I don’t speak Esperanto yet but I think it might be a good thing to have a community for, given the language’s internationalist nature and its historical connections to left-wing politics. If you look for federated Esperanto communities, one of them is basically locked because they moved instances, and the other is dead as a doornail.
An Esperanto comm could be used to talk about Esperanto history and culture and news from Esperantujo, or help people learn the language, or people could discuss language politics, et cetera, all in Esperanto. Hexbear does have that weird thing where it won’t let you post if you say that your post is in a language other than English, though.
An alternative might be to see if there are any Esperantist instances we can federate with.
Two points:
Esperanto is extremely Eurocentric and white in nature and in history. It seems to be a dying community and not all that useful. I’d much rather have a toki pona community and we could all learn that together.
I’m pretty sure there is an Esperanto instance which I would support federation with.
There’s already !tokipona@lemmygrad.ml, but really I do agree that Toki Pona is the better or at least more interesting language to promote, even though treating TP as an IAL is sort of a square peg through a round hole. I’ve even brought up the idea of adding sitelen pona as Hexbear emojis such that we can write with them.
Extremely Eurocentric, yes — it doesn’t even have much of any Slavic vocabulary despite Zamenhof being a native of Białystok — but I’d question how strictly “white” Esperanto is. I’ve recently shared a Congolese band as well as a Sri Lankan artist who make music in Esperanto; Prolewiki’s article on Esperanto talks about a declaration made by Korean Esperantists in the Chosun Ilbo in the 1920s stating that Esperanto should be used to combat Japanese linguistic imperialism.
Now you can of course question whether it is wise of those Congolese musicians to so enthusiastically support such a Eurocentric language as the world language, you can question whether that Sri Lankan artist should think of Esperanto as having a “romantic sound” if this might play into the prestige of Western European natlangs, you can question the choices of those Korean anti-imperialists, but the fact of the matter remains that Esperanto does indeed have plenty of non-white history if you actually bother to look for it. Just because Esperanto is Eurocentric in its design, and originated and first proliferated in Europe, doesn’t mean that non-Europeans can’t engage with the language on their own terms, whether that be from a finvenkist or a Raumist perspective.
I don’t get the impression that the Esperanto community is dying at all, and I don’t think the decision to learn Esperanto should be guided by the language’s “usefulness” or its chances of achieving its original goal of becoming the world’s second language. Esperantujo is an interesting country with an interesting history, and I think that’s something that’s worth preserving, regardless of how big the community is or indeed how white the community is. There are today native speakers of Esperanto whose parents were native speakers, and that’s just kinda cool, right?
waow my community mentioned!!! huge!!!
All great points. Thank you!
It gets too much shit for this, IMO
The two choice were:
be similar to the world’s largest language-family, so that speakers of that family pick it up quicker
be distant from all languages, so that nobody picks it up extra quickly
The alternative to making speakers-of-european-languages winners was making everybody everywhere losers