Esperanto – Lingua Franca and Language Community

Authors

Sabine Fiedler | Leipzig University

Cyril Robert Brosch | Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027211477 | EUR 105.00 | USD 158.00

e-Book – Open Access Download from our e-platform

ISBN 9789027257536

This book addresses a fascinating topic – a constructed language that has turned from a project into a fully-fledged language used by some of its speakers on a daily basis. Based on extensive fieldwork, this book provides rare and profound insights into the use of Esperanto in a large number of communicative areas. It studies the speakers’ use of code-switching, phraseology and metaphors, techniques they employ to enhance understanding, such as metacommunication and repair strategies, as well as their predilection for humour. The study also contributes to a comparison between the communication in Esperanto and in the language that is now predominantly used as a lingua franca – English – and allows conclusions to be drawn on the question of what a lingua franca is all about.

[Studies in World Language Problems, 10] 2022. xx, 429 pp.

Publishing status: Available

Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

https://doi.org/10.1075/wlp.10

Table of Contents

List of figures | pp. xi–12

List of tables | pp. xiii–14

List of abbreviations | pp. xv–xvi

Key to transcription symbols | pp. xvii–18

A note to the reader | pp. xix–xx

Part I. Introduction

Chapter 1. What is Esperanto? | pp. 3–8

Chapter 2. What is a lingua franca? | pp. 9–14

Chapter 3. Previous interlinguistic research | pp. 15–18

Chapter 4. The aim of this book | pp. 19–20

Chapter 5. Methods and data | pp. 21–26

Chapter 6. On the structure of this book | pp. 27–28

Part II. Esperanto – an overview

Chapter 7. Planned languages and interlinguistics | pp. 31–38

Chapter 8. The history and ideological background of the Esperanto movement | pp. 39–46

Chapter 9. Main current domains | pp. 47–52

Chapter 10. Esperanto as a family language and the phenomenon of Esperanto “native speakers” | pp. 53–58

Chapter 11. Esperanto as a linguistic system | pp. 59–70

Part III. Excursus: The use of Esperanto outside the speech community

Chapter 12. Introduction: Esperanto as a metaphor | pp. 73–74

Chapter 13. The use of Esperanto for artistic purposes | pp. 75–76

Chapter 14. The use of the glottonym Esperanto | pp. 77–80

Chapter 15. The use of Esperanto words in branding | pp. 81–90

Chapter 16. Some concluding remarks on Esperanto outside its speech community | pp. 91–92

Part IV. The main characteristics of Esperanto communication

Chapter 17. Introduction: Communication in Esperanto | pp. 95–96

Chapter 18. Metacommunication | pp. 97–124

Chapter 19. Working towards mutual understanding Repairs | pp. 125–152

Chapter 20. Humour | pp. 153–192

Chapter 21. Phraseological units and metaphors | pp. 193–250

Chapter 22. Code-switching in Esperanto communication | pp. 251–268

Chapter 23. Written vs oral Esperanto | pp. 269–306

Chapter 24. Attitudes to accents | pp. 307–324

Chapter 25. Esperanto and language change | pp. 325–350

Chapter 26. Esperanto as a corporate language: A case study of an educational NGO | pp. 351–368

Part V. Conclusion

Chapter 27. The main characteristics of Esperanto communication | pp. 371–374

Chapter 28. The speakers of Esperanto and their culture | pp. 375–376

Chapter 29. Language “ownership” | pp. 377–378

Chapter 30. Final remarks | pp. 379–380

Bibliography | pp. 381–409

Appendices

Appendix 1. Recordings and other sources | pp. 411–421

Appendix 2. The sixteen rules of the Fundamental Grammar of Esperanto | pp. 423–425

Index | p. 427

Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Fiedler, Sabine

2022. English as a lingua franca and linguistic justice: insights from exchange students’ experiences. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2022:277 ► pp. 17 ff.

Stępkowska, Agnieszka

2024. Some bilingual couples speak lingua francas: personal pronoun indexicality in the light of positioning theory. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism ► pp. 1 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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