Hopes & Fears: I was hoping you could give me a simplified, brief history of Esperanto.

Chuck Smith: Over a hundred and twenty-five years ago, a man named L.L. Zamenhof looked around his city--what is now Bialystock, Poland--and saw people speaking many different languages. German, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian. He saw there were many conflicts because of language, and he wanted to make a language that would unite them. So he made Esperanto, which is an easy-to-learn language.

HF: What makes it easier to learn?



CS: The easiest way to show it is with the verb tenses. Amas is 'love,' amis is 'loved,' and amos is 'will love.' It doesn't matter who's doing the loving.

HF: How did the language spread, initially? How did Zamenhof get it out there?

CS: His first book was released in 1887 in Russia, and then he started translating it into other languages--German, English. From there it just evolved naturally.

HF: How many people--rough estimate--speak it today?



CS: I'd say around one to two million people.

HF: How did the language survive into the 21st-century?



CS: A lot of this came with the ideology of world peace, and uniting people across borders. Some people even died for that: In World War II, Hitler and Stalin were actively seeking out Esperanto speakers to persecute them. Hitler called it the language to unite the Jewish diaspora because Zamenhof was a Jew, and Stalin called it the language of spies. Despite that, at that point Germany and Russia were the countries where Esperanto was most-spoken. And despite that active seeking-out and murdering of Esperanto speakers, it still managed to survive and thrive.

HF: Were you surprised that 100,000 people, 120 years after Esperanto's inception, would be signing up for this Esperanto Duolingo app?



CS: There was a lot of demand for Esperanto, but all these other language schools were saying, 'how many Esperanto speakers are there?' They weren't really seeing the demand, and nobody was producing the materials. And then suddenly when the Duolingo course came out, everyone said 'well finally, we have a good resource to learn Esperanto with.'

HF: What is your role within the app?



CS: Right now, we have a team of eight people working on it. The course works sort of like a game, you could say. You start with things like 'I am man' --very simple sentences-- and then you work yourself up to 'the government of Russia says ... some very complicated sentence.'

HF: Would it be offensive of me to ask you to say a sentence in Esperanto?



CS: No! Esperanto estas tre bela internacia lingvo.

HF: Ha, so that sounded to me like Italian. Is there a connection between the two languages?



CS: Well, 60% of the vocabulary comes from Romance languages, 30% from Germanic, 10% from Slavic.

HF: So wait, what did you just say?



CS: I said 'Esperanto is a very beautiful international language.'