Esperanto Revolutionaries and Geeks: Language Politics, Digital Media and the Making of an International Community

In a similar vein, the Esperantist understanding of nationality depicts languages as a constitutive element of nationalities, further equating these with cultures. This makes room for a significant slip through which someone from a different linguistic background is presented as a national Other. In addition, one's country of origin and/or country of residence is by proxy associated with one's nationality. In a more substantial slip, all of these identitarian features collapse under the label 'country', as expressed on our congress badges. As conversations unfold during the congress, the controversies produced by the way these categories are equated become the centre of the cosmopolitan sociabilities at play.

The way these sociabilities unfold often draw near to practices of xenophilia. With participants from 61 countries—and with the Philip- pines and East Timor saluting the congress for the first time—more nationalities come to mean more differences to be bridged and more experiences to be brought together. As diversity in national form runs above everything else at the congress venue, Esperanto is the element that runs underneath, giving support to the cosmopolitan sociabilities in place and making sense of the congress' formal ceremonies and casual conversations.

Returning to the congress badges, among the information the badges display—the participant's full name, congress registration number and 'country'—the latter refers to one's country of residence, based on the address the person used to register for the congress. In this way, the participants often find themselves categorising each other according to the country on their badges, even though the place where they live may not necessarily be the one from where they derive their nationality.

As conversations take place in the day-to-day of such a congress, the entanglements of nationality, language, culture, country of origin and country of residence become problematised and disentangled. In trying to identify what Esperantists have to share once they share a meal, congress participants juggle what they have in common and what they do not, their common Esperantoness and their (preferable) national other- ness. At these moments, the features subsumed under the label 'country' on the participants' badges are dissociated, endorsing the fact that the boundaries between countries, cultures, nations and languages do not necessarily overlap (Eriksen 1992: 314). As our conversation over lunch revealed, Marie-Christines attempt to guess my nationality from the country displayed on my badge revealed a non-correspondence between the two 'countries' at stake—which she also noticed by my non-French accent. The same applied to her accent in Esperanto, which would place her as an English speaker due to her having practised Esperanto mostly with an English interlocutor.

Thus, differences in pronunciation, stress and vocabulary choice are loosely used as indexes of Esperantists' nationalities and mother tongues, as one's use of Esperanto often reflects these influences.[17] For instance, in a conversation in Esperanto between myself, a middle-aged French woman, an elderly English man and a young Japanese woman, in which we talked about where to go for dinner at the end of a day at the congress, there were three distinct ways of referring to the abundance of restaurants available in the local area. The French woman initially said ' oni povas trovi multajn restoraciojn ci tie' (based on the French form ' onpeut trouver plusiers restaurants ici'). The native speaker of English then remarked that he would have said it differently, as 'estas multaj restoracioj ci tie' (from the English 'there are many restaurants here'). Finally, the Japanese woman contributed to the discussion by saying 'multaj restoracioj trovigas ci tie' ( 'many restaurants find themselves here', with the verb in its reflexive form). Even though I could not analyse her sentence concerning the Japanese language, she noted that these distinct ways of saying 'the same thing' came from their ways of expressing themselves in their mother tongues.

Just as the influence of people's mother tongues on people's written and spoken varieties of Esperanto is usually praised as an indicator of the internationality of Esperantujo, differences in accents are also commented upon. If we take the word 'Esperanto', when pronounced in Esperanto, as an example: a native speaker of English (particularly in the case of people displaying certain American English accents perceived as 'strong') would be likely to place the stress on the penultimate syllable and to voice the 'r' as an alveolar approximant (j). A native speaker of French, by contrast, is more likely to place the stress on the last syllable and to voice the 'r' like a uvular fricative (x). These two forms are distinct from the standard in Esperanto, with the stress in the penultimate syllable and the 'r' voiced as an alveolar tap (r).