How many people speak Esperanto?

When searching for “How many people speak Esperanto?”, you will often find estimates of “around 2 million speakers worldwide”.  This is a very old number and is certainly no longer accurate in 2023.

This number has been circulating the internet as the official estimate of the number of Esperantists for many years, going back to at least 2016 when this author began learning Esperanto.

In a tweet from January 2018, DuoLingo (a popular language learning application) announced: “Over 1 million people are learning Esperanto on Duolingo!”

Two years after this explosion in new language learners, our world would go through a challenging period of lockdowns in many countries.  During this time, according to the DuoLingo blog: “New users on Duolingo doubled over the month of March, with the biggest surge coming the week of March 16, after the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic.”

It’s reasonable to assume that included in the doubling of new users would be many new Esperanto learners as well.

In an effort to attempt a corrected, modern number of Esperanto speakers around the world, we have create a single-question poll.

If you speak Esperanto on any level, please take a brief moment to complete our poll and contribute to the new count of Esperantists.

Thank you so much!