How an artificial language from 1887 is finding new life online By Sam Dean

On a recent Friday evening, the Esperanto Society of New York convened in a rowhouse on Manhattan’s East 35th Street. The upper floors of the building seemed to house a bilingual preschool, going by the many large surfaces covered in multicolored paint handprints; the ground floor was made up of multipurpose meeting rooms administered by the Unitarian Universalist church down the block. Four people had been listed as "attending" on the Facebook page for the event, but by the time the meeting began, eight Esperantists were sitting in a rough semicircle of dormroom couches and hard plastic chairs. The exuberantly mustached Neil Blonstein, president of the Society, was presiding behind a folding banquet table, wearing a white T-shirt printed with the word "ESPERANTO" and a photo of a group of Esperantists at a convention. There were grapes and crackers by the door. That night, the Society consisted of seven men, including Neil, and one woman (though Neil’s girlfriend, also an Esperantist, did show up later). Some were young, most were not. The agenda for the evening included two speeches, each followed by discussion. The talks were difficult to follow if you didn’t know any Esperanto, but a rusty background in French allowed for an understanding of the broad strokes. It's an artificial language, with none of the messy exceptions of natural tongues Tech was in the air. A bearded Brooklyn College junior read an account of a conference he’d gone to the previous weekend called Organizing 2.0, peppered with the untranslated names of apps, and followed by a discussion of the uses and meaning of MailChimp. Then, a composer and member of Mensa gave a speech on Wikipedia, specifically the problems that crowdsourcing presents for smaller languages. He compared Esperanto to Bislama, the language of the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu. Despite having 250,000 native speakers, Bislama Wikipedia only has 444 pages. Esperanto Wikipedia has over 215,000. Like its vastly more successful digital cousins — C++, HTML, Python — Esperanto is an artificial language, designed to have perfectly regular grammar, with none of the messy exceptions of natural tongues. Out loud, all that regularity creates strange cadences, like someone speaking Italian slowly while chewing gum. William Auld, the Modernist Scottish poet who wrote his greatest work in Esperanto, was nominated for the Nobel Prize multiple times, but never won. But it is supremely easy to learn, like a puzzle piece formed to fit into the human brain. Invented at the end of the 19th century, in many ways it presaged the early online society that the web would bring to life at the end of the 20th. It’s only ever been spoken by an assortment of fans and true believers spread across the globe, but to speak Esperanto is to become an automatic citizen in the most welcoming non-nation on Earth. To speak Esperanto is to become an automatic citizen in the most welcoming non-nation on Earth Decades before Couchsurfing became a website (or the word website existed), Esperantists had an international homestay service called Pasporta Servo, in which friendly hosts around the world listed their phone numbers and home addresses in a central directory available to traveling Esperantists. It may be a small, widely dispersed, and self-selected diaspora, but wherever you go, there are Esperantists who are excited that you exist. It sounds hokey, but this is the central appeal of Esperanto. It’s as if the initial utopian vibes of the World Wide Web had never reached a wider audience. There’s no money, no power, no marketing, no prestige — Esperanto speakers speak Esperanto because they believe in it, and because it’s fun to speak a foreign language almost instantly, after a couple months of rolling the words around in your mouth. The internet, though, has been a mixed blessing for Esperanto. While providing a place for Esperantists to convene without the hassle of traveling to conventions or local club meetings, some Esperantists believe those meatspace meet ups were what held the community together. The Esperanto Society of New York has 214 members on Facebook, but only eight of them showed up for the meeting. The shift to the web, meanwhile, has been haphazard, consisting mostly of message boards, listservs, and scattered blogs. A website called Lernu! — Esperanto for the imperative "learn!" — is the center of the Esperanto internet, with online classes and an active forum. But it’s stuck with a Web 1.0 aesthetic, and the forum is prone to trolls, a byproduct of Esperanto’s culture of openness to almost any conversation as long as it’s conducted in — or even tangentially related to — Esperanto. But there’s hope that the internet can give the language new life. Wikipedia and its 215,000 pages was a first step, and yesterday, Esperanto debuted on Duolingo, a virtual learning app with 20 million active users — far more people than have ever spoken Esperanto since its invention. The assembled Esperantists in that scuffed room on East 35th Street knew the Duolingo course was coming, and they were optimistic. The word Esperanto, after all, means "one who hopes." But the final item on the meeting’s agenda underscored what all those virtual Esperantists were missing. After the speeches, Neil got up and passed out sheets printed with the lyrics to "Fremdaj en la Nokt," the Esperanto version of the Sinatra hit "Strangers in the Night." He explained that a particular Italian Esperantist had an extensive YouTube presence and a habit of jumping into worldwide Esperanto forums and Facebook groups to plug his singing. This was one of his better songs. Neil settled back down behind his banquet table, counted out the time, and the eight attending members of the New York Esperanto Society started to sing.

Esperanto was invented in 1887 by a Polish ophthalmologist named L.L. Zamenhof, who hoped his creation would bring about world peace. Zamenhof saw a turbulent world divided by language, and concluded that the situation was too complicated, essentially unfair, and ultimately doomed. He believed that the languages people already spoke were oversaturated with history, politics, and power, making it impossible to communicate clearly. Esperanto was a fresh start, a technology that would allow its speakers to sidestep the difficulties of natural languages altogether. He made it as easy to learn as possible, with no irregular verbs, a vocabulary adapted from Romance language roots, and a simple, genderless, almost caseless grammar. The late 19th century was the heyday of the artificial language, and before Esperanto, an artificial language called Volapük was all the rage, with almost a million speakers across Europe. Zamenhof dismissed it as too difficult to speak (the Esperanto word for "gibberish" is still volapukaĵo), and by the late 1880s, it was starting to unravel. Zamenhof wrote his first book describing Esperanto in Russian, and he called the language the studiously dull Lingvo Internacia, or "International Language." But he published it under the pen name "Doktoro Esperanto," meaning "Doctor Hoper" in his new idiom, and like Doctor Frankenstein before him, soon found that people were calling his creation by the name of its creator. With its simplicity and supposed neutrality, he was hoping his language would make it to the Fina Venko, the "Final Victory," his term for the Esperanto rapture: the day when the whole world would speak his invention as a second language, facilitating clear, neutral, and ultimately peaceful dialogue among all humanity. Babel, basically, be gone. He soon found that people were calling his creation by the name of its creator Progress was slow in the early days. Zamenhof and his buddies started publishing a magazine in Esperanto, and word trickled out over the continent. Eighteen years after the first book describing Esperanto was published, there were 27 Esperanto magazines in regular production, and Zamenhof decided it was time to mark a new phase in the movement by doing what nerdy subcultures do best: he organized a convention. This was 1905, so they called it a "world congress," and 688 people showed up to discuss their new language in their new language. At least one convention has been held every year since, save the cumulative 10 years of World Wars, and conventions are still the major feature of the Esperanto social calendar. As the movement grew, it started attracting notice from powerful places, not all of it positive. The League of Nations almost adopted Esperanto, but the idea was shot down by the French delegate. Zamenhof was Jewish, so Adolf Hitler denounced Esperanto as a language designed to unify the Jewish diaspora, and the Nazis were officially anti-Esperanto. Joseph Stalin was reportedly an Esperantist, but he turned on the language in the late '30s, calling it a "language of spies," and started purging people who spoke it. Ayatolla Khomeini, too, waffled on Esperanto. Shortly after the Iranian Revolution, he urged his people to learn the language as an anti-imperialist counterpoint to English, and an official translation of the Qur’an followed. But adherents of the Baha’i faith had been fans of Esperanto for decades, and Khomeini was definitely not a fan of Baha’i, so his enthusiasm dimmed. And Baha’i’s not the only smaller religion that’s embraced Esperanto as a liturgical language. In Brazil, which has one of the world’s largest populations of Esperantists, the language is intimately associated with the séance-centric Spiritist movement, and many followers of the neo-Shinto Japanese religion Oomoto have studied some Esperanto. Esperanto was a fresh start Mao Zedong liked Esperanto too. The Communist Party of China has published an Esperanto magazine, El Popola Ĉinio, since 1950, and state radio stations still regularly broadcast in the language. And perhaps most famously, George Soros grew up speaking Esperanto, though his public involvement with the language hasn’t gone beyond getting his father’s Esperanto memoirs translated into English. Mostly, though, Esperanto survived the 20th century on the strength of the local clubs and spread by chance encounters and word of mouth. This culture created hundreds of books, dozens of publications, and at least four known full-length feature films. Today, nobody has any good idea how many people have even heard of Esperanto, let alone speak it fluently. Some estimate that millions can "parolas Esperanton," but a Finnish linguist who’s studied the 1,000 or so native Esperanto speakers in the world came up with more reasonable ballpark numbers: around 100,000 can speak it to some degree, and only 10,000 are totally fluent. There’s no federal Esperanto government to pay for a census, and the decline of the local clubs and societies has made any kind of headcount nearly impossible. It’s not easy being artificial.

This would be great for computers to learn, was the first thought that Chuck Smith had about Esperanto. It was 2001, and he was in college, taking a class called Models of Mind. With its logical structure, Smith thought Esperanto could work as a bridge language for translation, especially between two languages like Finnish and Turkish, that are unlikely to have a large overlapping dataset that a machine translation program could use. Just as Zamenhof intended, Esperanto would be the metamedium of communication across tongues. Smith didn’t pursue that idea beyond the class, but he did pursue Esperanto. The summer after Models of Mind, he went to Esperanto meetings in New York and San Francisco. Like every Esperantist I spoke with, the radiant chumminess of the Esperanto world drew Smith in. The following fall, he tapped the Esperanto network to find a place to stay during a board game fair in Essen, Germany. He was hooked, and he had a new angle: he wanted to use computers to help people learn Esperanto. So he started Vikipedio, the Esperanto Wikipedia. This was 2001, and Esperanto was only the 11th language to have its own version. The first article, "Modernismo," was imported from an extant online Esperanto encyclopedia called La Enciklopedio Kalblanda, or "The Kalb Land Encyclopedia," which a guy named Stefano Kalb had been slowly writing since 1995. The radiant chumminess of the Esperanto world drew Smith in Lernu! launched a year later. More people visit Vikipedia, but this is the site that first posted free Esperanto classes online that were more advanced than email versions of the pen-and-paper correspondence courses that had existed for decades. It made learning the language easier, but some in the community believe that the popularity of its forums also sped the decline of the Esperanto clubs — instead of being a quiet member at a meeting, you could just lurk on the Lernu! forums. While Esperanto became more digital, Smith dug deeper into Esperanto’s real-world organizations. He attended conferences, backpacked across Europe and stayed only with Esperantists, and started working at various Esperanto organizations in Europe and Canada. He landed in Berlin, and started a company, Ludisto (Esperanto for "player"), that makes iOS games. So when Duolingo launched in 2012, Smith was one of the thousands who requested Esperanto for the new, free, and intentionally addictive language learning program. Duolingo eventually tapped Smith to be Team Leader for the development of the Esperanto course that went live yesterday. He’s the public face of tech Esperanto in many ways, serving time as a guest on podcasts and logging many thousands of words on his own Esperanto-centric blog on Transparent Language. But the actual work of making the Duolingo course for Esperanto has largely fallen to a relative newcomer to the language: Ruth Kevess-Cohen, a DC-area doctor in her 50s specializing in internal medicine and geriatrics. "It would be unusual to start from zero and, after two years, be able to develop a course in any other language," Kevess-Cohen told me. "Maybe some geniuses, you know, but I’m just doing it in my spare time." She heard of Esperanto first as a possibility for a new Duolingo course, and then sought it out elsewhere. First she looked up the course on Lernu, but ultimately learned the language through the oldest method available: a correspondence course. After practicing the regular grammar with pen and paper, she spent a couple weeks at an intensive Esperanto immersion camp in Raleigh, North Carolina, and found that she could already understand what longtime Esperantists were saying. The community was welcoming, and the ability to suddenly speak a new language was practically addictive. Ruth, just like Chuck, was in.

That sense of empowerment has drawn the growing language hacking community to Esperanto, too. Benny Lewis, a man better known as Benny the Irish Polyglot, has built a career on telling people how to learn languages as quickly as humanly possible. His website, fluentinthreemonths.com, is the center of his business, and he’s written a book with the same name. If you ask where he lives, he says that he’s been traveling for 12 years. He claims to be fluent in 7 languages, and proficient in many more. Benny first encountered Esperanto through couchsurfing (he says he’s hosted over 2,000 people on his own couches), and was immediately intrigued. His core language learning principle is confidence — the trick to being fluent in three months, he says, isn’t any kind of drug or special flashcard system, but a willingness to be humiliated by speaking a language poorly as soon as you know a single word. And Esperanto is the ideal language for shamelessness: it’s simple, and almost everyone is a relative newcomer. Many studies, most of them conducted in the first half of the 20th century, found that Esperanto had a marked propaedeutic effect on language learning, which is a fancy Latinate way to say that, if you take college Esperanto classes for a year and college French classes for three years after that, you’ll know more French than if you took four straight years of college French. The hyper-regularity of Esperanto makes it supremely easy to learn, and its newness, its foreignness, primes the monolingual brain to learn more complicated newness even more quickly. "Your brain starts to accept how to say words in another language without having to worry about complexity," is how Benny puts it. He believes in Esperanto as a springboard to other languages so much that he convinced his girlfriend to learn Esperanto as her first foreign language, and filmed every minute of her progress. "Your brain starts to accept how to say words in another language without having to worry about complexity." As a language hacker, Benny scoffs at the slow pace of academic language learning — he doesn’t recommend six months or a year of Esperanto, followed by years of French, but rather two weeks, just two weeks, of intensive Esperanto training, followed by a couple more months of anything else you’d like to learn. "Ultimately it’s an easy language," he said, "and it’s not intimidating." He remembered his first attempts to learn German and Spanish, and being cowed in the face of all their particular grammatical rules and irregularities. Esperanto, on the other hand, is pure self-esteem. Plus, there’s a whole world of Esperanto speakers who are happy to hop on Skype to help out a neophyte — good luck finding a friendly francophone to do the same for free.

Esperantists like to talk about logic: Zamenhof made the grammar to be logical; Chuck Smith found that logicality intriguing; Benny the Irish Polyglot finds that the language's logic makes it a logical choice for language hacking; and Duolingo chose Chuck Smith as the logical person to create its Esperanto course. But by what logic did Duolingo decide to make an Esperanto class at all? Over 30 million English speakers have signed up to learn Spanish on Duolingo, and even more Spanish speakers have signed up to learn English. Anglophones also have French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Irish, Swedish, Danish, Turkish, Norwegian, and Ukrainian, in descending order of popularity, available to learn for free. Esperanto is the 13th language to be offered, chosen over many others with speaking populations 10 times larger. Esperanto, though, has enthusiasm. When Duolingo first launched, Luis von Ahn, its founder, was surprised to find that Esperanto was the number one most requested new language for the program. "Speakers and supporters of Esperanto are very hardcore," von Ahn said over email, "and vocal!" "Speakers and supporters of Esperanto are very hardcore." Esperantists are linguistic evangelists — the community saw an opportunity for expansion, and pounced. Two of the other languages available on Duolingo fit a similar bill, though by dint of history rather than original intent; Irish and Ukrainian are both associated with strong nationalist movements. Irish was the first of many languages that English would violently suppress, and Ukrainian is shoring up its ramparts to avoid the same fate from Russian regional control. Esperanto, of course, was designed precisely to transcend linguistic nationalism and ultimately avoid conflict, but the end result is similar: a small group of people intensely invested in seeing their language spread. But Esperanto on Duolingo makes sense in a deeper way, as well. Both the language and the app were created, at least in part, to solve the same problem: the world is divided by language, and more importantly, the majority is often forced to learn the native tongue of a powerful minority in order to get by. In Zamenhof’s time, Yiddish or Polish speakers in his hometown of Bialystok had to learn Russian to interact with the ruling state. Today, anyone who doesn’t speak English is born at a disadvantage, and probably can’t afford Rosetta Stone. Von Ahn didn’t just create Duolingo to give Anglophones a fun, free way to learn new languages — he created it for the non-Anglophone majority that’s stuck with the burden of learning English. There might be 13 languages available for English speakers on Duolingo, but English courses are available in 22 world languages. Zamenhof saw the same problem and took a more radical tack. Instead of starting a network of free, worldwide language schools, he invented a free, worldwide language. Instead of starting a network of free, worldwide language schools, he invented a free, worldwide language Twenty-five thousand people have signed up to be notified when the Esperanto Duolingo course goes live. If just those people complete the course, that would qualify as an Esperanto baby boom. But Chuck Smith is thinking bigger: "I keep saying that, by the end of the year, over 200,000 people will be learning Esperanto on Duolingo." The world will probably never see the Fina Venko, but the internet does have a way of hypercharging communities that never could have existed before it. Who could have imagined that more than one Brony would ever exist, or that Americans would want to write thousands of pages of Harry Potter slash fiction. And soon, Esperanto might not even be the least likely artificial language to get a signal boost from Duolingo: the Klingon course is on track to debut in 2016. Linguistically, the language is the exact opposite of Esperanto. Its grammar was designed to be as difficult to learn as possible, and its vocabulary is strongest when discussing the warlike and brutal traditions of Klingon culture. "Many who try it will drop it later," admitted André Müller, the German PhD student who’s creating the Klingon course. "But some might enjoy the challenge, a very Klingon thing to do." Given the language’s difficulty, he considers himself to be only a "conversational" Klingon speaker. He is also fluent in Esperanto.

Correction: An earlier version included Linux in a list of coding languages. It's an operating system.