**another one of my drafts; this one will probably be re-written into a proper article on my website, but i wanted to share the thoughts early anyway
esperanto gets a pretty bad rap both inside and outside the conlang community, but i think a lot of it is very unfounded. you're allowed to personally dislike the language or how it's constructed, but it's an insanely impressive language that's refused to die. over time, i've grown a huge appreciation for the language, and wanted to be able to share that with you all.
- isn't it a dead language? a failed project?
esperanto is not a dead language. its goal of being a universal language did not technically succeed if we're going by the definition of "the majority of the planet speaks the language," but few languages could. it's still regularly used online and in real life, with a population of native speakers and large meetings/conventions.
while it doesn't have as many speakers as english (and again, no language does), it still has a sizable number of speakers. exact numbers are difficult, but wikipedia says anywhere from 100,000 to 2,000,000. this is larger than some languages you might know! hawaiian only has about 20,000 speakers, for example.