Free In the Land of INVENTED LANGUAGES by Arika Okrent Page A

Esperanto have made do with a virtual homeland. Esperantoland is located wherever people are speaking Esperanto. And contrary to what I had assumed, they really are speaking Esperanto.
    The earthly setting of my first Esperanto experience was the MIT campus, the 2003 venue for the annual congress of the Esperanto League of North America. As I drove from New Jersey through hellish Fourth of July traffic toward Cambridge, the clearest mental picture of an Esperanto congress I could muster was five gray-haired radicals on folding chairs bantering about the Spanish civil war and their stamp collections. I imagined they would be speaking Esperanto, but not for everything. Surely, as soon as something worth saying came up, they would lapse back into English. Just in case, though, I studied up. I brought my dictionary and grammar book and practiced having the maturity not to giggle when I spoke the textbook phrase for “How are you?” or more specifically “How are you faring?” which is rendered as “
Kiel vi fartas
?”
    More than eighty people turned up at the conference, and I can say that almost all of them spoke only Esperanto the entire weekend. Some were the retired teachers and spry socialist grandpas I was prepared for. Their emotional proselytizing about the noble ideals of “our dear language” clicked right into the Esperanto landscape I'd imagined. But there was no place in that landscape for Kim (known as Kimo in Esperantoland) and his 3:00 P.M. presentation on the importance of rock music in the history of Esperanto culture.
    I really wanted to hear what he had to say on the subject, but I had a terrible time understanding him. Three obstacles hindered my full comprehension. One was my incomplete grasp of thelanguage. I had studied Esperanto for only six weeks, by myself, from a book. I thought I was doing pretty well. I understood every word of the opening lecture on the future of the Esperanto movement. I held my own in conversations about topics ranging from the language imperialism of English to Esperanto haiku. In fact, I was doing so well that I started to enjoy meeting my fellow conference goers so I could chitchat about my meager Esperanto experience. “Oh, I started a month and a half ago, no teacher, just a book,” I would toss off casually. If I really wanted a pat on the head, I'd add, “This is actually the first time I've ever heard it spoken.”
    I can be a bit of a show-off when it comes to facility with language. I have an aptitude for it that is probably much less impressive than that of the average European, but I've figured out how to work it to my full advantage by picking languages with high impact-to-proficiency ratios. Pretty good Hungarian gets you a lot more love in Budapest than perfect French buys you in Paris, and one well-placed word of Ibo to a Nigerian taxi driver can reward you with enough compliments to beat back the insecurities from all other parts of your life for a week. I wasn't expecting an ego boost from Esperanto. We are all speaking a second language here. Who's to impress? So when I heard, “Only six weeks? You're doing wonderfully!” I might have milked it a little. But I grew suspicious after four or five speeches about how we must do everything possible to encourage young people and keep them in the movement. A quick look around told me that I qualified as a young person (I was thirty-three at the time). The flattery may not have been inspired by my dazzling language skills.
    The second obstacle to my full understanding of the role of rock music in Esperanto culture was Kimo's impenetrable Danish accent. In one sense Esperanto pronunciation is standardized (each letter stands for one sound, no confusing
c
or
gh
), but it allowsfor a lot of bleed around the edges; my
r
sound and a French person's
r
sound will be different. Usually, this isn't a problem. I've since heard and fully understood British, Belgian, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, and Chinese Esperanto. But