Chapter 15
The language ideology of Esperanto
From the world language problem to balanced multilingualism
The status of Esperanto, the language launched by Zamenhof in 1887, has been contested since its
beginning. Esperanto became the most relevant of the International Auxiliary Languages (IALs) from a sociolinguistic
perspective, as it successfully survived two World Wars in spite of being explicitly persecuted by Hitler and Stalin,
among others (Lins 2017). The motivations of the pioneers of Esperanto were
put under scrutiny according to the different political context, both across time and place (Forster 1982). Therefore, its language ideology was adapted in order to reduce the level of
contestedness of the language, and this adaptation re-framed the self-perception of its speakers and their attitudes
toward Esperanto itself. For instance, before the Great War in Europe there was a strong connection between the
Esperanto movement and pacifism (Alcalde 2015), while in the 1930s in China
and Japan Esperanto was linked to anarchism and communism (Lins 2008). In
the aftermath of the Second World War, the language ideology deeply changed (Jordan 1987), and the link between Esperanto and linguistic rights became increasingly stronger (Pietiläinen 2010). Nowadays, the new generation of Esperantists is facing
the new challenges of the Digital Era. In particular, there is an ideological convergence with other contested
languages, in particular Regional and Minority Languages, also in the Esperanto speaker’s attitudes (Caligaris 2016; Gobbo and Miola
2016). This chapter aims to illustrate the evolution of the language ideology of Esperanto, in comparison
with other contested languages.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Is Esperanto a contested language?
- 3.The tradition of Esperanto: One language, several ideologies
- 4.Multilingualism and Esperanto: A complex relation
- 5.Esperanto and linguistic rights in the Digital Era
- 6.Concluding remarks
-
Notes
-
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Cited by one other publication
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2021.
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