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It's always amazing to me that, when the topic is language, people tend to use their own ignorance as a primary source of evidence. “Gee, I've never personally met anyone who speaks language X (though I wouldn't have a clue what it sounds like) therefore it must be totally useless!"”

Grishnakh, please do your homework before making sweeping generalizations. Esperanto is indeed a real language, and it has quite a few native speakers. Not only native speakers, but second and third-generation native speakers.

As to usefulness in meeting people: in just a few years of speaking Esperanto I've conversed with new friends from Japan, Finland, Uzbekistan, Quebec, Australia, Iran, mainland China, England, Macedonia, Mexico, Switzerland, Poland, Brazil, Vietnam, the Netherlands... and yes, even Texas!

What's cool is that with Esperanto we're all able to interact with one another on a fair and reasonably equitable basis, and nobody has to feel awkward stumbling over the arcane and illogical details of someone else's national language. That's something neither Gaelic, Romansh, Icelandic, nor even English can do.

Oh, and then there's the wonderful Pasporta Servo , which lets me stay in more than 80 countries for free! Kick-ass!

The Esperanto language community has something called "Pasporta Servo" (English wikipedia article here).

It always seemed to me that this would be a fun way to travel. You can go to foreign countries, get a place to crash, an interesting host, and not feel like a clod for only speaking English. I guess I like the idea of traveling and meeting people half-way.

Plus, it's a way to expand your mind and make a statement for peace and global understanding by learning esperanto (as if you needed a reason!) :-)

Hmm... that reminds me, I'm behind on my language lessons at lernu.

It's simply never going to happen.

It already has happened. There's over a million speakers around the world. While that does mean that I'm not likely to just run into someone on the street who speaks it (like I did in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), but when I travel to a new city, I can almost always contact someone there who will show me the city or give me a place to stay for the night. I did this countless times travelling through Brazil and Europe using the Pasporta Servo. So, it is already useful, just not yet in international commerce.

I'm a full-time volunteer for the World Esperanto Youth Organization in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. As of July 2002, I've been speaking Esperanto as my primary language travelling for six months through Brazil and Europe and then volunteering here starting in January 2003. I'm also a board member of Esperanto@Internet which has done projects like lernu! which is one of the best free language teaching environments online as well as the founder of the Wikipedia in Esperanto which has over 8,000 encyclopedia articles after two years of work by an international team from over 25 countries and is now the 9th largest language in the project.

As for a high-rate of IT Esperanto speakers, I think a lot of it comes from the fact that we aren't put off by the word artificial because we're familiar with fields of study like artificial intelligence. Also, people working in IT are more likely to like the idea of a "logical language" even though Esperanto isn't really logically per se since no living language can ever be completely logical. Esperanto was initiated out of the need for a just international language and started just like an Open Source Project. So, another reason that many Esperanto speakers are techies is simply because we tend to use the Internet more than other people.

Professor Culbert of the University of Washington did a worldwide survey of Esperanto speakers and found there to be 1.6 million speakers at Foreign Service Level 3, so I generally just say there's more than a million. I'm a full-time volunteer at the World Esperanto Youth Organization, so I use Esperanto everyday as my working language, because it's our only common language here. Yes, believe it or not, not everyone can speak English here.

Well, it's hugely useful on the net, groups like soc.culture.esperanto and sites like gxangalo.com let you interact with users who do not speak English, which can give you a perspective on the world. There are plenty of real audio feeds of shortwave Esperanto radio broadcasts as well.

For practical uses in the real world, it doesn't get much more useful than the Pasporta Servo, a service of Esperanto-speakers who volunteer to welcome travellers from other countries in their homes--in other words, learn to speak Esperanto and you can travel around the world and get FREE room and board! (There are homepages around with the stories of people who've actually gone around the world like this, although I don't have the links handy.) Not only that, but when you visit a country you get to see how the people actually live, and to talk about life there with ordinary people, instead of getting a touristy hotel-centred kind of experience.

This FAQ may answer some of your other questions.

I found this article very interesting in fact. Klingon is indeed a language with a fully developed grammar and a vocabulary big enough to communicate in it. Just because it's an invented language (a conlang), that doesn't need to mean you couldn't talk to people in it; Esperanto is the best example. And when there are native Esperanto speakers, why shouldn't there be some people fluent in Klingon?

Speaking of Esperanto, a few weeks ago, the World Esperanto Youth Organisation (TEJO) asked me to translate their website into Klingon and that translation is now available at www.tejo.org together with 23 other languages.
So, at least a volunteer Esperanto-Klingon translator has been needed, hehe... :D

It has nothing to do with Spanish.