Where is Esperanto spoken?
Everywhere and nowhere as an official map colour. Speakers live in Brazil, Japan, France, China, Poland, the United States, Indonesia, and dozens of other countries. Local clubs meet in cities. The World Esperanto Congress moves each year. Pasporta Servo lists hosts who welcome travellers in the language. Online, people speak it in voice rooms every week.
How many people speak Esperanto?
There is no census of the language. Honest ranges: tens of thousands use it with some regularity; a few hundred thousand have studied enough to read a simple page; older guesses that reach two million count anyone who ever opened a textbook. Treat round millions as marketing, not measurement. The useful fact is smaller and stronger: a stable international community still writes, meets, and raises children in it.
Are there native Esperanto speakers?
Yes. Families who share Esperanto as a home language raise denaskuloj — native speakers. Estimates usually sit in the low thousands, not millions. Almost all of them also speak the local national language. Native Esperanto is a real, documented phenomenon; it is not the main way the language lives. Most speakers learn it as adults.
The Akademio de Esperanto
The Akademio de Esperanto is the language academy. It does not invent slang. It guards the Fundamento de Esperanto (1905): the 16 rules, the basic vocabulary, and the examples Zamenhof declared untouchable. New words for new things still appear in speech and in dictionaries; the academy’s job is to keep the skeleton from bending so a reader in 2026 can still read a page from 1907.