erinja:Ladino has its roots in a variety of language, but as you say, it developed its own literature, and it developed as a language past being simply "Spanish with Hebrew words mixed in".

I think you are confusing Ladino with Ladin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladin) which is what Nebuloso was talking about (being Austrian he certainly heard about it as I did by living in Veneto) since it is a Rhaeto-Romance language. On the contrary I never heard about what in English is called Ladino. Ladin is named Ladino in Italian (Ladino is named "lingua giudeo-spagnola") and it took me a while to distinguish the two.

The problem is that he supposed in his estimation that the speakers were divided evenly. I don't honestly believe that Cologne has an even share of Esperanto speakers (and I don't think that Sikosek thought so either, based on what I remember reading in his book.) Think of the hundreds, thousands of cities that have no speakers whatsoever. Cologne with its 30 speakers no doubt has more speakers than most cities in the world, and therefore higher than an even proportion of speakers. Cologne currently has approximately a million residents. The Boston metropolitan area (not just the city, but also the suburbs) has about 4 million inhabitants. When I was living in Boston, there weren't 30 speakers in the entire metropolitan area. Probably more like 10, and Boston was considered a hotbed of Esperanto activity on the US east coast, too. There probably aren't 30 speakers in the entire state of Massachusetts (population ~6 million).

I personally think that 100,000 E-o speakers is a number closer to the mark (though this all depends on how you define a speaker).

Boston might give us a more conservative estimate, but I wonder what would happen if we went East - say to Warsaw. This has 1.7 million inhabitants. I would like to kow how many Esperantists there are in Warsaw; I suspect there could be hundreds. Given that the UEA has 30,000 members, 100,000 might be an underestimate for the number of speakers worldwide.

My grandfather was of sefardí origin and was raised speaking ladino. He finally became a communist… but that’s another story. The fact is that I had the chance to hear some ladino haquetía spoken by some of his relatives from Morocco, and it sounded like old fashioned Spanish to me. It had many words from Arabic and Hebrew but it was basically Spanish. Even those strange words are conjugated the Spanish way, so any Spanish speaker could “fill” the missing words or guess the meaning. The most difficult part of understanding haquetía is the pronunciation and the intonation: quite different to modern Spanish.

Miland:Given that the UEA has 30,000 members, 100,000 might be an underestimate for the number of speakers worldwide.

Where does this number come from? According to this year's UEA Jarlibro, there are around 4000 members.

I seriously doubt there are 100.000 fluent Esperanto speakers all over around the world. I don’t know what the official statistics are, but unless there are 95.000 Internet phobic esperantists, I guess the number of fluent esperantists won’t be over 5000… or less. Am I being pessimist? I hope so!

Well, in my mind, the interesting question isn't how many fluent esperanto speakers are there, the question is, how many people are there that know esperanto well enough to communicate with it? I read and write Esperanto very well, but I haven't had enough opportunities to learn how to speak it. I could probably speak it haltingly, make myself understood, and understand someone who was trying to communicate with me...but normal speech is still too fast for me to get more than just the gist of what's being said.

So, I'm not fluent by a longshot. However, i'm still an Esperantist. I've corresponded over the internet with many people in Esperanto on a wide range of topics (including several who don't speak My native tongue). I read news articles in Eo from around the world (about things seldom reported on in U.S. newspapers) almost every day.

I also have no doubt that if I could get immersed in an Esperanto environment for a couple of weeks, my speaking/listening comprehension skills would skyrocket.

How many people are FLUENT in esperanto? It's impossible to say...certainly there are more than a few thousand....but are there 5000? 10,000? 50,000? It's impossible to say.

On the other hand, how many people know esperanto well enough to use it? My guess is that that number is quite higher. Is it the oft quoted number of 2,000,000? Maybe, probably not. But my feeling is that it's at least 100,000 and probably more.

Just for fun I searched the Esperanto Google for the word "lingvo" (a word I randomly picked). There were over 2.7 million pages returned. And of those pages, a quick informal survey suggests that more than half of them are in esperanto (perusing through several pages at random).

I really doubt that only 5,000 people wrote over a million web pages in Esperanto (and those are just the ones with the word lingvo written in them).

Right now there are over 85,000 articles in the Esperanto Wikipedia. I've not contributed any yet, have you? Do you personally know anyone who has? (You might but I don't) Somebody has to be writing all those articles though. That's more than some wikipedias of languages with millions of speakers.

Mendacapote:I seriously doubt there are 100.000 fluent Esperanto speakers all over around the world. I don’t know what the official statistics are, but unless there are 95.000 Internet phobic esperantists, I guess the number of fluent esperantists won’t be over 5000… or less. Am I being pessimist? I hope so!

Awake:
I don’t dare to call myself esperantist and I read and write in Esperanto as well as you do. Would you call “English speaker” to someone who only reads and writes your language? By the other hand, you wouldn’t have any doubts about any illiterate native English speaker… or would you? From my point of view being an esperantist implies speaking the language… preferably well.

awake:Just for fun I searched the Esperanto Google for the word "lingvo" (a word I randomly picked). There were over 2.7 million pages returned. And of those pages, a quick informal survey suggests that more than half of them are in esperanto

I did a Google search on "+kaj +estas +de +la" (the +'s indicate that each term MUST be in each page of the returned results). I figure any eo page that doesn't contain all of those words is too tiny to count anyways. The search brings back 1,640,000 pages (all of which, on the first results page, were in esperanto). That sounds to me like a pretty good estimate of the total number of pages in eo.

American's are VERY forgiving with people who try to speak English. Fluency is a misnomer. True fluency I think is almost impossible to achieve unless you are a native. Can you understand plant and tree names in English? How about Chemical names? How about puns and plays on words? Then to me you're not fluent. But if you can discuss a mere 60% of any topic I choose to dicuss, then that's good enough for most Americans. And it's good enough for me.
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