Becoming an Esperantist is similar to joining some kind of an exclusive club or fraternal society for which there is an "initiation right" that holds a lot of people out--you have to learn the language. Becoming a speaker of any language (by birth or by acquisition) automatically entails becoming part of a society from which you would otherwise have been excluded. Learning the language gives you a tie or a connection to every other member of that society--a connection that otherwise would not have been there. This is especially true of the Esperanto community because people learn Esperanto specifically in order to be able to connect across language barriers. This phenomenon is not so obvious when one's native language has a broad speaker base, but if you consider minority languages, it becomes much more apparent that learning a language connects you--at least on some level--to everybody else who uses that language.