Pardonu min…Ĉu vi parolas Esperanton?” is Esperanto for “Excuse me, do you speak Esperanto?” While most people will not understand this phrase, the language was created to be a universal tongue. In ...

Annie Linares first read of Esperanto at age 12. When she asked her father what it was, he told her it was a dead language. Okazis ke li eraris. Translation: It turned out he was dead wrong. Today the ...

On a recent Friday evening, the Esperanto Society of New York convened in a rowhouse on Manhattan’s East 35th Street. The upper floors of the building seemed to house a bilingual preschool, going by ...

Still, Esperanto classes are taught for credit at both UC Berkeley and Stanford, but these are usually attended by locals, only two or three per semester. And some longtime members are losing faith.

The first remark many sceptics make about Esperanto is that it is not “useful” the way other, allegedly more “important” languages are. A politically left-leaning sceptic may wonder, if he or she ...