🚀 go-pugleaf

|> TITLE: Dialect variation in Esperanto
|> 
|> (Sorry to change topic, but I've got an interesting question)
|> 
|> Q: is there any?
|> If there, could you please tell us something about it?
|> If there isn't, how is it prevented or why doesn't it occur?

The main-stream important Esperanto literature is read internationally, and the
most influential speakers travel a lot. This prevents the literary language
from splitting up into national dialects. There is however a lot of writing in
Esperanto that is read mostly in one area (most national Esperanto
organisations have a newsletter in Esperanto, hold their committee meetings in
Esperanto, etc), and this writing does often show national characteristics.
The difference are however not large enough or consistent enough to merit
the title "dialect". They are smaller than the differences between American
and English, or between Austrian and German (and I mean the *written*
languages in both cases).

Occasionally one can notice a feature that is characteristic not of a particular
area but of a particular sub-movement. I can't at the moment produce an example,
but I think that a careful analysis would show certain statistical differences
between the language of SAT Esperantists and UEA Esperantists. (UEA is the
neutral international movement; SAT represents the workers' movement, though
it switched from socialism to a kind of anarchism a long time ago.)

As for the spoken language: Some speakers have a strong national accent,
and some speak in such a way that no one could guess where they come from.
Ability to learn a good pronunciation seems fairly independent of the ability
to actually learn a language, in my experience.

In case anyone wants a concrete example of a national characteristic in
Esperanto I might mention two features that I identified last night while
I was flicking through some Esperanto magazines from Vietnam:

The expression "ia nombro de", literally "some quantity of", but used
apparently to mean rather a lot.

The word "premsekvi", literally "push-follow", apparently meaning something
like "follow closely" or "chase".

Neither of those expressions is in any way incorrect, but I have never
seen them used with such frequency in any other Esperanto literature. Of
course it may well be possible to trace both of these expressions back to
one influential dictionary or writer/translater. The Esperanto movement in
Vietnam is probably rather small and centralised compared with the European
movement(s).

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Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS                  Edmund.Grimley-Evans@cl.cam.ac.uk
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