Denaskuloj: native Esperanto speakers, how many and who

Yes, Esperanto has native speakers. They are called denaskuloj – "people from birth" – and there are an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 of them. Almost all grew up bilingual or trilingual, speaking Esperanto with at least one parent and the local language everywhere else.

The word comes from de "from", nask·i "to give birth" and -ul- "person": de·nask·ul·o. A native speaker is a denaskulo; the adjective denaska appears in phrases like denaska esperantisto – "native Esperantist".

#How many native speakers are there?

Nobody keeps a register, so the figures are estimates:

The 1,000–2,000 range is small next to the tens of thousands of fluent second-language speakers – see how many people speak Esperanto. It is still unique: no other international auxiliary language has a comparable community of families passing it to their children.

#How do Esperanto-speaking families form?

Native speakers come from two kinds of families:

• Couples who share a national language but choose to speak Esperanto with their children – according to research, the majority of cases. Often one parent speaks Esperanto consistently while the other uses the local language. Renato Corsetti found that this parent is usually the father, which is why his 1996 paper was titled "A mother tongue spoken mainly by fathers".
• International couples who met through Esperanto – at a congress, through Pasporta Servo hosting, or online – and have no other language in common. Esperanto becomes the home language by necessity.

In both cases the child hears Esperanto at home and another language at school. Native speakers are therefore almost never monolingual.

Because Esperanto has no territory, families travel to meet each other. The annual Renkontiĝo de Esperantistaj Familioj (REF), a gathering for Esperanto-speaking families, has met since 1979. A children's congress, Internacia Infana Kongreseto, runs alongside the World Esperanto Congress every year, and the online group DENASK connects parents.

#When did the first native speakers appear?

Children were raised in Esperanto within a generation of its publication in 1887. The British Esperantist Montagu C. Butler (1884–1970) raised his children in the language and described their speech in an article, Infana Esperanto, as early as 1921. Some families have since passed Esperanto down over several generations.

#Who are famous native speakers of Esperanto?

Only a few native speakers are well documented in reliable sources:

George Soros is often called a native speaker. His father, Tivadar Soros, was an Esperanto writer who raised his son to speak the language, and George attended the World Esperanto Congress in Bern in 1947. However, Humphrey Tonkin, who translated Tivadar's memoir into English, says Soros is not a native speaker and that his only native language is Hungarian. We therefore do not list him as one.

#Is native Esperanto different from standard Esperanto?

Slightly, and linguists disagree about why. In 1993 the Dutch linguist Kees Versteegh, drawing on creole studies, predicted that native Esperanto would differ little from learned Esperanto. In 2001 Benjamin Bergen published the first systematic study of several native speakers: eight children aged 6–14, recorded at a children's congress in France, whose other languages were Hebrew, Slovak, French, Swiss German, Russian and Croatian. His findings, published in the Journal of Child Language:

• Vowel reduction: grammatical endings like -o and -as were sometimes reduced to a neutral vowel, about 5% of the time.
• Accusative: use of the accusative ending -n tracked the child's other language – almost always with the Slovak-speaking children, almost never with the French-speaking child.
• Simpler verbs: the children avoided compound tenses and aspect prefixes like ek-.
• Word order: mostly subject–verb–object.

The Finnish linguist Jouko Lindstedt (2006), who raised his own three children in Esperanto, argued that these are not signs of a new "native" Esperanto. Most can be explained by the children's other languages, by ordinary spoken style, or by incomplete learning. His own children, whose other language was Finnish, used the accusative correctly and even corrected non-native speakers' mistakes.

#Do children invent new Esperanto words?

Yes, and this shows how productive Esperanto's word building is. Children combine prefixes and suffixes in ways adults rarely do. Researchers have recorded examples such as:

• malpluvi – "to stop raining" (mal- "opposite" + pluvi "to rain")
• malmateno – "evening" (literally "un-morning")
• elektrujo – "battery" (elektro "electricity" + -ujo "container")
• muzi – "to go to the museum" (from muzeo, reinterpreted as muz·ej·o "place for museuming")

Corsetti, Pinto and Tolomeo (2004) studied parents' diaries of five children aged one to five. They found that young native speakers over-regularise, just as children learning other languages do – but in Esperanto, the "over-regularised" form is often a correct word.

#Do native speakers decide what is correct?

No. In most languages, native speakers are the final authority on grammar. In Esperanto the standard is the Fundamento de Esperanto (1905) and the usage of the whole community, mostly second-language speakers. The Academy of Esperanto does not give native speakers any special status, and linguists such as Ken Miner have noted that this makes Esperanto unusual for research.

#Common questions

#Does Esperanto have native speakers?

Yes. An estimated 1,000–2,000 people have learned Esperanto from birth, usually alongside one or two other native languages.

#Is George Soros a native Esperanto speaker?

He learned Esperanto as a child from his father, the Esperanto writer Tivadar Soros, and is often described as a native speaker. Humphrey Tonkin, translator of his father's memoir, says Soros's only native language is Hungarian, so the claim is disputed.

#What is a native Esperanto speaker called?

A denaskulo (plural denaskuloj), from de nasko – "from birth". The phrase denaska esperantisto is also used.

#Which Nobel Prize winner was a native Esperanto speaker?

Daniel Bovet, who won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. His father, the Swiss psychologist Pierre Bovet, raised him with Esperanto.

#Why do parents raise children in Esperanto?

Some parents have no other language in common. More often, parents who share a national language choose Esperanto to give their children an extra language and a place in an international community.

#Sources

• Benjamin K. Bergen, "Nativization processes in L1 Esperanto", Journal of Child Language 28 (2001), 575–595
• Jouko Lindstedt, "Native Esperanto as a test case for natural language", SKY Journal of Linguistics 19 (2006)
• Renato Corsetti, "A mother tongue spoken mainly by fathers", Language Problems and Language Planning 20(3), 1996, 263–273
• Corsetti, Pinto & Tolomeo, "Regularizing the regular", Language Problems & Language Planning 28(3), 2004, 261–282
• Wikipedia, Native Esperanto speakers and Daniel Bovet
• Kees Versteegh, "Esperanto as a first language: language acquisition with a restricted input", Linguistics 31(3), 1993, 539–556
• Sabine Fiedler, "The Esperanto denaskulo", Language Problems & Language Planning 36(1), 2012, 69–84
• Humphrey Tonkin on George Soros, Transparent Language Esperanto blog
• Vikipedio, Renkontiĝo de Esperantistaj Familioj and Wikipedia, Petr Ginz
• Ken Miner, "The impossibility of an Esperanto linguistics", InKoj 2(1), 2011