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

Similar controversies regarding vocabulary choice are also manifest, though in less dynamic ways, in online collaborative dictionaries. Unlike dictionaries compiled by a particular editor or institution, collaborative dictionaries are made up of contributions of ordinary language users. In this sense, websites such as Tatoeba and Glosbe offer translations of words from and into several languages followed by example sentences. These websites are constantly updated and expanded by their users: anyone can register to become a collaborator and suggest more transla- tions and example sentences. Most importantly, these databases enrich the language, mostly on the basis of the influence of the collabora- tors' mother tongues. For instance, in the Esperanto-English version of Tatoeba, the English noun sink is often translated as lavujo ('washing container') or lavkuvo ('washing vessel'), while in its Esperanto-French version, even though some example sentences also point to lavujo, most of them list lavabo as the Esperanto translation of the French lavabo.

The Internet provided a space for new linguistic authorities to emerge. Alongside grammarians, members of the Akademio, dictionary editors, language teachers, proofreaders, writers, members of UEA's executive committee, radio broadcast presenters and singers, also YouTubers and those who regularly post on Esperanto channels on social media and instant messaging apps become often perceived as model language users, with their texts, voice messages and videos setting a precedent and standards that come to influence language use.

On online groups and conversations, it is common to see Esperanto speakers asking others to point out their language mistakes. Addition- ally, there are frequent unrequested corrections and repairs, from people interrupting both written and spoken chats to highlight someone else's or one's own mistakes. Presenting itself as more flexible when compared to hegemonic languages, Esperanto is not, however, free from the policing of correctness. Yet definitions of right and wrong are relatively loose, on the grounds of Esperanto being 'no one's language'. Kathryn Woolard (2016) analyses how ideologies of linguistic authority in Catalonia resonate with conceptions of Spanish versus Catalan belonging. By contrast, Esperanto's language ideology conveys this language not as belonging to a given ethnic or national group: being no one's language comprises being potentially anyone's, this being the basis of the percep- tions of fairness, inclusiveness and egalitarianism that sustains Esperantos language ideology.

As discussed before, Esperanto counts speakers-from-birth, who are raised in Esperanto-speaking households and have Esperanto as one first language among others (Miner 2011). However, the linguistic compe- tence of these speakers—called [Esperanto-] denaskuloj, the [Esperantist] from birth—does not decide on language standards (Fiedler 2012). Unlike native speakers of ethnic languages, speakers-from-birth are not raised in an entirely Esperanto-speaking environment, such that Esperanto is never their one and only first language. In the face of the absence of unequivocal norm-providing language users, rather than leaning on a strengthened language council or adhering strictly to dictio- naries and corpora, Esperanto language practices and ideology developed mechanisms to refuse the establishment of a rigorous linguistic authority. As a consequence, this makes room for vocabulary choices and colloquial registers emerging from the influence of one's first language, nationality or age to be commonly conveyed as the outcomes of language variation, rather than as mistakes. As specimens of language variation, such registers are equally accepted in formal settings, such as opening speeches at Universal Congresses and documents issues by UEA and SAT.