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Esperanto – Lingua Franca and Language Community
e-Book – Open Access 
ISBN 9789027257536
This book addresses a fascinating topic – a constructed language that has turned from a project into a fully-fledged language used by some of its speakers on a daily basis. Based on extensive fieldwork, this book provides rare and profound insights into the use of Esperanto in a large number of communicative areas. It studies the speakers’ use of code-switching, phraseology and metaphors, techniques they employ to enhance understanding, such as metacommunication and repair strategies, as well as their predilection for humour. The study also contributes to a comparison between the communication in Esperanto and in the language that is now predominantly used as a lingua franca – English – and allows conclusions to be drawn on the question of what a lingua franca is all about.
[Studies in World Language Problems, 10] 2022. xx, 429 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 17 August 2022
Published online on 17 August 2022
© John Benjamins
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Table of Contents
- List of figures | pp. xi–12
- List of tables | pp. xiii–14
- List of abbreviations | pp. xv–xvi
- Key to transcription symbols | pp. xvii–18
- A note to the reader | pp. xix–xx
- Part I. Introduction
- Chapter 1. What is Esperanto? | pp. 3–8
- Chapter 2. What is a lingua franca? | pp. 9–14
- Chapter 3. Previous interlinguistic research | pp. 15–18
- Chapter 4. The aim of this book | pp. 19–20
- Chapter 5. Methods and data | pp. 21–26
- Chapter 6. On the structure of this book | pp. 27–28
- Part II. Esperanto – an overview
- Chapter 7. Planned languages and interlinguistics | pp. 31–38
- Chapter 8. The history and ideological background of the Esperanto movement | pp. 39–46
- Chapter 9. Main current domains | pp. 47–52
- Chapter 10. Esperanto as a family language and the phenomenon of Esperanto “native speakers” | pp. 53–58
- Chapter 11. Esperanto as a linguistic system | pp. 59–70
- Part III. Excursus: The use of Esperanto outside the speech community
- Chapter 12. Introduction: Esperanto as a metaphor | pp. 73–74
- Chapter 13. The use of Esperanto for artistic purposes | pp. 75–76
- Chapter 14. The use of the glottonym Esperanto | pp. 77–80
- Chapter 15. The use of Esperanto words in branding | pp. 81–90
- Chapter 16. Some concluding remarks on Esperanto outside its speech community | pp. 91–92
- Part IV. The main characteristics of Esperanto communication
- Chapter 17. Introduction: Communication in Esperanto | pp. 95–96
- Chapter 18. Metacommunication | pp. 97–124
- Chapter 19. Working towards mutual understanding Repairs | pp. 125–152
- Chapter 20. Humour | pp. 153–192
- Chapter 21. Phraseological units and metaphors | pp. 193–250
- Chapter 22. Code-switching in Esperanto communication | pp. 251–268
- Chapter 23. Written vs oral Esperanto | pp. 269–306
- Chapter 24. Attitudes to accents | pp. 307–324
- Chapter 25. Esperanto and language change | pp. 325–350
- Chapter 26. Esperanto as a corporate language: A case study of an educational NGO | pp. 351–368
- Part V. Conclusion
- Chapter 27. The main characteristics of Esperanto communication | pp. 371–374
- Chapter 28. The speakers of Esperanto and their culture | pp. 375–376
- Chapter 29. Language “ownership” | pp. 377–378
- Chapter 30. Final remarks | pp. 379–380
- Bibliography | pp. 381–409
- Appendix 1. Recordings and other sources | pp. 411–421
- Appendix 2. The sixteen rules of the Fundamental Grammar of Esperanto | pp. 423–425
- Index | pp. 427–429
Cited by (6)
Cited by six other publications
Hampton, Jessica & Stefano Coretta
Stria, Ida
Stępkowska, Agnieszka
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