La construcción de la neutralidad en los discursos sobre el esperanto a principios del siglo XX: las posiciones de la Asociación Internacional de Academias Científicas y del movimiento anarquista internacional

• Published in: Revista de llengua i dret no. 80; p. 81
• Main Author: di Stefano, Mariana
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Barcelona Escola d'Administracio Publica de Catalunya 01-12-2023
• Subjects: 20th century; Academic discourse; Anarchism; Argumentation; Esperanto; History of linguistics; Language ideologies; Neutrality; Political factors; Scientific technical language; Sociolinguistics; Syntactic movement
• DOI: 10.58992/rld.i80.2023.4012
• EISSN: 0212-5056

The study uses a glottopolitical approach to analyse the construction of the “neutrality” characteristic attributed to Esperanto, in two discursive communities at the beginning of the 20th century, as part of their linguistic ideologies. After identifying various topics it studies, on the one hand, the 1917 Compte rendu des traveaux du Comité, drafted by L. Couturat and L. Leau as a report for the first International Association of Scientific Societies, created in 1900, to support its choice of scientific language. On the other hand, it analyses speeches from the International Anarchist Congress (Amsterdam, 1907), in which a motion proposed adopting this language for the movement, and later articles (1917) on the subject of the Argentinian anarchist newspaper La Protesta, in which the Esperanto libertarian ideology was already consolidated. The analysis discloses very different arguments and goals in these two groups, although there are also similarities, the most significant being the movement, in both groups, toward the topic of universality, which places language in a timelessness outside space, guaranteeing univocal signs.