Esperanto Slang: Sound Like an Insider, Not a Textbook

Esperanto slang is the layer of words speakers use about themselves. Mojosa is cool, krokodili is slipping into your own language, kabei is quitting for good. None is in a phrasebook, and all of them are in the group chat.

mojosa: cool

Mojosa means cool in the sense of great, not cold. It is built from initials: moderna, juna, stila (modern, young, stylish), MJS, padded with vowels and given the adjective -a. It was coined in November 2003 at a youth seminar in Söjtör, Hungary.

It takes every adjective ending, and mal- and -e work on it as on any adjective:

• La nova kanto estas ege mojosa! - The new song is seriously cool!

Ege, from the suffix -eg-, is the usual booster. The word is not in PIV, the big reference dictionary, and an older speaker may not know it: that is how slang travels.

-aĉ-: rotten, and sal for hello

The suffix -aĉ- makes anything rotten. It works on almost any root, which makes it the most useful insult in the language:

On its own it is an adjective: aĉa, lousy. Kia aĉa tago! - What a rotten day!

At the friendly end, sal is the casual short form of saluton, hello, common in chat and among friends. Keep saluton for anyone you do not know.

krokodili and the reptile family

Put twenty Esperantists in a room and some will share a national language. Speaking it there is krokodili, to crocodile: a crocodile, krokodilo, turned into a verb.

• krokodiloa crocodile

• Ne krokodilu! - Don't crocodile! (Speak Esperanto!)

It is called out with a laugh, usually by someone who was doing it an hour earlier. Where the word comes from is not settled: several stories are told with confidence, and none is proven.

The community has built a joke family on it, sorted by whose language you are speaking. Definitions vary from speaker to speaker; these are the common ones:

Krokodili is the one everyone knows; the rest are mostly jokes.

kabei: the man who became a verb

Kabe was the pen name of Kazimierz Bein (1872-1959), a Polish eye doctor and a celebrated early translator. He was vice-president of the Academy of Esperanto. Then, in 1911, he left the movement abruptly, with no explanation, and never came back.

The community made a verb of him. Kabei is to quit the movement suddenly and completely after being active in it:

• Li kabeis. - He quit Esperanto for good.

It conjugates like any verb: kabei, kabeis, kabeos. It names a clean exit, not a drift: a member who skips a few meetings has not done it.

Esperantujo and samideano

Esperantujo is the Esperanto world: the clubs, congresses, hosts and online groups, treated as a country with no map. The suffix -uj- makes a land from its people or a container from its contents:

• Bonvenon al Esperantujo! - Welcome to the Esperanto world!

Its citizens call each other samideanoj, people of the same idea: the traditional word, still used to open letters and speeches.

fina venko and raŭmismo

Two words name a long-running argument in the movement: what is Esperanto for?

The Manifesto of Rauma came from the international youth congress in Rauma, Finland, in 1980. Its claim: official adoption is neither likely nor necessary, and the speakers are a community with a culture worth developing for its own sake. Plenty of speakers hold a bit of both views.

• Ŝi estas finvenkisto, sed ŝia frato estas raŭmisto. - She is a finvenkisto, but her brother is a raŭmisto.

Mistakes English speakers make

What to do next

1. Join an Esperanto group online and count how long before someone says ne krokodilu.
2. Make five -aĉ- words about your week.
3. Then read spoken Esperanto for the register around these words.

See also

• La Kongreso - where krokodili and samideano are spoken most.
• Spoken Esperanto - the casual register these words live in.
• Word building - -aĉ-, -eg-, -uj- and the other affixes.