Spoken Esperanto: What People Actually Say

Every Esperanto course ends at the same place: you can build a sentence, and you have never heard one. The gap is not grammar. It is the two hundred words and half-dozen habits that a community develops when it actually uses a language, none of which appear in the sixteen rules because Zamenhof did not invent them. The speakers did, mostly after he died.

This is that layer. Where the Esperanto hodiaŭ article covers where the community lives and the vocabulary of the internet it lives on, this one is about what comes out of people's mouths.

The greeting ladder

Four things on that table are worth more than the table.

Saluton is an accusative and nobody thinks about it. It is the object of an understood verb of saying: I offer you a greeting. The same shape gives dankon (thanks), bonan tagon (a good day) and bonan nokton. This is why the adjective agrees - bonan, not bona - and it is the single most common place a learner's -n goes missing. If you want the machinery, the accusative article has it.

Sal' is a clipping, not an elision. It wears an apostrophe, so it looks like the Rule 16 elision covered in poetic Esperanto, where a singular noun drops its -o: mond' from mondo. It is not that. Sal' throws away two whole syllables of saluton, which no rule licenses and which the language does anyway, exactly as English does to goodbye and because. A UEA vice-president noted in the association's own magazine, in 2007, that today's young people greet each other with sal', which is a nicely institutional way of recording something the institutions did not decide.

Ĝis grew a verb. Ĝis is a preposition meaning until; ĝis la revido is until the re-seeing; ĝis! on its own is the everyday goodbye; and from there the language did what it always does and made ĝisi, to say goodbye. It is not slang, it is in the dictionary, and Radio Verda signs off with it: el Vankuvero, Kanado, ĝisas vin kore Radio Verda.

Adiaŭ is not the neutral one. English speakers reach for it because it is the word in the textbook, but it carries the weight of farewell rather than bye. Use it when you mean it. Otherwise ĝis.

Krokodili, and the rest of the reptiles

Put twenty Esperantists in a room and some of them will share a national language. Within four minutes two of those will be speaking it. The community named the behaviour rather than tolerating it.

Krokodili: to speak a language other than Esperanto in an Esperanto setting, and normally your own. Krokodilo is a crocodile and -i makes it a verb, which is the four endings doing what they always do. Ne krokodilu! is a friendly reprimand, and it is nearly always delivered by somebody who was doing it themselves an hour ago.

Where it came from, nobody knows. Three stories circulate, all told with total confidence:

1. Crocodiles have enormous mouths and flap them about.
2. A Paris Esperantist named Ferrari, in the 1930s, asked what those crocodiles wanted.
3. Andreo Cseh's direct method used a wooden crocodile, passed to whoever lapsed into their own language.

None is documented. The word, by contrast, is solid: it has its own article on the Esperanto Vikipedio and a Wiktionary entry with a citation from Monato.

Then the family, which subdivides the offence by who in the room can follow you:

Now the honest part, because this is the sort of list that gets copied from blog to blog without anybody checking it. Krokodili is attested and the rest are not. Wiktionary has explicitly declined aligatori and kajmani for want of durably archived citations. They live on the Vikipedio page, in conference chatter and in the movement's own jokes about itself, and the definitions above are that page's definitions - other speakers will give you slightly different ones. Vikipedio's own note is that gaviali, in its first sense, is generally regarded as more forgivable than krokodili, and that lacerti describes a much rarer event than any of the others, which will surprise nobody.

Use them at a congress. Do not build a sentence in an exam on them, and do not let anyone tell you the boundary between aligatori and kajmani is settled, because it is not.

Kabei, and the man who walked out

This one is worth the space, because it is the only verb I know of in any language made out of a person's decision to stop.

Kabe was the pen name of Kazimierz Bein (1872-1959), a Polish ophthalmologist. In the language's first two decades he was, by wide agreement, its finest prose stylist: he translated Prus's La Faraono into Esperanto in 1907, he translated Turgenev and Orzeszkowa, he sat as vice-president of the Akademio, and in 1910 he produced the Vortaro de Esperanto, the first dictionary that defined Esperanto words in Esperanto rather than translating them out. A monolingual dictionary is the moment a language stops being a project and starts being a language. He wrote it.

In 1911 he stopped. No statement, no quarrel anybody could point to, no gradual drift. He went off to run the Warsaw ophthalmology institute and never wrote in Esperanto again. Interviewed twenty years later by Literatura Mondo, he said he no longer thought Esperanto would solve the problem it was built to solve, and that was that.

The community's response was to make a verb out of him. Kabei: to abandon the movement abruptly after having been active in it. Li kabeis. It is in the Reta Vortaro, it conjugates like anything else, and English has to render it as to pull a Kabe.

There is something genuinely revealing in that. A movement with any insecurity about itself would have quietly stopped mentioning him. This one coined a word so it could keep talking about him for a century, and the word is used without much bitterness. Verŝajne li kabeis pro la participoj - he probably quit over the participles - is the kind of thing people say, and the joke only works because everyone knows the participle argument really has driven people out.

Mojosa: how a word gets made now

Mojosa means cool. Not cold: cool, as in good.

It is an acronym, and a nicely built one. Take the initials of modern-, jun- and stil- - M, J, S, modern, young, stylish - pad them with vowels so a mouth can get round them, and finish with the adjective -a: M-o-J-o-S-a.

And unlike almost every other word on this page we know exactly where it came from. It was coined in November 2003, at a youth seminar in Söjtör, Hungary, by Gregor Hinker, Felix Zesch, Carl Mäsak and the rest of the room, who had noticed that Esperanto had no way of saying cool in the sense English uses it.

It took. It inflects like any adjective (mojosa, mojosan, mojosaj, mojosajn), it has generated malmojosa for uncool, mojose for the adverb, mojoseco for coolness and mojosulo for the person who has it, and it turns up throughout the newer dictionaries.

It is also not in PIV, and a speaker in their seventies may honestly not recognise it. Both facts are true and neither is a scandal. That is what a living colloquial layer looks like from the inside: a word travels through the people who need it, and the reference works arrive twenty years later.

For a learner the useful thing is not mojosa itself. It is the demonstration that the coining is still open. Esperanto's word-formation system is not a museum exhibit you admire in the word-building article; people are still using it on Tuesday nights.

Samideano, and the register it belongs to

Samideano is sam- + ide- + -an- + -o, a member of the same idea, and the dictionary records the community sense as an affectionate title among people who regard themselves as collaborators in the language's internal idea. It is a real word, it is warm, and it will make you sound like the printed programme of the 1962 congress.

That is not a criticism of the word. It is a register fact. Samideano belongs where Estimata and Altestimata belong, which is a letter, a speech or an obituary - see letter writing and register for the ladder it sits on. In a Telegram group people write amiko, or your name, or nothing at all.

The same goes for Esperantujo, the community imagined as a country you can be in. Lovely word, entirely genuine, faintly ceremonial, and built with the -uj- suffix that the countries article spends a section arguing about.

The opposite of ceremonial is etoso - the vibe, the feel of a gathering - which may be the community's most-loved everyday word. Nobody reviews a congress without pronouncing on its etoso, and no translation quite lands: it is warmer than atmosphere and less transferable than ambience. Use it freely; it is what the register ladder sounds like with its tie off.

Fina venko against raŭmismo, briefly and without a side

You will hear these two words within a week of joining anything, and the argument behind them is a hundred years old.

Finvenkismo takes its name from the fina venko, the final victory: the position that Esperanto is on its way to becoming everybody's second language, and that the movement's job is to get it there. It is the older view and it is what most of the institutions were built to do.

Raŭmismo is named after the Manifesto de Raŭmo, published in Rauma, Finland, in 1980 and edited by Jouko Lindstedt among others. Its claim is that officialisation is neither likely nor necessary, that defeating English is not Esperanto speakers' job, and that the speakers are best understood as a self-chosen diaspora language minority with a literature and a culture worth developing on its own terms.

In practice most speakers are neither, or both on different days, and the argument now runs mainly over funding and priorities rather than principle. Lindstedt's later gloss is the fair one: the manifesto's value was in admitting that there is more than one legitimate way to be an Esperantist, and that the community matters alongside the movement.

I have not given you a side here on purpose. You will form one, and it will be more interesting if it is yours.

Pasporta Servo, and what you actually say

The hospitality network is covered properly in the congress article. Two facts worth adding, because they are the ones that make it real: it started in 1974 with forty hosts, under Jeanne-Marie Cash and TEJO, from an idea Rubén Feldman González had floated in 1966; by 2017 it listed around 974 hosts in 81 countries.

What matters here is what comes out of your mouth when the door opens, and it is less than you fear.

Saluton! Mi estas Mikaelo. Dankon pro la gastigado.

Ĉu mi povas helpi?

Je kioma horo vi matenmanĝas?

Mi tre dankas. Ĝis la revido!

That is the entire transaction. The one rule of the network is that the conversation happens in Esperanto, which means your host has volunteered to be patient with a stranger's grammar. There is no other room in the world where that is true.

The three habits that do the most work

Ĉu ne? - the universal tag. English builds a different one for every sentence (isn't it, doesn't she, won't they); Esperanto has one form and never changes it. Vi venos, ĉu ne? The lighter bare ĉu? assumes less and genuinely asks. Both are in the questions article, and using them is the fastest single thing you can do to stop sounding like a textbook.

Nu - the noise you make while deciding what to say. Nu, mi ne scias. Nu, ni komencu. It is the most natural filler the language has, it is a proper dictionary word rather than a mumble, and its other life as a logician's conjunction is covered in the interjections article.

Do - so, then, therefore. Do kion ni faru? Ĝis do! This is the one to be careful with, and the warning is specific: learners discover do, notice that it fits almost anywhere, and then put it everywhere, three times a sentence, until it stops meaning anything. Speakers use it at joins - the end of a thought, the start of a conclusion, the close of a goodbye. Put it where English would put so and then delete half of them.

Two smaller ones worth having. Ja is the emphatic particle: mi ja konas lin, I do know him. It does in one syllable what English does with stressed do, and there is no other way to say it. And nedankinde - not-worth-thanking - is the standard answer to dankon, built out of danki plus -ind- plus mal-'s cousin ne-, which is a small demonstration of the whole affix system arriving in a single politeness formula.

What to use, and what to merely recognise

What to take away

• Saluton for hello, ĝis for goodbye, adiaŭ only when you mean it, and sal' in chat.
• Saluton, dankon and bonan tagon are accusatives with the verb left out, which is why the adjective agrees.
• Krokodili is speaking your own language at an Esperanto event, and it is the one piece of in-group slang every speaker knows.
• Aligatori, kajmani, gaviali and lacerti subdivide the same offence, are genuinely used, and are genuinely undocumented. Recognise them; do not lean on them.
• Kabei means to walk out of the movement, after Kazimierz Bein, who wrote the first monolingual Esperanto dictionary in 1910 and left in 1911 without a word.
• Mojosa means cool, from the initials of modern-, jun- and stil- padded into an adjective, coined in Hungary in November 2003, and it is not in PIV.
• Samideano is genuine and formal. Esperantujo is genuine and ceremonial.
• Finvenkismo expects the final victory; raŭmismo, after the 1980 Manifesto de Raŭmo, says the speakers are a self-chosen diaspora minority. Most people are somewhere in between.
• The three habits worth copying: the tag ĉu ne?, nu as the thinking noise, and do at the joins and nowhere else.

See also

• Esperanto hodiaŭ - the sibling article: where the community actually is, and the vocabulary of the internet it uses.
• The Esperanto congress - aliĝi, kotizo, gastiganto and the week itself.
• Letter writing and register - the written ladder that samideano belongs to, and why politeness lives in the sentence rather than the pronoun.
• Landoj kaj popoloj - the -ujo suffix behind Esperantujo, and the country vocabulary you will need at any international event.
• Interjections and onomatopoeia - the sibling article: nu, ho, ve and the noises.
• Questions - ĉu ne? and the tag that does the work of a dozen English ones.
• Poetic Esperanto - Rule 16 elision, which sal' only looks like.