1. Mobility and Inclusion
in Multilingual Europe
Approaches to multilingualism of EO speakers
Aliroj al multlingvismo de Esperanto­parolantoj
Federico Gobbo
⟨Amsterdamo / Milano-Bicocca / Torino⟩
⟨F.Gobbo@uva.nl⟩
28 July 2016, Nitra, Slovakia
Perspective of language communication in the European Union
panel Multilingualism, Linguistic Democracy and Social Justice
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2. The Esperanto community, democracy and
multilingualism
After the fall of the USSR and the invention of the World Wide Web
in the 1990s, the Esperanto Movement was forced to rethink about
its own place in a fast-changing world, where English definitely
becomes the dominant language on a global level.
The Manifesto signed at Prague in 1996 sets the new ideological
horizon for the Esperanto Movement. After 20 years, what became
commonsensical of the Prague Manifesto in the Esperanto
community?
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3. The Prague Manifest in a nutshell
1. Democracy: language inequality entails inequality of
communication at all levels;
2. Transnational education: the education of any ethnic language is
linked to a specific worldview;
3. Pedagogical efficiency: the difficulty of the ethnic languages always
will present obstacles to many students;
4. Multilingualism: in the Esperanto community all members are at
least bilingual, often multilingual;
5. Linguistic rights: The unequal distribution of power between
languages is a recipe for permanent language insecurity;
6. Linguistic diversity: every language, like every living thing, is
inherently valuable and worthy of protection and support.
7. Human Emancipation: Esperanto is enables every human to
participate as an individual in the human community, with secure
roots in their local culture and linguistic identity, while not being
limited by it.
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4. A sociolinguistic research: results
Me and my former student Irene Caligaris at the University of Torino
did a sociolinguistic research of the awareness of linguistic diversity as
well as the actual practice of multilingualism of daily life in Esperanto
speakers, through two surveys and semi-structured interviews. They
were held in Italy in 2014. 93 Esperantists participated. The main
results are:
■ Esperantists forster Multilingualism, and sustain Linguistic rights in
general (points 4 and 5);
■ Esperantists are well aware of Linguistic diversity, and in particular
of regional and minority languages; sometimes Esperanto is
considered a quasi-minority language as well (point 6);
■ The culture of respect and openness of the Esperanto community
is seen as a viable vehicle for Human emancipation (point 7)
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5. Remarks for the discussion
■ Esperantists still lack a clear view on how language inequality
hinders Democracy (point 1);
■ The idea of Transnational education is important only for
Esperantists who are teachers or professionally involved in
education, not for any of them (point 2);
■ The fact that in general our education systems are pedagogically
inefficient (point 3) is known, but considered a “necessary evil”;
In conclusion: up to now, there is no clear, shared view on the
connection between languages, power, and social justice in the
Esperanto common sense but on the other hand multilingualism and
linguistic diversity are strongly considered necessary for democracy.
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6. Acknowledgement of funding
MIME – Mobility and Inclusion in Multilingual Europe
The research leading to these results has received fund-
ing from the European Community’s Seventh Frame-
work Programme under grant agreement No. 613344
(Project MIME).
UEA – Universala Esperanto-Asocio (Rotterdam, NL)
One of the authors’ is appointed as holder of the Spe-
cial Chair in Interlinguistics and Esperanto at the Uni-
versity of Amsterdam on behalf of UEA. The content
and opinions expressed here are the author’s ones and
they do not necessarily reflect the opinions of UEA.
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7. Thanks! Dankon! Ďakujem!
Questions? Comments?
Demandoj? Komentoj?
 ⟨F.Gobbo@uva.nl⟩
 @goberiko  federico.gobbo  +FedericoGobbo
 http:/federicogobbo.name/pub/
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