Esperanto hodiaŭ: Where the Language Actually Lives

You have finished a course. The awkward question follows immediately: Esperanto has no country, so where do you actually go and use it?

It lives in three places: on the reto, in a back catalogue of recorded material, and at a few hundred gatherings a year. None will come and find you. All will take you the moment you turn up.

First, the numbers, honestly

Nobody has ever counted Esperanto speakers, because you cannot run a census on a language with no territory. Published estimates run from 60,000 to two million, a spread wide enough to be an admission rather than a measurement. What can be said without embarrassment: somewhere in the low hundreds of thousands can hold a conversation, a much smaller core uses it weekly, and one to two thousand people are denaskuloj - native speakers, from de + nask- (birth) + -ul- (person).

Small, then. What the headcount misses is density: a Welsh speaker cannot assume the next Welsh speaker is reachable in ten seconds, and an Esperantist can.

La reto: where the speakers are

Reto means net, and it is the root that shows off the whole word-building system in one go:

Nobody sat in a committee and approved retejo. It is -ejo, the place suffix, stuck onto reto: the place in the net. If you have read the word-building article, you could have coined it yourself. The same trick gives you the two verbs you will need within a week of joining anything: ŝuti is to pour or tip, so elŝuti is to tip out of the net (download) and alŝuti is to tip towards it (upload). Mi volas elŝuti la albumon. Ŝi alŝutis sian filmeton.

A note on typing the hats. Not every keyboard produces ĉ ĝ ĥ ĵ ŝ ŭ, so speakers fall back on the x-system: write cx gx hx jx sx ux and everyone reads them correctly. That is why this page sits at the URL esperanto-hodiaux while the title says hodiaŭ. You will see elsxuti and alsxuti in chat constantly: a keyboard workaround, not a different spelling, and nobody minds.

Where the babilado actually happens, in rough order of activity:

• Telegram. The centre of gravity, by a distance: groups for beginners, for grammar arguments, for cooking, for country-by-country chatter. Where a typical speaker uses the language most days.
• Discord. Younger, noisier, best for voice practice with people who will not judge your accusatives.
• Reddit. r/Esperanto runs to tens of thousands of subscribers, though much of the posting is in English, which is a bit krokodila of everyone concerned.
• Facebook groups. Older demographic, still very large, still where the movement's arguments get had at length.
• lernu.net. The multilingual learning portal, courses and forums attached. It has introduced more people to the language than anything except Duolingo.
• Amikumu. An app that shows which speakers are physically near you. In a city, usually more than you expected.
• Libera Folio. Independent journalism about the movement, and genuinely critical of it.

Vikipedio: the scale, without the spin

The Esperanto Vikipedio passed 300,000 articles a while ago and keeps climbing, which puts it inside the top forty of the roughly 340 language Wikipedias - ahead of Greek and Danish, both languages with a state and a school system behind them.

The number does flatter it. A large share of those articles are short stubs about villages, asteroids and species, produced in bulk the way they were everywhere, and the active editor base is a few hundred people rather than a few thousand. For a learner none of that matters: it is the largest body of free, non-fiction, level-appropriate Esperanto prose in existence, and plain by necessity. Read the article about something you already know well - your own town, your job, a film you have seen forty times. You will guess nine words in ten, and the tenth sticks.

Muziko: Vinilkosmo and the back catalogue

The label of record is Vinilkosmo, founded in 1990 by Floréal Martorell and run out of a village near Toulouse. Hundreds of albums across three decades: rock, folk, ragga, chanson and whatever Ĵomart kaj Nataŝa are doing. Start with Kajto for Dutch folk, Persone for Swedish guitar rock, Dolĉamar for French ragga, La Perdita Generacio for melodic indie, and JoMo, who is exactly as unhinged live as the recordings suggest.

The claim is not that this is good "for Esperanto music". Some of it is simply good, and the rest is the standard of any competent regional scene. Either way it is input, and sung input at natural speed does things to your ear that flashcards do not. Muzaiko streams around the clock if you would rather not choose.

Podkastoj kaj radio

Podkasto is a straight loan, and the fact that no committee-approved coinage displaced it tells you something true: Esperanto borrows exactly like a living language, and always has.

• Pola Retradio has broadcast in Esperanto from Poland since 1959 and is now a podcast, one of the longest continuous runs of anything in the language.
• Ĉina Radio Internacia puts out daily material. It is state media and reads like it, but it is daily.
• Kern.punkto is essayistic, careful and slow enough to follow.
• Radio Verda and a rotating cast of YouTube channels fill in the rest, Evildea the most visible of the video lot.

Same advice as the music: pick what you would have listened to anyway. Comprehensible input is only comprehensible if you already roughly know what is being said.

The associations, and what they are for

The UEA - Universala Esperanto-Asocio - was founded in 1908 by Hector Hodler, sits in Rotterdam, and holds consultative relations with UNESCO. It has also been losing members for decades and has had visible financial trouble. Both are true at once. What it still does that nothing else does: it runs the Universala Kongreso, it publishes, and it gives the language an institutional address when governments want one. TEJO is the youth wing, and its Internacia Junulara Kongreso is where the language's actual future turns up.

Below that sit the national associations - Esperanto-Asocio de Britio, Esperanto-USA, a hundred others. Often small, often ageing, and the reason any local group exists at all.

Then Pasporta Servo, running since 1974: speakers in around ninety countries who will put you up for free, on the single condition that you speak Esperanto while you are there. It is the most concrete benefit the language offers, and the thing that most reliably converts a learner into a speaker.

The congress circuit

The Universala Kongreso has been held every year since 1905, when Zamenhof himself turned up at Boulogne-sur-Mer, with breaks only for the two world wars. Recent hosts have ranged from Montreal to Turin to Arusha in Tanzania. Attendance runs in the low thousands, well below its post-war peak, and it is still the largest gathering of the language on earth. The article on la kongreso covers what a week there is actually like.

Below it: the IJK, SES in Slovakia over the summer, JES over new year, national congresses, and hundreds of weekend renkontiĝoj - from renkonti + -iĝ- + -o, a meeting that comes about. You aliĝi (register), pay a kotizo (fee), and turn up.

And you try not to krokodili. To crocodile is to sit at an Esperanto event speaking your own national language at people, and the word exists because the behaviour does. There is even kabei, to abandon the movement abruptly, coined from Kabe, the pen name of Kazimierz Bein, one of the finest prose stylists the language ever had, who walked away in 1911 without explanation. A language that invented a verb for quitting it has a sense of humour about itself.

The Duolingo generation, and what it is missing

The Duolingo course launched in 2015 and has claimed well over a million registered learners - more beginners than the movement recruited in the several decades before it, and anyone sniffy about that should explain where they would have found them instead. Its future has never looked secure: the Spanish and Portuguese versions were retired years ago and the English one has had more than one scare. But the influx happened.

What it reliably lacks is not vocabulary. It is four specific things:

1. The accusative past the direct object. Direction (en la domon), duration, dates and measurements all take -n, and a recognition-first course barely touches them. See the accusative.
2. The correlatives as a system. Learned as 45 separate words they are a slog; learned as a five-by-nine table they take an afternoon.
3. Affixes as something you use, not something you recognise. Knowing malbona is not the same as reaching for mallaboremulo when you need it. Word building is where the language stops being a vocabulary list.
4. Output. Tapping the right tile is not writing a sentence, and the gap between the two is where most people quietly stop.

This course spends most of its time on precisely those four, which is either a happy coincidence or the reason it was built. The curriculum is the route through them.

How to plug in this week

1. Join one Telegram group and post one sentence today. Not a good sentence. Today.
2. Read one Vikipedio article a day about something you already know.
3. Put a Vinilkosmo album on while you work.
4. Register for one online event. There is always one this month.
5. Book a Pasporta Servo stay, or turn up at one weekend renkontiĝo.

The community is small enough that a new speaker who shows up and talks gets noticed inside a fortnight. That is not a consolation prize. For a self-taught learner it is the entire point: nowhere else can you go from finishing a course to being a recognised regular in a functioning international community in a single season.

Vortaro