Native Esperanto speakers


Native Esperanto speakers are people who have acquired Esperanto as one of their native languages. As of 1996, there were 350 or so attested cases of families with native Esperanto speakers. Estimates from associations indicate that there were around 1,000 Esperanto-speaking families, involving perhaps 2,000 children in 2004. In the majority of such families, the parents had the same native language, though in many the parents had different native languages, and only Esperanto in common.

History

Raising children in Esperanto occurred early in the history of the language, notably with the five children of Montagu Butler. Owing to this, some families have passed Esperanto on to their children over several generations. Also notable are young Holocaust victim Petr Ginz, whose drawing of the planet Earth as viewed from the Moon was carried aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia, and Daniel Bovet, the recipient of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
In at least one instance, Esperanto was used as a bridge language for a family started by a couple who did not have a native language in common.
Esperanto is not the primary language of any geographic region, though it is spoken at events such as conventions like the World Congress of Esperanto and isolated offices, such as the World Esperanto Association's central office in Rotterdam. Consequently, native speakers have limited opportunity to meet one another except where meetings are specially arranged. For that reason, many parents consider it important to bring their children regularly to Esperanto conventions such as the annual "Renkontiĝo de Esperanto-familioj". Similarly, the annual happens alongside the largest Esperanto convention, the World Congress of Esperanto.

List of noted native speakers

Below is a list of noted native speakers of Esperanto. The billionaire George Soros has often appeared on such lists, but Humphrey Tonkin, the translator of Soros's father Tivadar's memoir Maskerado ĉirkaŭ la morto into English, has disputed this. He has made no statements either way concerning Soros's brother, Paul.

Grammatical characteristics

The Esperanto of native-speaking children differs from the standard Esperanto spoken by their parents. In some cases this is due to interference from their other native language, but in others it appears to be an effect of acquisition.
Bergen found the following patterns in a study of eight native-speaking children, aged 6 to 14, who were bilingual in Hebrew, Slovak, French, Swiss German, Russian, and Croatian.
  • Phonological reduction of vowels in common grammatical suffixes and one-syllable grammatical words. This occurred about 5% of the time. The reduced grammatical suffixes were mostly the -o of nouns and -as of present-tense verbs, but occasionally also the -a of adjectives. Reduced grammatical words included personal pronouns, the article la 'the', and prepositions such as al 'to' and je. The article la was sometimes omitted with the Slavic speakers, as might be expected as a contact effect.
  • Proper nouns were generally unassimilated, either to Esperanto grammatical suffixes or to stress patterns. Proper nouns are common exceptions to grammatical rules in many languages, and this pattern is common among L2-speakers of Esperanto as well. However, stress was also observed to vary in native words, for example nómiĝas 'is/am called' and ámikoj 'friends'.
  • Children were not observed to use compound tenses or aspectual affixes on verbal roots. Except for simple passives, the parents were not observed to use compound tenses either. However, they did use aspectual affixes, but nonetheless the children did not use such affixes even when their other language was Slavic, where aspectual affixes are important. The closest thing to such forms that the children were observed to use were fini + verb 'stop doing something', komenci + verb 'start doing something', ankoraŭ 'still', and kaj poste 'and then'; but even then, usage was not as common as equivalents in the adstrate language. -Iĝi was, however, used on adjectival roots:
  • The word order was mostly SVO. OSV order was also attested, but half of all instances were with the child who spoke Swiss German, which allows preposing the object.
  • Related to the fixed word order, there is evidence that the accusative case has become redundant. Usage closely reflects the role of case in the adstrate language, being used only where consistent with the other language, but not always even there. Usage ranged from ≈100% with the Slovak-speaking children, to 0% with the French-speaking child, despite the fact that the French mother consistently used the accusative case in her own speech. Slovak has an accusative case on nouns, French does not. Other children used the accusative in only some of the contexts required by standard Esperanto, largely reflecting usage in their other language. There were other patterns to emerge as well. The Croatian child, for example, used the accusative only on personal pronouns immediately following a verb, a feature of reduction to clitic form common in Croatian :
Among children that do use the accusative, its usage may be regularized from adult usage, at least at young ages. For example, when a screw dropped out of a lock, a young child said it malvenis la pordon. Besides the novel use of mal- with veni 'to come' to mean 'come away from', the accusative is not used in adult speech for motion away, but only motion towards. However, in this case the child generalized the usage of the accusative for direct objects.
Lindstedt, on the other hand, referencing Bergen's study, contends that "it is difficult to find convincing examples of changes introduced by the process of nativisation. All examples proposed seem rather to be due to transfers from the children’s other native languages, differences between the spoken and written register of Esperanto and, in some cases, incomplete acquisition." Some of the features, such as phonological reduction, can be found in the speech of some fluent non-native speakers, while some other, such as the attrition of the accusative, are completely absent from the speech of some native-speaking children.

Word derivation

Native-speaking children, especially at a young age, may coin words that do not exist in the speech of their parents, often for concepts for which Esperanto has a word they do not yet know, by exploiting the morphology of the language. This is analogous to what adult speakers do for concepts where Esperanto lacks a word, and indicates that some of the grammatical alterations that adult learners may find difficult come easily to native-speaking children. For example,
  • Antonyms in mal-
  • Containers in -ujo
  • Tendencies in -ema
  • Places in -ejo
  • Feminine in -ino
  • Instrument in -ilo
  • Verbs from nouns
  • Verbs from adjectives
  • Adjectives from verbs
  • Adjectives from nouns
  • Compounds with prepositions
  • Adverbs from verbs
  • Adverbs from nouns and prepositions
  • Nouns from adjectives