Why Esperanto's Idealistic Dream Refuses to Die

I had always assumed Esperanto was a failed utopian dream—a well-meaning but ultimately futile attempt to engineer world peace through grammar and vocabulary. So when I found myself at the 110th World Esperanto Congress in Brno, Czech Republic, surrounded by more than a thousand speakers from sixty countries, all of them speaking nothing but this invented language for eight straight days, I had to reconsider what failure actually looks like.

The story begins in the late 1880s, when a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist named L.L. Zamenhof published a slim volume called International Language. Zamenhof grew up in Białystok, a fractious city where Russian, Polish, Belarusian, German, Yiddish, and Hebrew speakers lived in constant tension. He believed that linguistic division was the root of human conflict—that if people could speak a single, neutral, easy-to-learn language, they might finally understand one another. He published under the pen name Doktoro Esperanto: one who hopes. The language that bore his hopeful pseudonym took off in ways his predecessors had not. Solresol and Volapük had fizzled, but Esperanto found champions among anarcho-syndicalists, socialists, and pacifists who saw in it a tool for international solidarity. By the 1920s, there were forty radio shows broadcasting in Esperanto across a dozen countries. The League of Nations seriously considered introducing it into schools. Thirteen nations, including India and Japan, endorsed the proposal. Then Brazil and France blocked it—Brazil worried it was a language for "ne'er-do-wells and communists," France that it would corrupt the "French genius."

What followed was catastrophe. Stalin, who had once dabbled in Esperanto himself, reversed course and sent speakers to gulags for their internationalist sympathies. Franco's Spain persecuted them for their anarchist associations. Hitler, in Mein Kampf, branded Esperanto a Jewish conspiracy. The Nazis murdered all three of Zamenhof's children. Yet the movement refused to die. During the Cold War, it flourished in the Soviet Union among young people trying to connect across the Iron Curtain. It grew in China, where its Roman characters offered an alternative to both Chinese script and the encroaching dominance of English. When the internet arrived, Esperanto found new life: Wikipedia launched an Esperanto edition within a year of its debut; today there are nearly 400,000 articles in the language, more than in Danish, Urdu, or Greek. Duolingo has introduced over a million people to it. In Britain, as Brexit fractured the sense of European belonging, Esperanto classes saw a surge in enrollment.

But something had shifted in what the movement meant. The original vision—finvenkismo, or "final victory," the belief that Esperanto would become the world's second language and usher in universal peace—had given way to something smaller and more human. At the congress, the most crowded booths were not for political organizations but for the International Federation of Esperanto Railwaymen, the Philatelic Esperanto League, the International Esperanto Naturist Organisation. There were talks on the James Webb telescope and brutalist architecture. A Brazilian named Georgos Jurobola, who had been traveling continuously since 2019 by volunteering at Esperanto congresses and staying with speakers through the Pasporta Servo—a global homestay network that predates Couchsurfing by decades—told me simply: "When I arrive to a new place, I write to Esperantists, and immediately I have friends." A French cybersecurity worker turned naturist named Thierry Spanjaard, who had learned Esperanto from his grandfather, a World War I veteran and pacifist, shrugged when I asked whether he believed in the grand political vision. "It's fun," he said. "I meet interesting people. It's a means to travel."

Yet the older idealism had not entirely vanished. A 28-year-old Esperanto activist from the Democratic Republic of the Congo named Espoir Ngoma Kasati described how local speakers had partnered with missionaries and aid workers to help orphaned children in a nation fractured by linguistic diversity. "Esperanto is good for Africa because it is not a colonial language," she said. "Esperanto is everyone's property. That is the gift that Zamenhof gave to all humankind." The Catholic Church, which had embraced Esperanto early in hopes of reaching believers in a tongue easier than Latin, still broadcasts papal news in it three times a week. Radio Vaticana and China Radio International both maintain Esperanto services. The Chinese government, which once promoted the language heartily, still sends representatives to the annual congress.

On the feast day of Titus Brandsma—a Dutch friar who helped write an ecclesiastical Esperanto dictionary, resisted the Nazis, was captured in 1941, tortured at Dachau, and was canonized four years ago—I attended a mass in Esperanto held in an eighteenth-century chapel attached to a thirteenth-century monastery in Brno's old city center. A Chinese priest delivered the readings and blessed the eucharist. The experience was strange and ordinary at once: the ritual was formulaic, dutiful, familiar to everyone in the room. In that rote steadiness, I felt the patient sincerity of people already building, in small numbers, the kind of unity the language was invented to create. What struck me most was not that Esperanto had failed to transform the world, but that it had transformed itself—from a grand political project into something more durable: a community of people who had chosen each other, who spoke a language no nation owned, and who believed that mutual understanding, even if it never conquered the globe, was worth the effort.