I asked the Swedish Esperanto Association something that I guessed would be simple for them to answer: “Does the Swedish association have some figures about the number of members during the years, in Sweden and in other Esperanto organizations around the world?”
Simple questions do not always lead to simple answers, but in this case, the answer was, essentially, “No”.
At first, I wondered how that could be. All organizations count their members, and they are proudly making statistics telling how popular the organization itself and the thing it promotes have become.
Being part of a movement of any kind, often becomes kind of a fandom – you want “your team” to win and become the most famous, the most successful.
But when thinking this through, it is obvious that Esperanto doesn’t work that way.
Of course, you can find statistics. Many people have, during the years since Esperanto was first introduced in 1887, tried to estimate the number of uses of the language.
It can be done in different ways, and you’ll meet very different figures, depending on what you do:
Count the number of people with an Esperanto passport
Count the number of members of Esperanto organizations
Count the number of students at Esperanto courses
Count the number of published texts in Esperanto
Etc.
The first suggestion is rather silly, I admit. There is no such thing as an Esperanto passport. But if you wanted to know how many Danes there are, as an example, you can use that as a good guideline. Having a passport is not mandatory in Denmark, so you would reach a too low number this way. And some Danes live somewhere else, and may be dual citizens and have a different kind of passport, so how to calculate those?
But you can work a bit along those lines and maybe find some other information, for instance a list of people in Denmark who have been registered as Danish citizens at any point in time – and then decide what to do with those who have later been unregistered again, and hence, are no longer citizens of Denmark.
You will need to make many decisions about who to count and who not, and you’ll run into problems with, say, two Danes living abroad and having a child there, who is not registered as a Danish citizen, but still do speak Danish at home and may or may not move to Denmark later, and there, perhaps, be counted as a Dane.
Similar problems for all other countries, actually, meaning that when making up the total number of people in the world on such a basis, it will not become completely correct.
The second suggestion: how many members of Esperanto organizations are there? Well, if you can find out which exact organizations exist, and you can get their current member counts from them, it should be easy to reach a number.
But using the Esperanto language, or just knowing it, or being interested in it, doesn’t require a membership of anything. It must be assumed that there are very many Esperanto speakers who are not a member of an Esperanto organization. Think of it as similar to knowing Microsoft Word – you can definitely do that without taking part in a Microsoft Word organization.
Also, some members of some of the Esperanto organizations may not speak the language, and you would possibly define those as “not using” the language. But, with some reason, these are probably the majority of the members, because wanting to learn the language is a super-good reason for joining an organization.
And those who were members but aren’t anymore, they may or may not use the language. You cannot know, really.
So, counting the members will tell you something, but not really how many users there are of the language.
Students on courses, then? Yes, that makes sense, to some extent. You will not count the people who already speak the language, and not those who learned it from a course you don’t know about – and not those who learned from a course you do know about but weren’t registered in any way as students of it, so they are not counted.
And so on – it is probably impossible to get any kind of reliable number of Esperanto-knowing people out of a course participants count, and again, you don’t know if they actually use the language after that.
Published texts could say something, though. Let’s say you have a way of finding everything that is being published on the Internet each day, and in which language it is being published – and even how many are opening the text in their web browsers, assuming that this constitutes “use” of the language.
If you have such numbers for texts in Esperanto, and for texts in other languages, you can probably assume something from the relative numbers – say, if there are 100 times more articles posted in Portuguese than in Esperanto, it could be that there are 100 times more active Portuguese users than Esperanto users, and if the counts for the readers will be 20 times higher for Portuguese than for Esperanto, you will either have some very active Esperanto readers, or perhaps the actual number of Esperanto users is really closer to a twentieth of the number of Portuguese users.
But then comes the challenge to find out how many Portuguese users there are, which is not at all a simple question. For instance, I have once studied that language, then forgotten most of it, but I have a bunch of study books and other books in and about the Portuguese language, and occasionally, when I bump into a Portuguese text, or a Portuguese song, I may try to understand what is being said.
Am I a Portuguese language user?
Currently, I study Esperanto, but I have only just begun, so – am I an Esperanto language user?
There more I think about this topic, the less useful the possible answers seem to be.
The point is, we cannot know how many people consider themselves “Esperanto speakers”, or how many use the language regularly – or how many have shown some interest in it at some point during their lives.
What we can know, is that publishers of Esperanto books typically sell very few of them, just like publishers of books in all other languages, and that any kind of website, advert, or poster in the streets will meet a quite low level of interest, if it is all in Esperanto – because there is no place in the world where Esperanto is the common language, and there will be, anywhere you go, in any book shops, on any street – wherever – only a small amount of the people there who know Esperanto.
That’s the nature of it.
Similar, again, to Microsoft Word. There’s no “MS Word Land” where everybody use Word each day, even though it is a very popular product. If you want to talk “Word” with people, you first need to find those people.
Same thing with Esperanto, and, actually, also the same thing with any other language, if you are not in a country or other place where this is the common language.
Speak Chinese in the streets in any Danish city, and very few will understand you. Speak Danish in any Chinese city, and the result will be similar.
My point is that the value of Esperanto doesn’t live in the numbers. It is not a marketing stunt, and it is not a typical fan club activity. Even though you may see an Esperantist now and then wear a pin or a T-shirt that tells about them knowing Esperanto, most people just happen to know the language, like any other language, and you can’t see it on them.
As a skill they are happy to use, but not as anything openly announced.
Esperanto is just one of the things they can do. If you want to do it with them, talk Esperanto with other people who know it, you just have to tell that you want to, in ways and in places where it makes sense – where you can expect to get a reaction from those who can, and want to.
Maybe just when meeting people in any case, and you talk about what matters for you. Sometimes, you will both say “Esperanto”, and then you know that you have that in common.
Just like everything else you could talk to people about, really. Esperanto skills are of a much more natural and mature type than any fan club activities.
Counting was probably easier in the 1960s when Esperanto was connected with peace and disarmament. The spy agencies on both sides alternately cultivated and persecuted Esperantists. Most peace events had a table distributing the Green Book.