Polyglot Gathering

Esperanto is a constructed language, yet Ethnologue says it has about a 1000 native speakers. Is that correct? How can an artificial language with no nation even have “native” speakers? Does their mere existence not defy the assumed neutrality of Esperanto, which is promoted as “everyone’s second language”? And do these people play any special role in the development of the language or community? Come to learn more about this little-known phenomenon from Marek, who is himself a father of three native Esperanto-speaking children, and discuss the topic with fellow Esperanto speakers in the audience.

Marek Blahuš is an IT scientist, Wikipedian and polyglot based in Brno, Czech Republic. In his job in the field of computational linguistics, he is handling millions of words every day, routinely in languages he cannot speak. His areas of interest include text corpora, digital lexicography, terminology extraction, and interlinguistics. Searching for patterns in natural phenomena is his life-long passion, as demonstrated also in his long-time hobby, genealogy. Marek is married and a father of three bilingual children (Czech and Esperanto). https://www.sketchengine.eu/

This video was recorded at the Polyglot Gathering 2025: https://www.polyglotgathering.com.