Doktoro Esperanto

Reporter Katie Thornton tells the story of Doktoro Esperanto’s dream, and what we can all still learn from Esperanto right now.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:45Roman Mars?

  This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars and I'm here today with friend of the show and frequent 99PI contributor, Katie Thornton. Hey Katie, what do you have for us today?

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Hey Roman. So a while back I was on this show talking about shortwave radio. Unlike FM or AM radio, shortwave signals are those ones that can travel thousands of miles.

• 2:08Roman Mars?

  Yeah, you could be sitting in your place in Minnesota and like hear a broadcast in Spanish from South America or something with shortwave.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And it's actually the language part that I wanted to talk with you about today because one day, as I was researching and poking around on the shortwaves, I learned something that really surprised me. Roman, did you know that the Chinese national government and until recently the Vatican aired programs on shortwave radio in, drumroll please, Esperanto?

• 2:38Roman Mars?

  Esperanto, the invented language of Esperanto. I'm a big fan.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah. So in fact, the Vatican to this day still does a thrice weekly podcast in Esperanto.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  In formo in prilapapo, la santa seggio kaila loka i eklesioi, radio vaticana. Vaticana inovajoi en Esperanto.

• 2:59Roman Mars?

  Wow. Okay. So for the dedicated 99PI fans, we did an episode on Esperanto way back. I think it was 2010. I think it was like the first year of the show. But for people who didn't hear that story or simply don't know or remember, because I don't remember listening to that story, what should we say here about Esperanto?

• 3:17Speaker 01

  So Esperanto is what linguists call a constructed language. The language isn't attached to a nation or a region, and it didn't evolve from some other language over time. Instead, nearly 150 years ago, someone decided to sit down, probably at a desk with a pen and paper, and just make it whole cloth.

• 3:36Roman Mars?

  Or as we say on the show, they designed it.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Yes, of course. Right, of course. I'm sorry, they designed it. And from the very beginning, the goal behind this designed language was to make it incredibly easy to learn. That way, everyone in the world would just voluntarily take it up. And once that happened, we'd all be able to understand one another. And of course, from there, the idea went, world peace would follow.

• 3:59Roman Mars?

  Yeah, big goals.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Big goals, kind of the biggest goal.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  So, you know, when I first came across this Vatican Esperanto thing, it really sent me down this crazy months, I guess even years long rabbit hole, so much so that I actually took to Duolingo to learn Esperanto. Post mi laboris in the past, mi dormis. After I worked, I slept. Same, bro.

• 4:29Roman Mars?

  Well, since you're, you know, at least Duolingo versed in Esperanto, I should say, saluton Katie, mia nomo estas Roman.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Oh, we comprehend Esperanto.

• 4:40Roman Mars?

  Yeah, you know, a little.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  A little bit.

• 4:42Roman Mars?

  I mean, I mean, that's just like, hi Katie, my name is Roman. And then you replied, oh, you understand Esperanto, which I don't actually, but I did dabble in Esperanto a little bit when I was younger. I was taught it in second grade, probably the last elementary school program in the United States to ever teach Esperanto, as far as I can tell. But I was really, that experience really stuck with me.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Wow, okay. So unlike you, I was never an Esperantist, but I remember hearing about the language as a teenager. And at the time, I was definitely interested in the idea of a language that was rooted in this idea of mutual understanding and belonging, even if it was a bit overly earnest. But, you know, I was also in high school and working and doing life, so I sort of forgot about it, honestly.

• 5:26Roman Mars?

  Yeah, life happens and you put Esperanto on the back burner.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  It's true. Sad, but true. But then this past summer, I revisited Esperanto for a story I reported in Harper's Magazine because I was curious, like in a world that is as divided as ours, I wanted to know why this group still believes in the power of this language to bring about peace. And if they do indeed believe that, where does that optimism come from? And look, this isn't a story where I come out the other side convinced that Esperanto is going to solve all of our problems. But I do think there's something we can all learn from the people who are keeping this old invented language alive.

• 6:06Roman Mars?

  Okay, so let's start from the beginning. Where did Esperanto originally come from?

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Yes, so I'll kick things off in the late 1800s in a town called Bielsk.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  This was a town that was home to people of a variety of different ethnicities and religions and languages spoken in the home.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  This is Bridget O'Keefe, a historian of the Soviet Union and professor at Brooklyn College. She wrote a book about Esperanto and internationalism.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  You had Poles, you had Jews, you had Russians, you had Germans. This was, Bielsk was part of a very multi-ethnic, right? Borderland region of the Tsarist Empire.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  If you were to look at a map today, Bielsk is a city on the eastern border of Poland. But in the 19th century, it was part of something called the Pale of Settlement, which was the area of the Russian Empire where Jews were allowed to live permanently.

• 7:01Roman Mars?

  Which they really couldn't do in the rest of the Russian Empire.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Right. And so this is where in 1859, a kid named L.L. Zamenhof is born.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Growing up in Bielsk, Zamenhof spoke Yiddish, Russian and Polish. And later he learned French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew and English.

• 7:20Roman Mars?

  Show off.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  I know, such a flex. Didn't even have Duolingo. How did he do it? But in learning all these languages, he was also keenly aware of the tension that came with all these differences.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  What he remembered most of all were insults and bickering and acrimony and just like an undercurrent in the marketplace, in the town square of animosity, mistrust.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  So from a pretty young age, Zamenhof had this idea to bring the world together under one language. Here's Bridget paraphrasing a piece of a letter that Zamenhof wrote.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  In my soul, right? In my own little aching child's heart, I thought to myself, so much of this tension, so much of this animosity, so much of this mistrust would be obviated if only we had, right? Like a common mode, a common register, a common language through which to talk.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  And so as a kid, Zamenhof started constructing a language that he reasoned would be easy for anyone to learn. And if it was also fun to learn, he figured people would opt into it as a second language. And voila, marketplace arguments over.

• 8:35Roman Mars?

  I'm sort of struck by this sort of the childlike approach to Zamenhof's project. Like, you know, kids sometimes will create a secret code so they can talk to one another so that nobody understands them. But this is like the total opposite of that.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Complete opposite of that. Yeah, he wanted everybody to speak it. So, starting when he was pretty young, Zamenhof crafted the rules of his language. And in 1887, before his 30th birthday, he compiled all those rules and published what's called the first book, or Unua Libro.

• 9:05Roman Mars?

  And this is the founding text, like the Bible, so to speak, for Esperanto.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this book was actually written in Russian. So technically, the book's title is just international language. And Zamenhof actually wrote it under the pen name Doktoro Esperanto, which in his own language means one who hopes.

• 9:23Roman Mars?

  So Esperanto comes from that pen name, Doktoro Esperanto?

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, he did not actually name this thing Esperanto. That was all the work of the fans.

• 9:32Roman Mars?

  They took the name like Dr. Frankenstein and Frankenstein.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Yes, it's exactly, it's exactly like that. And in this book, Zamenhof, or Doktoro Esperanto, lays out the language's ideology of unity and peace, but mostly what he does is outline the grammar, the word structure, really the design of the language.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  The way that Zamenhof designed the language was to give birth to a kind of core vocabulary of, you know, some 700, 900 core root words.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  So what Zamenhof does is make it so that all of the parts of speech, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, have a consistent ending.

• 10:11Roman Mars?

  This is the best part of Esperanto. So please explain this a little bit more.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. It's so good. Nouns end in O, so sano is health. Adjectives end in A, sana is healthy. Verbs end in I, so sani, to be healthy.

• 10:27Roman Mars?

  And there are also the prefixes and suffixes that modify, like mal indicates the opposite. And so like sana is healthy, but mal sana is sick.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay. Look at you, Roman, reaching back to your Esperanto roots and prefixes and affixes. But yes, that's, that's exactly right. It's really clear, really simple and consistent. Esperanto advocates like to say that you can understand the vast majority of the language just from knowing about 500 plug and play root words and affixes.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  And so while he kind of gave the language its original architecture and gave it its original vocabulary, so much of even the earliest vocabulary was just developed in the practice of at first a dozen, and then dozens, and then hundreds, and then thousands, and then tens of thousands of people actually putting the language into practice.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  So I should say, Zamenhof wasn't the first to think of creating a universal second language. In the late 1800s, attempts at creating something like Esperanto were actually pretty common. New technologies like railroads were connecting people across huge distances, and there was this notion that maybe language would be the next great divide to fall. But unlike those other attempts, Esperanto actually caught on.

• 11:44Roman Mars?

  But I'm curious, like, how does that happen? Like, how does word get out about Esperanto?

• 11:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the language isn't just growing because it's easy to learn. Of course, that helps. But on top of everything, Zamenhof is also kind of a marketing mastermind. So in the back of the Unua Libro, there were these little pre-printed notes that you could tear out of the book, saying that you promised to learn Esperanto. And people would essentially make these pledges, these promises, and then mail the notes back to Zamenhof personally.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  Whenever an Esperantist, or a young, early adopter, or even someone just curious, wrote to him, he would reply. But what he would also do is, he started creating an address book, a directory of people who signed their names, who had committed to learning the language, and who had expressed interest in corresponding or communicating in it.

• 12:39Roman Mars?

  This is so amazing. Like, so people are sending their pledges into Zamenhof, and then he's compiling basically like a directory of speakers. And then, does he publish this directory?

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, you could go get your own copy of it. And people would write letters to other Esperantists. It was a really big grassroots movement. The Unua Libro, with the grammar and everything, had to be reprinted within six months of its debut. And by the turn of the century, the movement had gained enough momentum to really begin to organize.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  In 1905, for the first time in world history, a group of electing Esperantists traveled to France as participants in the First World Congress of Esperantists.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  This First World Congress of Esperantists is really just a fancy way of saying that they held a convention. And at this first convention, nearly 700 people joined from more than 20 countries.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  They found that Esperanto could actually work in real life, right? It could work in live conversation, that it had a life beyond the page, right? It allowed them to meet people, and to talk to people, and to have fun with people, and to realize, you know, like, oh, I've been spending hours with these people, and I'm not thinking about them as Frenchmen, or as Englishmen, or as Russians, or as Jews. I'm thinking about them as people.

• 14:04Roman Mars?

  So this is clearly a big deal. And that's a lot of people to get together from so many different places in 1905. But like, beyond the convention, is it well-known? Like, is Esperanto really in the zeitgeist?

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. You know, it was an explicitly internationals project, so it particularly took off among leftist groups, like international labor organizers and anarchists. It also had some big-name boosters. I mean, maybe you've heard of a guy with just a little bit of influence, this Christian anarchist pacifist, Leo Tolstoy. So Tolstoy took it upon himself to learn Esperanto. Ho Chi Minh learned it while living in London. And actually, George Soros's father, who was born Thibodeau Schwartz, he changed his family's last name to the Esperanto word, meaning "will soar."

• 14:51Roman Mars?

  Huh.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  And that was to avoid antisemitic persecution in his native Hungary.

• 14:56Roman Mars?

  I did not know that at all. That's amazing.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  A lot of prominent speakers, a ton of speakers. I mean, this was really a thing at the time.

• 15:04Roman Mars?

  But what I'm wondering is, like, all this popularity and growth is happening, it actually presents this challenge for a designed language like Esperanto. Because as soon as more people start speaking it, don't they start changing the language with their own verb tenses and their own slang? Like, doesn't it stop from being this, like, fixed, universal second language into something that evolves naturally, like natural languages do?

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that does begin to happen, and it's a really big concern for the early Esperantists. So at that first annual convention in France, some Esperantists, at Zamenhof's urging, formed what came to be called the Esperanto Academy, which is basically like a governing body for the language to keep Esperanto from changing uncontrollably.

• 15:46Roman Mars?

  And this is actually pretty common. Like, lots of languages, they have their own institutions that regulate linguistic standards.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Yes, definitely. There's one in Spain for Spanish.

• 15:55Roman Mars?

  But the goal is a little bit different, because with, you know, Spanish and French academies, the goal is to define a sort of national identity around the language. But in Esperanto, the goal is to keep it, you know, simple, straightforward, consistent, so that it, as a language, can transcend all national boundaries.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. And it did do that. Esperanto is rooted in European languages, but it didn't just take off in Europe. It found an early foothold in Asia, and eventually around the globe. And for a lot of early speakers, this was all part of the plan.

• 16:31Roman Mars?

  So what do you mean by here, by "the plan"?

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Okay, so we mentioned that the idea behind this language was that everybody would speak it, understand one another, inevitably there would be peace. For a lot of the early Esperantists, that wasn't just a sort of passing idea, it was a real political project. From the early days of the language, people in the Esperanto movement had this concept called the Finovenco, Final Victory. That would occur when everyone in the world, including governments, would take up Esperanto as a second language, and the people would be united in a shared tongue. It's an ideology that came to be known as Finvencismo.

• 17:09Roman Mars?

  That's pretty intense. I don't like any political movement sort of the final anything, to tell you the truth.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, me neither. But, you know, in the early 1900s, Finvencismo felt possible. The language was reaching all kinds of people.

• 17:21Roman Mars?

  But you know, we're not all speaking Esperanto today. So of course, at some point, this all must start to flicker out.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, big time.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  Precisely in that decade, where Esperanto was truly taking off, right? Like, it was truly like having its moment, right? There were kind of factions that argued, right, that Esperanto was great, but it could be better. We could like, fine-tune this and perfect this more.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  So in 1907 comes the first major, what I'll call, "I have a better idea" moment. And it comes in the form of a new language called Ido. The Ido speakers, or the Idis, were originally Esperantists. In fact, the name Ido actually comes from the Esperanto affix, meaning "offspring." And the Idis created what was essentially Esperanto, with even more straightforward grammar and even more simplified vocabulary. And all this tinkering with the language really started to divide the Esperanto movement.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  When you're really passionate about something, you can miss the forest for the trees, and you can forget your audience. And it was like, one of the things that was illustrative of how the Esperanto movement got in its own way.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  So this "missing the forest for the trees" thing, it just keeps happening. Because as the language grew, and by design welcomed all sorts of people, the foundational aspirations of Esperanto kept being tested.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  The movement itself had an extraordinary tendency to create its own splinters. We have bourgeois Esperantists over here, we have socialist Esperantists over here, we have anarchist Esperantists over here.

• 18:58Roman Mars?

  There's something ironic about the fact that there are these bitter rifts that are breaking out inside of this language that's supposed to be bringing us all together.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Definitely. And of course, like, that is not exclusive to Esperanto.

• 19:10Roman Mars?

  Not at all.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  It happens in all sorts of movements. People genuinely want to come together. They are desperate to come together. But sometimes, one of the biggest barriers to actually living in harmony is a disagreement over the best way to live in harmony.

• 19:24Roman Mars?

  Yeah, it's deeply frustrating, but also deeply human.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and also kind of beautiful in its own right. And so all along, there are certainly internal forces that are fracturing the Esperantists. But soon, external forces begin to really reshape the movement as well. So in the 1920s and 30s, nationalists were growing in power around the world, and they swiftly moved to end all internationalist agendas. So Franco, Stalin, and Hitler's regimes all criminalized Esperanto, and sometimes executed Esperantists. The Nazis even murdered all three of Zamenhof's children.

• 19:59Roman Mars?

  Oh, god. And yet, still, like, somehow, the language survived?

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, like, it was certainly seen as a threat. It was actively repressed. And it would never again be as popular as it was before the Second World War. But when the most violent repression eased after the war, Esperanto, once again, had a bit of a boom, this time during the Cold War, both among young people in the Soviet Union, who wanted to connect with people in Western Europe, but also among folks in Eastern Europe, who were trying to resist the sort of snowballing hegemony of the West, and of the English language.

• 20:32Roman Mars?

  And I know from personal experience that it kind of bloomed again in the sort of like, you know, hippie intellectual movement, the post-hippie movement in the 70s and 80s.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  That's right. And then in the 90s, there's a big community of speakers who brought the language online, and made it easier for more and more people to learn on the web.

• 20:49Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah. It's on Duolingo, for Jesus's sake.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Chaching. So there you go, Zamenhof. We really did it.

• 20:58Roman Mars?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess that really brings us back to where we started. Like, you learned Esperanto last year. So did you end up speaking with any Esperantists for this story?

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. So there's, of course, a thriving community of Esperantists online, Facebook groups, subreddits. But I really wanted to meet people, like, in person, and find out, who are these folks who are still learning and speaking this 19th century language that was supposed to bring peace to the world? So last summer, I flew halfway around the world to Brno, a small city in the Czech Republic, because for eight days, more than 1,000 Esperantists from all over were gathered here for the World Esperanto Congress.

• 21:39Roman Mars?

  Eight days?

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Eight days.

• 21:41Roman Mars?

  Eight days, amazing. So that convention happens every year?

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Every year, Roman. And while it's happening, everyone basically only speaks Esperanto.

• 21:50Roman Mars?

  Wow.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Also, I should say, the Esperantists prefer to call it the Universala Congresso de Esperanto.

• 21:56Roman Mars?

  Okay, so after the break, Katie reports from the Universala Congresso de Esperanto. Stay with us.

• 22:07Roman Mars?

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• 22:52Roman Mars?

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• 24:31Roman Mars?

  Okay, so we're back and we're at the convention. And I think someone said something like, "Hello and welcome to Burno."

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Hey, not bad for someone who only dabbled in Esperanto 40 years ago. But yes, I'm there in Burno with more than 1,000 Esperanto speakers from 62 different countries. And when I arrived at the convention, I was kind of shocked to see the breadth of people speaking Esperanto. There were, as ever, the anarchists and the European social democrats. But there were also folks from a state-approved Chinese Esperantist group, a delegation from the Catholic Church, Ukrainian independence advocates.

• 25:10Roman Mars?

  So like, really a range of people from all over with perhaps like, a pretty wide range of political views.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that surprised me. I assumed I'd be running into a lot of left-leaning, American nerdy types, no offense, of course. But that wasn't really the case. And I also presumed that the convention would be pretty in line with the traditional goals of Esperanto. You know, a lot of talk about the language, about how the movement can bring about peace. And there was a bit of that. But what I didn't expect was that most people didn't really talk much about those ideals at all. So I want to get to that. But let's start with the old-school stuff and what was maybe the most traditional of all the sessions at the convention: the public meeting of the Academia de Esperanto, or the Esperanto Academy.

• 25:58Roman Mars?

  Oh, so the Esperanto Academy, it still exists?

• 26:01Speaker 01

  It does still exist. And they still do largely the same job that they started back in 1905. They hold public meetings and discuss how the language is evolving.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Now, before you get your hopes up for a raucous session full of debate about grammar and syntax, I want to explain that this was not the most thrilling session that I went to at the convention. There was no shouting matches. There honestly weren't that many people there even. But you know, sometimes this is what democracy looks like: slow, a little boring, kind of poorly attended.

• 26:38Roman Mars?

  And so what was happening in this session?

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so basically, people were submitting questions on pieces of paper. At one point, you know, somebody submitted a question about why the language doesn't yet have a great and broadly-accepted gender-neutral pronoun.

• 26:52Roman Mars?

  That's a good question.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Totally valid question. So the academy took that under advisement. There was also a question from a violin repair person asking why there weren't more words for stringed instruments in the latest official dictionary.

• 27:06Roman Mars?

  Fun.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  So the questions, they really ran the gamut.

• 27:10Roman Mars?

  So did you muster up some courage and ask a question of the academy?

• 27:13Speaker 01

  I did not feel that I'm a competent enough Esperanto speaker to know of any missing words or confusing grammar. But I did get to talk with an organizer who helped set up the congress. His name is Petro Balas. And what I learned from talking with him and others is that the academy is a pretty reactive group. Like, they don't want to upset their fellow Esperantists. So, once a word or a way of speaking becomes commonplace within the community, the academy kind of reviews it. And often, they make a recommendation that others adopt it, too.

• 27:47Speaker 04

  Of course, they are only the recommendations because the community of Esperantists there more tend to be like anarchists.

• 27:56Roman Mars?

  Okay, so tell me more about Petro. What's going on with Petro?

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, Petro was born in then Czechoslovakia. And he started learning and speaking Esperanto a few years after watching his country split in two. And he told me that Esperanto speakers these days come to the congress not necessarily to talk about grammar and syntax. They come for the community and for the camaraderie.

• 28:19Roman Mars?

  And did you see that play out at the congress?

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Yes, I definitely did. Like, many of the most spirited and well-attended sessions at the convention weren't the super-official things, like the academy session that I went to. Instead, there was a lot of energy around the hobbies and the social gatherings.

• 28:35Speaker 04

  So you can meet here like linguists, professors, you can meet here like chess players or Go players and whatever?

• 28:44Speaker 01

  So, over the course of the trip, I met, yes, Esperantist chess players and Go players. There were also bicycle enthusiasts and stamp collectors. Even Esperanto nudists had events. Like, they went to a nude beach and they all crammed on this public tram to get there for a half hour. And I mean, maybe the hottest ticket of the entire week, or at least a personal favorite of mine, was a presentation by the International Federation of Esperanto Railwaymen.

• 29:11Roman Mars?

  The train people. I love the train people.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Of course, the train people absolutely rocked. Fantastic presentation. History of trains in Burno and beyond.

• 29:20Roman Mars?

  I mean, this all sounds fun and funny, but it all makes total sense. Like, you're an Esperanto speaker at an Esperanto convention. You want to have fun. You want to speak the language. You don't want to just debate world peace or whatever goals, these high-minded goals that maybe get nowhere. You want to talk about trains.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Absolutely, of course you want to talk about trains. But you know, the convention hasn't always been this sort of fun, social gathering. That dynamic is actually the result of a pivotal moment for the movement. So, back in 1980, at an Esperanto youth congress in the Finnish city of Rauma, a group of speakers had an epiphany. They were like, hey, all these grand ambitions for world peace and universal second language, they're really sort of weighing the movement down. So, let's just close the book on all that.

• 30:06Roman Mars?

  So they're basically kind of giving up on that big idea, the Finn Vinckesmo idea that Esperanto would be universally adopted by everyone as a second language?

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. And at the time, in 1980, the language had been around for nearly a century. That final victory hadn't happened yet. So this group of young folks proposed that the language be viewed more as a community-building tool and that Esperantists should consider themselves, quote, "as belonging to a self-chosen, diasporic linguistic minority."

• 30:35Roman Mars?

  Yeah, so in essence, they're allowing for and kind of accepting the idea that Esperanto would be a subculture.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, it didn't have to be universally adopted in order to have value.

• 30:46Roman Mars?

  You know, I love that there's, you know, like, there's this formal acknowledgement that the language has some limitations, and but there's still a desire to keep it anyway and to have it be a thing that people share. But I can't imagine, you know, the final victory folks enjoyed this capitulation at all.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  No, they did not. The Finn Vinckesmo folks did not like this. But you know, based on what I saw at the congress last year, the subculture school of thought really seems to have sort of won out.

• 31:14Roman Mars?

  But what about this old Esperantist thought? You know, the goal of using this language explicitly to promote world peace? Like, I can't imagine the spirit of that is totally gone.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  No, it's not totally gone. I had some really interesting conversations with very politically dedicated Esperantists. And that peacenice school of thought has lived on in some unlikely places.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  As an example, I spoke with a man named Aspar Nagoma Kasati. And he's from the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And the DRC is one of the most linguistically diverse nations in the world. It has more than 200 languages. And it has also been struggling with a brutal conflict. And Aspar is part of a contingent trying to advance a pacifist movement by bringing people together under one shared language.

• 32:05Speaker 04

  Moltai junuloi en Afriko parolas Esperanton en pluraj diversa. Uh, do mal samay landoi. Yes, very multi.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Did you get that, Roman?

• 32:18Roman Mars?

  Like, a little. Like, he's saying that many Africans speak Esperanto.

• 32:25Roman Mars?

  Very diverse group of people speak it, something like that.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so he's basically saying that many young Africans in many different countries speak Esperanto.

• 32:34Speaker 04

  Yes, uh, ni pensas que Esperanto estas bona por Afriko, char di ne estas colonial lingvo.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  And he says that he and his colleagues feel the language is good for Africa because it's not a colonial language.

• 32:47Roman Mars?

  I mean, this is, this is an excellent point. Like, they're gathering people from all over the world in this congress and these big ideas, and they're all speaking the same language, and for once, it is not English.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It's a huge accomplishment. And I think these days, Esperantists, broadly speaking, sort of recognize the utility of having the more politically devout side of the movement exist alongside the subcultureists. So at the convention, I spoke with a scholar and a prominent Esperantist named Humphrey Tonkin. He was 85 years old at the time. He's a very, very accomplished guy. He was the president of a college, he's a scholar of literature. In Esperanto world, he's definitely a get. And he put it this way, which I really liked.

• 33:29Speaker 05

  If you are into the English-speaking peace movement, what are you doing there? Peace. So you talk about peace, you talk about it really seriously, and you in fact probably talk about it so seriously that you bore the hell out of people.

• 33:43Speaker 05

  It's not like that in the Esperanto movement, because we have a whole culture that we can fall back on.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  So, most people I spoke with had no delusions about the language's potential. They knew that unlocking world peace is a goal that's poignantly out of their hands. But what the Esperantists did show me is that even amid our global turmoil, they still found it worthwhile to get together to try to enact the ideals of peace and understanding, even if only on a small scale, and even if only among one another.

• 34:12Roman Mars?

  Yeah, like, the movement might not bring the peace that Zamenhof dreamed of, but it might bring some measure of peace and understanding to the people who speak it.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Right. And, look, it's easy to think of that as an overly optimistic and simplistic idea, and I don't think that's wrong. Like, sometimes people can fully comprehend one another and still disagree, still even hate each other. Language alone isn't going to erase hatred. But almost everyone I spoke with said that this gathering gives them hope. I mean, the idea of hope is baked right into the name of the language.

• 34:44Speaker 05

  The point about hope, though, is that you never achieve your goal. That's not what it's about. It's about looking at the world in an optimistic way and working for something that is, that is positive and that will benefit humankind. I don't think that among Esperantists, there's a great deal of emphasis on the antagonisms. What we look for is what we have in common, which doesn't mean we're always successful. It doesn't mean that I don't get infuriated by many of my fellow Esperantists. And we argue in Esperanto, you know?

• 35:18Roman Mars?

  I mean, it strikes me that this is a group of people that are just absolutely, completely devoted to trying to learn something from the differences of each other and to try to embrace those differences and find common ground.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's this sort of shameless love for humanity in the Esperanto world that really seems to have fallen out of fashion most everywhere else. And that's not an impulse I'm eager to beat back with obvious critiques, especially critiques that the Esperantists themselves are fully aware of. Look, I know in 2026, the Esperanto-speaking community is almost uncomfortably earnest. Some would say it's cringe, but I think we could all afford to be a little more cringe.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  So, Roman, there's one more thing I wanted to tell you about from my time in Berno. And that's that I actually decided to join the daily practices of the Internazia Coruso, or International Chorus.

• 36:19Roman Mars?

  Did you actually join the Esperanto choir?

• 36:22Speaker 01

  There's an Esperanto choir, and I had to join it. I mean, I'm not a singer singer, but, you know, I've played instruments and sung in bands since I was a teenager, so I figured I'd give it a try.

• 36:32Roman Mars?

  I love it.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  So, yeah, on the final night of the convention, all the attendees went back to the big concert hall where the opening ceremony was held. And the night ended with us. Our scrappy little choir sang a local Czech folk tune and a Mozart song that was actually translated by Zamenhof himself. But our showstopper, I think, was an Esperanto translation of the Latin hymn Dona Nobis Pacem, "Grant Us Peace," or in Esperanto, Donu Alni Pazon.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Look, are we in tune? Not really. But are we trying to find harmony together? Yes, we are. And we're doing so in not one, but two constructed languages. Esperanto, of course, but also musical notation. That's a universal constructed language, too, and no one bats an eye at it.

• 37:25Roman Mars?

  That's a good point. I mean, this performance, you know, like, maybe, maybe a little off-key, but it seems to me, you know, such a fitting end to your convention, because, you know, this is what Esperanto is all about, right? It's trying to come together, even if it's imperfect.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  I, I think that's right.

• 37:41Roman Mars?

  Oh, okay. Well, thank you so much for this story. It's been fun to revisit Esperanto.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Thanks for talking with me, Roman. Adio.

• 37:48Roman Mars?

  Adio.

• 37:54Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible was produced this week by Katie Thornton, edited by Jason DeLeon, mixed by Martín Gonzalez, music by Swan Real, fact-checking by Graham Hesha. Katie Thornton's feature "Love Language: The Undying Dream of Esperanto" ran in the June edition of Harper's, and you can find it online. It was supported by NYU's Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, which we wanted to mention to all you audio-making listeners out there, is now open to applicants who work in audio, not just in print. Kathy Tu is our executive producer, Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director, Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lay, Laishma Dawn, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradley,

• 38:38Roman Mars?

  and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

• 39:16Roman Mars?

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