Esperanto

Where it’s spoken

Esperanto has no native country. Its roughly two million speakers — including a few thousand who learned it as their first language from Esperantist parents — are scattered worldwide, with active communities in Europe, Brazil, China, and Japan. The Universala Esperanto-Asocio holds an annual world congress drawing thousands.

What it sounds like

Regular phonology with 28 letters each representing one sound. Stress always falls on the penultimate syllable. Grammar is rigorously rule-based: nouns end in -o, adjectives in -a, adverbs in -e, infinitive verbs in -i.

How it’s written

Esperanto uses the Latin alphabet with six accented letters (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ). When circumflexes aren’t available, the “x-system” (cx, gx, etc.) substitutes. Zamenhof published the first textbook under the pseudonym “Doktoro Esperanto” (“doctor who hopes”), which gave the language its name.