Portland Esperantists on OPB

Think Out Loud guest host Geoff Norcross with Izaak, Alaine, and Bruce.

On 11 August, 2026, three members of the Esperanto Society of Portland recorded a segment for Oregon Public Broadcasting's daily talk show, Think Out Loud. It aired the next day at noon. Alaine Warfield, Dr. Bruce Sherwood and I sat down with Geoff Norcross, who was filling in for Dave Miller as host.

I went in braced for the question every Esperantist learns to expect, the one about a dead language and a failed project. It never arrived. Norcross opened by asking the three of us to talk to each other in Esperanto so that listeners could hear the language before hearing about it, and then correctly guessed what we had said. What surprised me over the next twenty minutes was how much he wanted to know. He asked what a native speaker of a language with no country actually is, what online voice chats had changed, how many speakers there are, and whether the idea of a universal second language still holds.

He did put the hard version of the question. With perhaps 100,000 to 2 million speakers among some 7 billion people, what is the point? The answer was easy. The point is the people, including the ones I have talked with who do not speak a word of English.

Bruce answered it another way, with an evening in Tehran arranged out of a directory of Esperantists, and a party in Berlin after the wall came down, among people who had grown up in the East. Alaine described the physics professor at the University of Illinois who had raised his own children in Esperanto forty years ago, and the coincidence at a conference in North Carolina that led her to Bruce, who by then was living a few miles away from her in Portland.

Going in as a group of three was the right decision. One speaker on the radio sounds like a hobbyist. Three people who found the language by different routes, and who now see each other regularly, sound like what we are.

The segment is at opb.org. The Society meets once a month on Saturdays, and the details are at esperantopdx.org. The 45th annual Northwest Regional Esperanto Conference is in Seattle next month. More detail here.