Esperantujo

The last word in the course, and it is a country that does not exist. Rank 2,920 of 3,000 is a fitting place for this one. Esperantujo is built with -uj-, the suffix the countries article spends a whole section arguing about: the Fundamento's ending for a country, displaced almost everywhere by -io across the twentieth century because -uj- was also busy with purses and apple trees. That argument is exactly why this word works. Nobody says Francujo any more, so Esperantujo sounds deliberately, faintly archaic - and that is the point. It is naming a country with a suffix that has itself retired from naming countries.

What it actually means. Not a place. Esperantujo is the community considered as a territory: the congresses, the local clubs, the correspondence, the couch-surfing network, the people you can turn up to. You go al Esperantujo when you go to a kongreso; you are en Esperantujo for the week it lasts. Esperantio exists too, and means the same thing with a modern suffix, and a handful of writers prefer it precisely because it sounds less like a joke.

Use it knowingly. The spoken Esperanto article puts Esperantujo and samideano in the same register box: both genuine, both formal, both faintly ceremonial, neither one a word you scatter through ordinary conversation. Deploy them and you are signalling that you know the movement's own vocabulary for itself, which is the register the interna ideo article takes apart - the claim that the language carries an ideal along with it. You do not have to believe the interna ideo to enjoy having a passport to a country made of grammar.