Esperanto

Ludwig L. Zamenhof, a Polish doctor, created Esperanto and published it in 1887 as a neutral bridge between language communities, not a replacement for them.

Zamenhof grew up in Białystok, in what is now Poland, among speakers of Polish, Russian, German and Yiddish.

His first booklet was titled An International Language: Preface and First Textbook and was signed Dr. Esperanto, a name he glossed as one who hopes.

After long efforts to find a publisher, Zamenhof published the booklet himself in July 1887 in Warsaw.

The 1887 presentation was extremely spare: a short set of rules, a small vocabulary list and some exercises added later.

The sixteen rules were considered at the time to be the whole grammar of the language, although a competent linguist would dispute that, and even simple textbooks need more than sixteen.

There is no indefinite article and only one definite article, la, for all genders, numbers and cases.

Nouns are formed by adding o to the root. The plural adds j, and the object form adds n after the o.

Other cases come from prepositions: de for the possessive, al for the dative and kun for the instrumental.

Adverbs are formed by adding e to the root, so one ending marks every adverb.

Every word is read exactly as written, with no silent letters, and the accent always falls on the last syllable but one.

Compound words are made by joining roots, with the principal word standing last.

The language began with about 1,000 roots that produced 10,000 to 12,000 words. Dictionaries today often list 15,000 to 20,000 roots.

Its vocabulary comes mainly from Western European languages, while its syntax and morphology show strong Slavic influence.

Because its invariant parts recombine, the way words are built resembles agglutinative languages such as Turkish, Swahili and Japanese.

The prefix mal- makes opposites, so bona (good) becomes malbona (bad), and the suffix -ejo marks a place, so lerni (to learn) becomes lernejo (school).

The Esperanto site run by the Universala Esperanto-Asocio says that learning 500 word roots gives access to over 5,000 words.

The Universala Esperanto-Asocio says the number of people with some knowledge of Esperanto is in the hundreds of thousands and possibly millions, an estimate it links to textbook sales and local society membership. Another page it runs says about two million.

A small number of people, called denaskuloj, learned Esperanto as a home language, some in families whose parents met through it.

Notable concentrations of speakers are in China, Japan, Brazil, Iran, Madagascar, Bulgaria and Cuba.

The first Esperanto congress met in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, in 1905, with more than 600 attendees from over 20 countries.

A world congress is held every year, recently in Montréal (2022), Torino (2023), Arusha (2024), Brno (2025) and Graz (2026).

The 2011 Pasporta Servo handbook listed 1,087 hosts in 90 countries who offer free overnight stays to Esperanto speakers.