| Esperanto has many many more speakers! (People joke about Klingon having more but it's not true.) Really accurate numbers are hard to come by but even based on estimates, it's no contest: "Arika Okrent guessed in her book In the Land of Invented Languages that there might be 20–30 fluent [Klingon] speakers."[1] "In 2009 Lu Wunsch-Rolshoven used 2001 year census data from Hungary and Lithuania as a base for an estimate, resulting in approximately 160,000 to 300,000 to speak [Esperanto] actively or fluently throughout the world, with about 80,000 to 150,000 of these being in the European Union."[2] In fact, Klingon has fewer total speakers than Esperanto has native
speakers: "As of 1996, there were 350 or so attested cases of families with native Esperanto speakers. Estimates from associations indicate that there are currently around 1,000 Esperanto-speaking families, involving perhaps 2,000 children. In all known cases, speakers are natively bilingual, or multilingual, raised in both Esperanto and either the local national language or the native language of their parents."[3] (Also Esperanto is much easier than Klingon, has much more material to read, and is spoken by a wider variety of people than just science fiction fans, though there are plenty of those too.) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language#Speakers [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Number_of_speakers [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Esperanto_speakers EDIT: The "160,000 to 300,000" quote was from an older version of the Wikipedia page (I based this comment on an old comment of mine). The current version has various estimates, including Lindstedt's ballpark figures of "10,000 speak it fluently" and "100,000 can use it actively". |