Doktoro Esperanto

Roman Mars introduces reporter Katie Thornton, who previously covered shortwave radio. While exploring shortwave broadcasts, Katie discovered that the Chinese government—and, until recently, the Vatican—broadcast programs in Esperanto. The Vatican still produces an Esperanto podcast three times a week. Roman recalls that 99% Invisible previously covered the language and mentions that he was taught Esperanto in second grade; Katie later used Duolingo to study it while reporting this story. Katie explains that Esperanto is a constructed language: it is not tied to a nation or region and did not evolve naturally over centuries. Around 150 years ago, L. L. Zamenhof designed it to be easy and enjoyable to learn, hoping that people everywhere would voluntarily adopt it as a second language. If everyone could communicate through one shared tongue, the theory went, misunderstanding and conflict would diminish and world peace would follow. Katie says she did not finish her reporting convinced Esperanto could solve the world’s problems, but she found something instructive in the people who continue to keep the language alive.

Esperanto began with L. L. Zamenhof, born in 1859 in Bialystok, then a multiethnic borderland of the Russian Empire. The city included Poles, Jews, Russians, and Germans, and it lay within the Pale of Settlement, the area where Jews were permitted to live permanently. Historian Brigitte Dufour says Zamenhof remembered the insults, bickering, mistrust, and animosity he heard in the marketplace and town square. As a child, he imagined that a shared language could ease those tensions. Zamenhof spoke Yiddish, Russian, and Polish, and later learned French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and English. He began constructing a common language while still young. In 1887, before turning 30, he published its rules in Unua Libro, or the First Book. He wrote the book in Russian under the pen name Doktoro Esperanto, meaning “one who hopes.” The language took its eventual name from that pen name rather than from Zamenhof himself. The book described Esperanto’s ideals of unity and peace, but its main purpose was to explain the language’s grammar, vocabulary, and design.

Zamenhof built Esperanto around roughly 700 root words and a highly regular system of endings. Nouns end in -o, adjectives in -a, and verbs in -i: sano means “health,” sana means “healthy,” and sani means “to be healthy.” Prefixes and suffixes modify words predictably; mal- creates an opposite, so malsana means “sick.” Advocates say that knowing several hundred roots and affixes allows learners to understand much of the language by assembling words rather than memorizing every form. Zamenhof also created an unusually direct way to organize early adopters. The First Book contained detachable pledge slips that readers could sign, promising to learn Esperanto and mail back to him. Zamenhof answered correspondents personally and compiled their names and contact information into a directory, allowing people to write to other Esperanto learners around the world. The book had to be reprinted within six months. In 1905, nearly 700 people from more than 20 countries attended the first World Esperanto Congress in France. They demonstrated that Esperanto worked in live conversation, not just on the printed page, and found that they could socialize without primarily thinking of one another as representatives of national or religious groups.

Esperanto became especially popular among international labor organizers, anarchists, and other leftist groups. Leo Tolstoy learned it, Ho Chi Minh studied it while living in London, and George Soros’s father changed the family surname from Schwartz to an Esperanto word meaning “will soar,” partly to avoid antisemitic persecution in Hungary. The language also spread beyond Europe, including into Asia and eventually across the world. Its growth created a problem: speakers naturally introduced new habits, slang, and changes. At Zamenhof’s urging, early Esperantists established the Esperanto Academy to keep the language simple, consistent, and internationally usable. Unlike national language academies, whose work can reinforce a national identity, the Esperanto Academy was intended to prevent national boundaries from re-entering the language. At the same time, reformers created splinter languages. In 1907, former Esperantists introduced Ido, which they described as having even simpler grammar and vocabulary. The movement also divided into bourgeois, socialist, and anarchist factions. Katie and Roman note the irony: a project intended to help people live harmoniously repeatedly generated disputes over the correct way to achieve harmony.

Esperanto’s early political ambition was expressed through the idea of the Fina Venko, or “final victory”: a future in which everyone, including governments, used Esperanto as a second language and humanity was united by a shared tongue. In the early 1900s, that goal seemed possible because the language was attracting speakers and international organizations. The rise of nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s changed the movement’s prospects. The regimes of Franco, Stalin, and Hitler criminalized Esperanto, and some Esperantists were executed. The Nazis murdered all three of Zamenhof’s children. The language survived, but it never regained its pre-World War II popularity. After the most violent repression ended, Esperanto experienced renewed interest during the Cold War: young people in the Soviet Union used it to connect with Western Europeans, while some Eastern Europeans used it to resist the growing dominance of the West and English. Katie recalls another revival among hippie and post-hippie intellectual circles in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, speakers brought Esperanto online, and sites such as Duolingo made it easier to learn.

For her reporting, Katie traveled to Brno in the Czech Republic for the annual World Esperanto Congress, formally the Universala Kongreso de Esperanto. More than 1,000 people from 62 countries attended, including anarchists, European social democrats, a state-approved Chinese Esperanto delegation, Catholic representatives, and Ukrainian independence advocates. Katie expected sustained discussion of peace and universal language, but most attendees seemed more interested in community and camaraderie. The Esperanto Academy still reviews how the language is changing, though it is reactive and generally considers forms only after they become common among speakers. Questions at one public session concerned a gender-neutral pronoun and missing words for stringed instruments. The liveliest events involved hobbies: chess, Go, bicycles, stamps, an Esperanto nudist outing, and a presentation by the International Federation of Esperanto Railwaymen. Katie learned from organizer Petro Baláž that people now attend less to debate grammar or syntax than to share a social world. This shift followed a 1980 Esperanto Youth Congress in Finland, where participants argued that the movement’s grand ambitions were weighing it down. They proposed treating Esperanto as a self-chosen diasporic linguistic minority: a subculture that did not need universal adoption to have value. The older Fina Venko supporters rejected that conclusion, but Katie says the subcultural view largely won out.

Katie says the older peace-oriented vision has not disappeared. Espoir Nagoma Cassati, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, told her that Esperanto could help in a country with more than 200 languages and a long-running conflict. He and other young Africans view it as a way to connect people without relying on a colonial language such as English. Scholar and prominent Esperantist Humphrey Tonkin, then 85, explains that the movement can sustain serious peace work because it also has a culture: people can discuss peace without making the entire movement unbearably solemn. Most speakers Katie met did not believe Esperanto could single-handedly produce world peace. Instead, they valued the chance to enact understanding on a small scale. They acknowledged that language cannot eliminate hatred or prevent people who understand each other from disagreeing, but they still saw hope in deliberately looking for common ground. Katie describes this as an unusually earnest, even “cringe,” love of humanity. At the congress’s final concert, Katie joined the International Chorus. The group sang a Czech folk song, a Mozart song translated by Zamenhof, and an Esperanto version of “Dona Nobis Pacem,” or “Grant Us Peace.” The choir was not perfectly in tune, but Roman and Katie treat the performance as a fitting conclusion: people trying to find harmony together, imperfectly, through both Esperanto and musical notation.