The Iranian Esperanto community competes with the Peoples Republic of China as to where in the world the most professional Esperanto web sites are found. Career Esperantists staff government funded institutions which produce high quality magazines along with television and short wave broadcasts several times per day . For students of Farsi the magazine archive and current interactive announcement concerning Teheran’s upcoming first national Esperanto congress are worth a perusal i m o:

http://www.espero.ir/irek

It’s no secret that these two governments among others are hedging their bets in case the American empire sets and ergo English is no longer the default defacto world business language. For example, the Chinese understand that when English encounters the same fate as my ancestors’ tongue after the Treaty of Versailles 1919, the script of Mandarin will severely hinder the latter’s universality. At that time the selection question will come under the microscope vis-a-vis true consultation en route to language rights cited in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in the late 1940s

Our own Australian Esperanto Association publishes a high quality glossy magazine four times a year http://aea.esperanto.org.au/

Overarching the 100 plus national Esperanto organizations is the world centre of Esperanto and Esperantism. 20 paid staff in Rotterdam manage our most professional operation as indicated in its six language web site:
http://www.uea.org/

Thanks, Saeed! Language of origin testing in asylum applications certainly contributes to essentializing Hazaragi: in asylum cases the truth of the refugee’s story is routinely questioned and subjected to all kinds of tests, sometimes including language-of-origin testing. Language-of-origin testing has been used a lot with refugees claiming to be Hazara, both in Australia and Europe, because the assumption is that (a) other Afghans who are not as persecuted as the Hazara might try to pass themselves off as Hazara; and (b) Hazara who have lived in Iran and Pakistan, where they are supposedly safe, might claim to come directly from Afghanistan. Here is a longish quote about how the procedure works (McNamara 2005, p. 363):

The refugees are interviewed by an immigration officer through an interpreter, and the tape of the interview is sent to so-called language experts employed by private companies (as it happens, based mainly in Sweden). On the basis of the language evidence on the tape, the ‘‘experts’’ draw their inferences: they claim to be able to tell, based on features of lexical choice and pronunciation, whether the person is a Hazara from inside Afghanistan, or from Pakistan or Iran. Leaving aside for a moment the competence and the methods of the ‘‘experts’’ involved, itself a deeply problematic issue, the validity of these inferences is rendered questionable by the problematic nature of the construct underlying the test. The issue is that the boundaries of the linguistic community of speakers of the Hazara dialect do not coincide with the political border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and there is simply not the sociolinguistic information available to determine the issue accurately. Obviously, given the conditions in Afghanistan over the last 30 years, there has been no proper sociolinguistic work on the varieties concerned and their geographical distribution; and the disruption caused by the years of war, the refugee flows, the influence of teachers who are speakers of other varieties, and other factors, mean that sociolinguistically the situation is likely to be very fluid. We can thus object to the procedure, and to the quality of the inferences to which it leads, by arguing about the construct, as a group of sociolinguists, phoneticians and language testers have recently done (Eades et al., 2003).

The document mentioned at the end of the quote, “Guidelines for the use of language analysis in relation to questions of national origin in refugee cases” (Eades et al., 2003), is available here.

Volapuk and Klingon and a host of artificial or planned languages which over the centuries have sought acceptance as a universal language or as a universal auxiliary language are virtually extinct whereas Esperanto gains in strength in various ways although its membership hovers around one million decade after decade. An exception to that low statistic is the internet where Esperanto is among the top two dozen languages for Wikipedia, enjoys Google’s instantaneous translation service and has thousands of on line students we never actually see.

It’s the whole notion or principle of a universal auxiliary language, what ever might eventually be selected, that merits discussion. I mean, you wont hear me complain if English is selected as a universal auxiliary language and then eventually becomes our universal language, i.e. a single planetary language setting us free from language studies altogether except for scholars who choose to pursue linguistics

McNamara, T. (2005). 21st century shibboleth: Language tests, identity and intergroup conflict. Language Policy, 4(4), 351-370.

Probably, in the case described in the previous blog post, the emergency service was looking for an Interpreter with the right dialect…..

Interestingly, the ABS does not divide Arabic into different languages…..Why is that????