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How do we "sell" Esperanto to the public? The government? etc.

kannouteki_neko :lta, 27. toukokuuta 2005

Viestejä: 12

Kieli: English

fojo (Näytä profiilli) 25. heinäkuuta 2006 14.20.52

A small point or just another view: I heard from no-esperantist and feel the same, that Esperanto is currently very intellectually "marked", you could say nerdy even, I mean, you get an instant impression that Esperantist are overwhelmingly very intelligent people, usually highly read, with a personal interest in linguistic matters (you see hobbies of lernu users and languages lovers are ubiquitous), usually speak somewhere from 3 to 8 languages -so funny enough hardly needing Esperanto-, are very open minded, have all manner of informed opinions (a bit of the chatting classes phenomenon), are very onlinish, etc...I mean you get the impression the whoever has learnt Esperanto is bound to be very nice and lofty feeling, you know, I can hardly fathom an Esperantist who is dull, bigot and nationalistic, for example, it simply doesnt happen. So I can relate to some of you above that, interestingly, this is working as an attraction right now; I dont mean to challenge the univesal aim which started everything, but the fact is that I presume I have some company in a sentiment that Esperanto is good enough for me already, the only cognitively selected language in the world!. So you see, your question perhaps could be reformulated, how to go through the current and already one century lasting phase of pure voluntary/idealist/inner idea/nerdy existence to one of dissemination in public education systems around the world, etc (the only way to make it come to the no so nerdy idealistic majority of the population); for that, necessarily public institutions and political powers must start moving their ass; how to get them doing it I dont know, but the nerdy hordes and your ideas might be working in that direction.

A question please: does anyone know of any hard evidence of Esperanto being growing at the moment? I really would like to know. I mean, the starting point of these posts seems to be the idea that Esperanto is not progressing much; I dont deny it, just honestly dont know. Dankon!

oren (Näytä profiilli) 25. heinäkuuta 2006 18.44.59

Pardonu mian krokodilecon.

I just got back from a 5-day trip to NYC for ELNA's annual "landa kongreso." (ELNA is the Esperanto-Ligo de Norda Ameriko) You would not be wrong to assume that most of the attendees were middle-upper class white males, and a decent number were linguistically experienced already. But that was only about half. And that's half of the people who have $500 to spend on a cross-nation trip for a congress.

In addition, there were also normal couples, many elderly men and women (not online-savvy), and people working class people from nations like japan, brazil, canada and russia.

But yes, i think that currently a good deal of the visible esperantist movement online now are people who are online-savvy and nerdy, simply because learning esperanto 'pere interreto' has been possible now for a while and sites like lernu are attracting more people who 1) are on the internet and 2) like to learn. I know at least in america, (and probably over the world) Esperanto is still pretty unknown or clouded with mis-information about its purpose ("i don't want something to replace all languages").

Somethings that can inspire one about the esperanto movement online: eo.wikipedia.org and gxangalo.com. The esperanto vikipedio has almost half as many articles as the english (15th of all world languages) and gxangalo is an impressive multi-media website with a large online community.

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