Jouko Lindstedt uses Esperanto on a daily basis at home and, after Finnish, reckons it is the language he is most fluent in, even if his research is on Bulgarian and Macedonian. He says that a number of linguists have reservations about Esperanto: the very idea of a consciously invented language feels odd for researchers of “natural” languages, or at any rate not terribly interesting. Lindstedt sees Esperanto as a part of his linguistic habitus, in three respects.

First, he would probably not have become a language scholar if, at the age of fourteen, he hadn’t studied Esperanto by following a language course on the radio. The grammar of Esperanto and its straightforward morphological structures encouraged him to look for systemic features in other, more complex languages.  For the young Lindstedt it took on the aspect of a self-study course in structural linguistics. The basic idea behind the Esperanto movement­­–that all of the world’s languages have the same intrinsic value and speakers of major languages shouldn’t gain an unfair advantage in international communication–explains Lindstedt’s interest in investigating language policy and sociolinguistics.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Esperanto however is that which is not consciously constructed. In over one hundred years of existence, it has evolved in ways which no-one has consciously determined, ways which have arisen spontaneously among those speaking it. And there are native speakers of Esperanto whose speech is starting to attract scholarly interest. In certain respects then it is close to natural language status and certainly has something to offer general linguistics, studying as it does the constraints and general regularities of human language.

Further information on Esperanto:

• ”Lindstedtin perheen arkielämä hoidetaan esperanton kielellä”,(‘The Lindstedt family’s daily life is in Esperanto’) interview with Jouko Lindstedt, Yle home news 15.12.2014
• Learning Esperanto online
• Vikipedio