Our town: Invented language sparks international conversation

As a member and manager of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra chorus for the last 21 years, Jeff Baxter has developed a broad knowledge of languages.

“One of my jobs is teaching the pronunciation of anything we sing in a foreign language,” said Baxter, who lives in Midtown. “So through music, I’ve learned German, Italian, French, Spanish, Latin - even Finnish.”

So adding Esperanto to his list wasn’t difficult, said Baxter, who has been studying the international language for the last three years. His fluency has increased by joining the Esperanto Society of Metro Atlanta, a community group devoted to learning and spreading the invented language. At monthly meetings held near Decatur, members and guests from around the state are encouraged to learn more about Esperanto, and to converse in it, if they’re comfortable.

Local enthusiasm for the learning and speaking Esperanto seems to ebb and flow, said Randy Dean, a Decaturite who leads the local group. When he first moved to the area 16 years ago, there wasn’t an organized group, so he put out some feelers and started hosting meetings. For the last nine years, Dean has kept up a tradition of monthly meetings at the Athens Pizza shop near Decatur.

“Interest rises and falls, so at times we have a lot of members, then it drops off,” said Dean. “We have a core of about six people, but we’ve also had 25 people show up. We usually draw hobby linguists, which I am, and a lot of computer geeks who have learned the language on the Internet.”

The speakers linger over lunch and often wind up at Dean’s nearby apartment, where he keeps an Esperanto library. He often hosts get-togethers where participants can play games or watch movies in Esperanto, a language Dean taught himself as a teenager 30 years ago.

“I bought a book about Esperanto for a quarter, but I couldn’t read it,” he recalled. “Then in college, I came across an Esperanto dictionary, and I learned it from there. The fact that it was so easy really impressed me. But it was constructed to be simple to learn. There are not a lot of grammatical exceptions, and most of the vocabulary comes from Greek and Latin roots.”

The Atlanta club is part of a national and international Esperanto organization that recently held a worldwide conference in Iceland. Both Dean and Baxter were among the 1,000 attendees from 55 countries.

“In most tourist areas, I can speak English, but then the nonnative speaker is at a disadvantage,” said Dean. “But if we’re speaking Esperanto, neither of us has a natural advantage. I can travel around the world speaking it.”

Baxter was delighted that the Iceland conference gave him the chance to speak Esperanto with people who knew no English.

“It was the first time I met people from around the world who could chat, and no one had an advantage,” he said. “It was fascinating.”

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