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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 862

Part of Session 130: Language in Multilingual Cities (Other abstracts in this session)

Invented Cities; Invented Languages: Esperanto and Urban Textuality, 1887-1914

Authors: Tonkin, Humphrey
Submitted by: Tonkin, Humphrey (University of Hartford, United States of America)

In a 1905 letter to Alfred Michaux, L. L. Zamenhof, author of Esperanto (1887), seems to locate the origins of Esperanto in the multilingual environment of his native city, Bialystok, then in Russia, now in Poland.  Divided by language, the four ethnic groups in the city were constantly at odds. A common language, Zamenhof seemed to suggest, could have brought them together.  

Esperanto owed its early popularity to the emergence of an urban middle class nurtured by universal education and imbued with cosmopolitanism. Members of this class, linked by a new language, had the money and leisure to look beyond their own communities. They were endowed with faith in technological progress and a corresponding belief in the achievement of common values manifest in such phenomena as universal expositions and early international organizations (the Red Cross, the Universal Postal Union, the International Telegraph Union…).  Zamenhof’s success came from his realization that Esperanto was not simply a language, but a textual community. 

In his book Reading Berlin (1996), Peter Fritzsche has argued that the modern city came into being through shared text: “In an age of urban mass literacy, the city as place and the city as text defined each other in mutually constitutive ways.”  Berlin, Vienna, London, Paris created a sense of themselves constantly reinforced by the popular press, whose texts became mirrors of these cities’ identity.  Esperanto began as an inter-urban self-reinforcing agglomeration of written texts, shared and held in common, linking its followers through periodicals, printed books, and above all by correspondence. This linguistic experiment was therefore also a social experiment, seeking common values in the shared experience of the cities of Europe and the imagined community that they represented. The expansion of Esperanto in the early 1900s was driven primarily by belief in its value to commerce and science.  Increased middle-class mobility in due course made it a spoken as well as a written language.  The first world Esperanto congress was held in 1905; subsequently, such congresses were held annually in different cities across Europe. 

The virtual community that Esperanto texts created helped reinforce a common ideology of peace and internationalism, overlaid on the immediately practical goal of promoting commerce, and leading to the emergence of a universalist identity situated in an emergent common language.

A careful reading of Zamenhof’s letter leads the reader to the conclusion that Zamenhof saw the fundamental problem in Bialystok not as ethnic division but as anti-Semitism.  Recent biographies of Zamenhof by Korzhenkov (Homarano, 2^nd ed. 2011) and Künzli (L. L. Zamenhof: Esperanto, Hillelismus und die jüdische Frage, 2010) stress the parallels between Zamenhof’s experiments with language and his search for a kind of post-Zionist universalism. This less evident, yet urgent, agenda created a marked tension between what we might call the utilitarian goals of collaboration in commerce and science, and the idealistic goals of the brotherhood and sisterhood of all.