VERBAVIA

How many people speak Esperanto? The real numbers

Nobody knows exactly how many people speak Esperanto, because no country has it as a national language and nobody has ever counted its speakers worldwide. The serious estimates run from about 60,000, the number of people a 2017 statistical model says would tick “Esperanto” on a census form, to about 2 million, a figure first rounded up in 1988 and still repeated today. The gap is mostly about what “speak” means. Roughly 1,000 people grew up with Esperanto as a native language, perhaps 10,000 speak it fluently, tens of thousands can hold a conversation, and millions have learned some at one time or another.

Updated 25 October 2026 · 14 min read

Where the estimates differ

Every number you will see quoted goes back to one of these. They disagree because they count different things, so the third column matters more than the first.

EstimateWho, and whenWhat was countedHow it was arrived at
1,000Ethnologue (online entry archived in 2019), citing Corsetti and colleagues, 2004People who learned Esperanto from birthA study of children raised in Esperanto-speaking families
About 10,000Jouko Lindstedt, University of Helsinki, 1996Fluent speakersAn order-of-magnitude scheme, which Lindstedt himself called very imprecise
63,000 (30,000 to 180,000)Svend Vendelbo Nielsen, December 2016, reported by Libera Folio in February 2017People who would say on a census that they speak EsperantoA statistical model of membership and website figures, scaled to four national censuses
About 100,000Lindstedt, 1996People who can actively use itSame scheme
About 380,000Ivo Lapenna of the Universal Esperanto Association (UEA), 1953“Persons who speak the International Language”Not stated; UEA then represented 16,861 organised Esperantists
1 to 2 millionSidney Culbert, University of Washington, in the World Almanac; 1 million from about 1956, rounded up to 2 million in 1988Speakers meeting Culbert’s own criteriaSampling surveys he carried out in person, beginning in France in 1958 and 1959
About 2 millionAmri Wandel, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2015Internet users with some knowledge of Esperanto320,000 Facebook users listing Esperanto, multiplied by a series of assumptions
2,000,000 second-language speakersEthnologue, 16th edition, 2009Second-language speakersCited to a 1999 source, “Wiesenfeld 1999”
2,001,000 usersEthnologue, online entry archived in 20191,000 native plus 2,000,000 second-language usersThe second-language figure now cited to Wandel 2015
1 million / 10 millionLindstedt, 1996People who understand a lot passively / who have studied it at some timeSame scheme

Three things stand out. Only Culbert and Nielsen used a method that could, in principle, be repeated and checked. The figure of 2 million has survived by being re-sourced: Culbert’s rounding, then a 1999 citation, then Wandel’s Facebook arithmetic. And the low and high ends are not really in conflict. Nielsen counted people who would claim the language on a form. Culbert and Wandel counted something closer to anyone who knows a fair amount of it.

Where the 2 million figure comes from

Sidney Culbert was a psychology professor at the University of Washington who supplied the table of the world’s principal languages to the World Almanac for many years. In a 1989 letter to the American Esperantist David Wolff, he set out his method. His first sampling survey was in France in 1958 and 1959. He picked 14 of France’s 98 administrative departments at random, interviewed active Esperantists in each, asked them how many speakers there were, and then tried to find every one, following up every lead. In the two departments he searched most thoroughly, staying about a month in each, he found about twice as many speakers as the people he had interviewed knew of. Similar surveys followed in Switzerland, Austria, Italy and elsewhere, and he extended what he learned to other countries.

On that basis, he wrote, the number of speakers passed one million around 1956, and “not until 1988” did he feel justified in rounding his estimate up to two million rather than down to one million. He was frank about the error: the true figure might be “no more than one million”, or already more than two. In a 1969 letter he dismissed the much larger figures then in circulation, 8 million and 15 million, tracing each to people who had said that many had some acquaintance with the language, or had studied it at some time.

Two cautions. First, the definition. Culbert’s letters speak only of his “criteria of speaker of Esperanto”. The often-repeated detail that he counted people at the US Foreign Service’s “Level 3”, professional working proficiency, appears in a 2003 letter by Wolff, not in any of Culbert’s own letters that Wolff published. Second, the letters give no results country by country, so there is no way to check how a few European surveys became a worldwide total. Culbert died in 2003.

Amri Wandel set out to update the figure in a 2015 paper in Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems. His starting point was Facebook, where 320,000 users listed Esperanto among their languages at the end of 2014. He then assumed that only half of those claims were reliable, that only a third of real speakers on Facebook had bothered to list it, that Facebook users were about a tenth of the world’s population, and that the result should be applied only to the 40% of people then online. The arithmetic gives 1,920,000. Each of those adjustments is an assumption rather than a measurement, and changing any one of them moves the answer in proportion. Wandel noted his own warning sign: 250,000 Facebook users claimed to speak Klingon.

Ethnologue has printed 2 million second-language speakers since at least its 2009 edition, cited then to a 1999 source and, by 2019, to Wandel. Its current entry is behind a paywall. The free page, checked on 25 October 2026, places the Esperanto community in its band of 10,000 to 1 million.

The low estimate: 63,000

In December 2016, Svend Vendelbo Nielsen, then a doctoral student in bioinformatics at Aarhus University, built a model from membership numbers: UEA’s individual members by country, registered users of the learning sites lernu! and Edukado, the online directory esperantujo.directory, hosts on Pasporta Servo, and the size of national Esperanto associations. That gave each country a relative density of speakers. He then turned those relative figures into head counts using the four countries whose censuses ask about Esperanto and where the figures fitted his model: Lithuania, Estonia, Russia and New Zealand.

The result was 62,984 people worldwide who would say on a census that they speak Esperanto, with a recommended range of 31,460 to 183,420. He left Hungary out of the scaling, because its census found four times as many speakers as its membership figures predicted, which he put down to the many Hungarians who learned Esperanto at school and never joined an organisation. Including Hungary would have raised the total to about 103,000.

The statistician Sten Johansson, asked by Libera Folio, pointed out that the whole model rests on a few censuses being reliable and on the ratio of members to speakers being the same everywhere, both very uncertain. He still judged it more realistic than the claims of many millions. Nielsen did not try to measure how well his census-claimers speak, so “63,000” means people who would say yes on a form, not 63,000 fluent speakers.

Native speakers

People who grow up speaking Esperanto, called denaskuloj (“from-birth people”), are usually the children of couples who met through the language, sometimes with no other language in common. Renato Corsetti counted about 350 documented Esperanto-speaking families in 1996, and found that in almost all of them it was the father who spoke Esperanto to the children. Ethnologue’s figure of 1,000 first-language users cites a 2004 study by Corsetti and colleagues.

Lindstedt, who studies native Esperanto, put it at around 1,000 in 1996 and explained what that meant: if you estimate the number in hundreds you may be too low, but there are not many thousands of them. Self-reported data agrees. In 2017 the app Amikumu had 4,354 Esperanto users, of whom 45 described themselves as native speakers.

The best-known person raised with the language is the financier George Soros. The New York Times reported in 2010 that he grew up in Budapest in the 1930s and 1940s in a home where Esperanto was spoken; his father, Tivadar Soros, helped found the Esperanto literary magazine Literatura Mondo. Lists of native speakers often include him, though Wikipedia’s own list leaves him off on the grounds that the claim is disputed.

Fluently, natively, or “learned some”

The three questions people search for have three different answers, and only one of them is anywhere near measured.

How wellMeaning hereBest available figureHow solid
NativelyLearned from birth, usually alongside another languageAbout 1,000A rough count of known families
FluentlyTalks and follows talk without effortAbout 10,000A guess, Lindstedt 1996
Can use itWould claim it on a census30,000 to 180,000 (about 63,000)Modelled from censuses, Nielsen 2016
Knows someUnderstands a good deal, or studied it once1 to 2 million, or moreCulbert’s surveys; Wandel’s Facebook arithmetic; Lindstedt’s “one million” and “ten million”

Census counts: the only official figures

A handful of countries ask about every language a person speaks, and in these Esperanto can be written in. These are self-reported figures, with no test of ability.

CountryCensusPeople reporting Esperanto
Hungary19902,083
Hungary20014,575
Hungary20118,397
Hungary20224,216
Lithuania2011604
Estonia2011209
Russia2010992
New Zealand2006123
New Zealand2013108

The Hungarian figures are from the statistics office’s own database. The rest are as reported by Libera Folio, the head of the Russian Esperanto Union and the Esperanto Wikipedia’s collection of census results.

Hungary is the exception, with far more speakers per head than anywhere else on record. It also shows how much a census figure can swing. The number doubled between 2001 and 2011 and halved again by 2022. The age breakdown suggests why: the swing is carried by one generation. In 2011, 3,795 of the 8,397 were aged 30 to 39. Eleven years later the same generation, now 40 to 49, numbered 1,596. In 2011, 6,846 of the speakers, about four in five, had completed tertiary education. Some people who once learned the language evidently stopped listing it, which is a reminder that a census counts what people choose to claim.

Russia’s 992 is about 7 per million people. When the Russian Esperanto Union asked UNESCO’s Russian commission to back an international Esperanto day, the commission declined, citing about 1,000 speakers in the country.

Esperanto speakers by country

Outside the census countries, no figures exist that count people directly. Nielsen’s model is the only attempt at a full breakdown, and it inherits the model’s weakness: a country where people speak Esperanto without joining anything is undercounted, as Hungary showed. With that caveat, its largest national totals in December 2016 were:

CountryModelled speakersPer million people
Brazilabout 7,30037
Franceabout 6,900104
United Statesabout 5,80018
Germanyabout 3,90048
Russiaabout 2,30016
Polandabout 2,20058
Spainabout 2,20047

By density the leaders were tiny Andorra, at about 620 per million, and Lithuania at about 250. Hungary’s census figure of 8,397 would put it above Brazil, against about 2,000 in the model.

What the Esperanto movement itself counts

Organisations count members, not speakers, and many speakers never join anything, but the trends are real.

UEA members. UEA counts individual members separately from the people who belong through its national associations. Individual membership peaked at 8,071 in 1991 and was 5,501 in 2015. It fell to 4,162 in 2019, its lowest since the Second World War, then rose to 4,293 in 2020 and 4,424 in 2021, almost all of the rise among under-35s. By 2024 it was about 4,700, as charted by Libera Folio. Counting members of the national associations as well, UEA had about 43,600 in 1987 and about 13,000 at the end of 2016.

The World Congress. The Universala Kongreso is the movement’s yearly gathering. Its record is the 1987 centenary congress in Warsaw, with nearly 6,000 participants. The 100th congress, in Lille in 2015, had 2,698. Recent ones: 1,319 in Turin in 2023, 854 in Arusha, Tanzania, the first in Africa, in 2024, 1,132 in Brno in 2025, and 1,138 in Graz in 2026.

Pasporta Servo, the hosting network in which Esperanto speakers put up travellers for free, had more than 2,000 hosts in over 100 countries in 2021. In 2023 it listed more than 2,300, but its maintainer said many entries were out of date, and only 900 to 1,400 users logged in during a year.

Learners are not speakers. Duolingo’s Esperanto course for English speakers, launched in May 2015, had 402,000 people start in its first year. By 27 May 2017 the English and Spanish courses together had passed a million starts. Lu Wunsch-Rolshoven, who worked with the course team, put the number who had finished at 30,000 to 50,000, at least twice UEA’s total membership at the time. In March 2023 Duolingo’s site showed 316,000 active learners on the English course, while the courses for Spanish, French and Portuguese speakers were closed to newcomers. The learning site lernu! reported 150,000 registered users in 2013. Every one of these counts people who started, not people who can now speak.

How do you count a language with no homeland?

Most languages are counted from censuses and surveys of the places where they are spoken. Esperanto is spoken thinly everywhere and is the main language nowhere. Only a few census forms leave room for it, and organisations see only the people who join. Each method therefore picks up a different slice: censuses catch the people who bother to write it in, membership lists the people who join, websites anyone who once signed up. Culbert tried the only direct approach, going out and finding speakers, and even he could not do it for more than a few countries.

What all of the methods agree on is the shape. Esperanto has a small core of fluent and native speakers, a wider ring of people who use it now and then, and a very large ring who learned some once. That is also why it is unlike the natural languages ranked by Ethnologue, almost all of whose speakers live in particular places, and why it never appears in lists of the world’s biggest languages.

So how many people speak Esperanto?

Whichever number you take, it is enough to find people to talk to. UEA had members in more than 100 countries, and over a thousand people still travel to its congress every year. The Esperanto course starts at the first lesson and runs to C2.

What it takes to join them is weighed up in how long it takes to learn Esperanto and is Esperanto hard to learn, and how Esperanto’s numbers compare with the giants is in the most spoken languages in the world.

Sources

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