Love Language 

Esperanto has always been a bit of trivia in my brain, nothing more: It’s the rare constructed language that has a sizable footprint and speaking population. (Sorry, Klingon and Dothraki.) But Katie Thornton’s trip to the 110th annual World Esperanto Congress opened my eyes—or, rather, malfermis miajn okulojn. This might just be the most wholesome, hopeful piece you read all week. Thanks, L.L. Zamenhof.

Zamenhof never intended for his language to evolve wholly organically. Instead, its rules are governed by the Akademio de Esperanto, a body founded at the first World Esperanto Congress (in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, in 1905) with the mandate to “preserve and protect the fundamental principles of the Esperanto language” and “monitor its development.” That mission makes sense: the survival of a made-up language demands a tight ship, since dialectical differences and patois often birth entire new “natural languages.” Esperantists cannot have “rizz,” and the acceptance of malleable, unregulated internet slang like “six seven” would threaten the entire social contract upon which the experiment is predicated. But Esperanto must nevertheless keep up with the times. So the academy—a panel of forty-five linguists, scientists, philosophers, and others—makes formal recommendations about how the language can and cannot change. It fields comments and queries from Esperanto speakers year-round, but perhaps most notably in a public forum at the annual congress (in Brno, questions from attendees concerned gender-fluid pronouns and the paucity of technical terms related to stringed instruments). The academy then takes these requests under advisement and, very occasionally, updates the Esperanto dictionary. (It last released a new “official supplement” in 2023, only the tenth since the language’s inception.)