It's not "on the rise" exactly. It is my understanding, subject to correction, that nearly all modern Ido speakers (Idists) were originally Esperanto speakers who decided to learn Ido out of curiosity. There is, for example, and Ido language edition of Wikipedia. I suppose I should note that there is a Volapük edition of Wikipedia as well. It seems that the Volapük version has far more articles than the Ido version. Go figure.

eojeff:It's not "on the rise" exactly. It is my understanding, subject to correction, that nearly all modern Ido speakers (Idists) were originally Esperanto speakers who decided to learn Ido out of curiosity. There is, for example, and Ido language edition of Wikipedia. I suppose I should note that there is a Volapük edition of Wikipedia as well. It seems that the Volapük version has far more articles than the Ido version. Go figure.

vo.wikipedia.org has a lot of bot-created articles. use special:random a few times
and you will see that almost all articles are about cities and towns
and contain only basic "database-like" information.

eojeff:It's not "on the rise" exactly.

Well more people learning it = on the rise. And my understanding--though it is based on limited information--is that more people are learning it now than, say, five years ago. Whether or not these people come from an Esperanto background I can't say.

And Esperanto is on the rise too.

To say that a quantity has doubled sounds impressive. But you have to ask what the quantity was beforehand. One to two is a doubling, but can hardly compare with growth from 100,000 to 200,000.

The conditions which may give rise to the number of adherents of Ido, or Klingon, or Interlingua, or any of the other 999 constructed language projects are surely those which will also give a significant boost to the number of Esperantists.

Any rise in the number of Ido speakers must surely be taken as evidence that the Zeitgeist favours Esperanto.

sudanglo:And Esperanto is on the rise too.

I've actually wondered about this. Can you point me to any figures that demonstrate what's going on with Esperanto speakers?

I've always had the impression that Esperanto's heyday was back around 1900 to 1930. But I really have no idea how many speakers supposedly existed then as compared to now, and whether or not the the language today is losing ground, remaining steady, or gaining ground.

There have been varying attempts to count Esperanto speakers. None of them have been very successful, in my opinion.

If I were to make a guess, I would say that the number of fluent speakers has probably been holding roughly steady for quite some time, but we probably have had a sharp increase of people who have learned a little and never really done much with it.

You might take attendance of the Universala Kongreso as a rough metric. You can see a list of attendance statistics at Wikipedia. The post-war numbers have their ups and downs that don't necessarily correspond to numbers of speakers, with the vagaries of world events, important dates, desirability of various cities, ease of reaching the locations etc.

You could give a lot of arguments, people have more money to travel now, so they are more likely to attend, or maybe you could say that people have more opportunities to meet other Esperantists now, outside of UK, so they are less likely to attend. Maybe those things cancel each other out. Though UEA's membership has been in a steep decline, there hasn't been a steep decline in UK attendance.

That's interesting.

What do you think is contributing to the decline in UEA membership? Do you know if national organizations are taking the same hit?

One thing I can say is that the UEA's website is very confusing and disorganized. I think it could use an overhaul.

erinja:There have been varying attempts to count Esperanto speakers. None of them have been very successful, in my opinion.

It's funny, but I was thinking about this very topic earlier this week. It occurred to me that it was just about time for someone to try and start another "Hey, everyone, sign here and we'll officially count the Esperantists!" survey, and was wondering when it would actually get going (again).

(The final count, by the way, as is found by every survey I've seen so far - three or four, at least, over the last six years alone - is that there are around 5000 (give or take) Esperantists across the globe that are willing and able to sign internet surveys, and can be reliably counted on to do so. Although the internet isn't quite as new as it used to be, and people are starting to clue in to what's what, so the next survey may actually discover a lower number.)

I, actually, would expect that the number of Esperantists has jumped by a very large number since the internet really got going, purely by virtue of its greater availability.

Pre-internet, if you wanted to learn anything about Esperanto at all beyond what the Encyclopedia Britannica at the local library had to say about it, you had to make a concerted effort. There probably were no books on it at that library, or at any of your local bookstores. You had to (somehow) find a mail-order house, get their catalog (through the mail, of course), and order from that, mostly sight unseen. And you had to find that information WITHOUT the help of Google or the rest of the internet we have today. (Obviously, if you lived in a large city, back then, you were more likely to be able to find some local bookstores that might carry some titles. But if you lived in a smaller town - good luck.)

The local library might have been able to order a book or two on Esperanto, and they could help in finding out the name of mail-order sources for books, but their help would have been limited. And then, once you learned Esperanto, who would you talk to? Unless some of your friends learned it at the same time, you'd have to find some pen-pals, and you'd have to figure that one out on your own as well. Ugh.

Now, well... shoot. You hear about Esperanto, pop open that browser and you're immediately confronted with books and lessons and forums and so on and so forth - 99% of it completely free. You can read about Esperanto for days on end before even starting to dip your toes into the actual language. Once you've learned it, the internet has lots of people you can use it with, too! The wealth of free material available on-demand to absolutely anyone HAS to have had an effect on the numbers of people getting involved, if only on a purely statistical level.

Pre-internet: Horribly difficult to get information on niche subjects in any kind of timely manner, even if you knew what you wanted. Yet, there were a LOT of people worldwide who did exactly that to learn Esperanto.

Now: Insanely easy to bury yourself in information on a moments notice. How could this not have had an effect?

That's a good point, RiotNrrd.

I think if there is a problem it's that most people have simply never heard of Esperanto. The only reason I had heard of it was because I lived in a house for a while with a group of liberal activist types and someone mentioned it once. But since I've started learning it only one person out of a decent handful that I've mentioned it to even knew what it was.

So I think something needs to be done to increase awareness and let your average person know that Esperanto is even a thing!

Once you ARE aware of it though, like you say, it's insanely easy to find free, high-quality learning materials. I've been working my way through the Kurso de Esperanto, which I think is a great resource even if I had had to pay something for it.

It's interesting you mention the library, though. I have also been using "Esperanto: Learning and Using the International Language," which I was able to check out from the main library. They had about five Esperanto books.