Ideas about perfect language have long presented alluring solutions to innumerable human predicaments (see Eco 1994). Under such vision, language – from sacred speech and mother tongues to multilingualism and translanguaging – is readily ascribed utopian potentials. This tendency has been particularly pertinent in appraisals of the purported transformative capacity of constructed auxiliary languages, with Esperanto being the supreme example (Forster 1982; Heller 2017). Esperanto, as the name implies, comes with a humanistic hope for peace and universal understanding. Despite such hopes, Esperantist promises of global human unity have largely remained a dream. Esperanto tends to linger as a comparatively marginal phenomenon in national linguistic markets. A critical sociolinguistic engagement with Esperanto-related practices can, nevertheless, offer privileged insights into the deeper workings of such markets. This is the point of departure of the present paper. It discusses the use of Esperanto in the Swedish labour movement in the early 20th century. During this period of ensuing social democratic hegemony, worker-Esperantist organisations constituted a dominated faction in this organisational space of organised labour. Notably, these ideologically diverse groupings attempted to challenge the mounting turn of the Swedish labour movement toward an increasingly nation-centred agenda. Envisioning forthcoming human unity, they promoted an ideology of sennaciismo (anationalism; see Lanti 1931/1951), which construed Esperanto as a means for denationalising the working class and, hence, pave the way for a utopian socialist society. Although this dream attracted several thousands Swedish workers in the early 1930s, it soon succumbed to ideological conflict and marginalisation. Yet, its contingent existence presents a versatile vantage-point for grasping language ideological struggles over utopian ideals, past as well as present.
References
Eco, Umberto. 1994. The search for the perfect language. Oxford: Blackwell.
Forster, Peter. 1982. The Esperanto movement. Berlin: Mouton.
Heller, Monica. 2017. Dr. Esperanto, or anthropology as alternative worlds. American Anthropologist 119, 12-22.
Lanti, Eugène. 1931/1951. Manifesto de la sennaciistoj. Paris: SAT.
