dabbling a bit more in Spanish. My first language is English. I learned Mandarin from a young age. 

When I was at the Esperanto Congress, I would find that when I panicked and became nervous, I would default to speaking Mandarin, because it’s my go-to second language. The word for “you” in Mandarin is “nǐ,” and the word for “we” in Esperanto is “ni,” so that was deeply confusing to me.

Liu: You observe in your piece that “for a satirist or a cynic, Esperantists are easy fodder.” You have a surprisingly earnest attitude toward the people you met at the Congress. Did you ever feel tempted to make fun of them?

Thornton: I think the original line was “for a satirist or an asshole.” Many times throughout the congress, I asked myself, Am I the asshole here? Oftentimes, when I asked myself that question, the answer was yes.

When I was looking into who the speakers are, and who attends these Congresses, I noticed how many of them were from areas proximal to conflict zones. I thought, if they can have an earnest interest in this movement, I can keep an open mind. The obvious thing to do is to dismiss this as a joke—that’s often how I’ve heard it spoken about in the United States. Much more interesting than looking repeatedly for those punch lines is to look for the reasons that people actually do this. It’s not an insignificant investment: they’re investing their time; they’re investing their resources to get to these congresses; and they’ve made real human friendships thanks to this language.

Some of the most memorable moments were when Esperanto felt normal—moments when conversation was flowing, when I was understanding pretty much everything that was being said, when I wasn’t so focused on just deconstructing the words. In those times, I would begin to forget that this was a made-up language. Instead, I was simply having a deeply human experience with a bunch of people who I could not have otherwise communicated with. It made me reconsider how much human design is inherent in our seemingly organic lives.

Liu: Certain aspects of the Esperantist movement—travel on the cheap, an open-ended embrace of multiculturalism, a celebration of global interconnectivity—feel anachronistic. At the congress, did you feel that Esperantists inhabited a moment that has passed?

Thornton: This is a group that nominally aspires to world peace. It’s easy to look at that mission and be dismissive. But what I came to learn through talking with people is that they’re not naïve to the fact that this is a goal that is completely out of their hands. They’re content to experience that type of peace—that type of relationship—on a small scale, just among themselves. They know they won’t be able to bring peace to the world, so they settle for peace, or at least cross-cultural communication in an intimate community, even if only for the duration of the congress every year. The goal was less grandiose than it had once been in the history of the movement, and less grandiose than I had perhaps assumed it to be going into the congress. With that in mind, these more humanistic, interpersonal achievements seemed less anachronistic.

Liu: You do express some disappointment in the fact that the Esperanto community is no longer motivated by militant politics the way that it was at the beginning of the twentieth century, and that people aren’t as forwardly anarchist, socialist, and antinationalist. Did you talk politics with people at the conference?

Thornton: There are still explicitly leftist sub-organizations within the broader Esperanto movement. From what I’ve heard, there are right-wing Esperantists. Peace at this point in the Esperanto movement is often talked about in an apolitical way. But I think that when you’re talking about large-scale conflict, peace cannot be apolitical. There’s certainly some degree of conflict about how to bring in Esperantists from different sides of global conflicts. I believe there were a handful of Russian Esperantists at the congress, but the formal Russian delegation is not currently attending the global gatherings, and there was conflict over the fact that there were some Russian folks serving as editors at one of the Esperanto magazines. So there’s a limiting factor to peace being apolitical. You can’t have political pacifism on a global scale. Unfortunately for the world, I don’t think mere comprehension across differences is enough to foment peace.

Liu: The governing body of the language frowns on the usage of slang. The idea is that the development of colloquialisms would make it difficult for others learning the language to understand what is being said. My understanding is that it’s part of the language’s aspiration to be universally communicable. But much of the richness of language inheres in excluding people; being part of a subgroup; communicating with like-minded people; associating more closely with some than others. Does the regulation of Esperanto prohibit it from being as expressive as other languages?

Thornton: This is the thing that makes Esperanto, and any planned language, doomed from the start: language inherently evolves. This isn’t to say that Esperanto doesn’t change, but it by design cannot do so in a strictly organic way. The Esperantists would make counterpoints and say that so-called natural languages also have a degree of control—institutions like the Académie Française, among others. But languages evolve and must evolve. This is how we get new languages. This is how we get evolutions in our own language.

As you mentioned, there’s a lot of affinity and power in evolving languages, and claiming evolved versions of languages. That is a vital component of a language’s survival, its evolution, and in some instances, the creation of an entirely new language. I think that trying to rigidly control a language will always be a losing battle—or at least require the full buy-in of all its speakers. They have to want to opt out of evolving the language in their own way. They have to voluntarily sign up for the rigidity of the language with the intention of being able to understand people. And I think that’s why they designed it, or why Zamenhof saw it, as a voluntarily adopted second language. The idea was that it would be so fun to learn that people could not resist it, that they would opt into the rigidity for the broader goal of understanding one another, and that they would still have their first language to be able to adapt in the ways that languages naturally do.

But one thing about the language itself that I think makes people willing to opt into that rigidity is that the language is very expressive. I remember somebody I spoke with saying that speaking English—he’s good at English, it’s his fifth language or something—is like using an old black-and-white TV from the Fifties, and speaking in Esperanto is like having full Technicolor. Although the rules are quite strict, the language does open up possibilities for how words are used. You can take a noun and turn it into an adjective quite easily. You can take an adjective and turn it into an adverb. You can express yourself very beautifully in Esperanto because of the rules of the grammar.