ESF Mission

We aim to develop and support excellence in scholarship, education, and interlingual communication.

Our priorities and values are shaped through engagement with the worldwide community of Esperanto speakers, as well as with researchers, educators and activists in many language-related fields.

ESF Priorities

ESF works to further the understanding and practice of linguistic justice in a multicultural world, with a focus on three priority areas: ResearchConservation and Education.

ESF supports its priorities through grants and awards.

Research

ESF works to encourage and facilitate scholarship and public discourse on interlingual communication and interlinguistics, linguistic justice, language policy and planning, and the phenomenon of Esperanto.

Specifically, ESF priorities are to:

  • Commission and support research in these areas, especially research that is multidisciplinary, transnational and/or innovative in its approach;
  • Strengthen existing journals and book series:Language Problems and Language Planning (LPLP); Esperantologio / Esperanto Studies; sponsored issues, review articles, and colloquia; publication series (e.g. Studies in World Language Problems); commissioned volumes;
  • Improve research tools in the above areas, including text and speech corpora; computational tools; bibliographies and databases;
  • Strengthen ties to other organisations, including networking, partnerships and the development of joint projects with research institutes and universities;
  • Improve the visibility of interlingual research through sponsored awards and external conferences, and by encouraging research dissemination, policy formulation, and public debate on interlingual policy issues.

Conservation

ESF works with libraries, organizations and individuals to preserve valuable documents and artifacts that may provide insight into the rich history of the phenomenon of Esperanto and the broader field of interlinguistics.

Specifically, ESF priorities are to:

  • Assist libraries to acquire and preserve documents and printed materials relating to Esperanto and interlinguistics;
  • Work to assure that these materials are available to researchers;
  • Identify materials that merit being conserved and libraries able to acquire them;
  • Encourage collaboration on digital libraries and catalogs.

Education

ESF encourages the study and teaching of Esperanto and interlinguistics at the university level by offering support for residential and online courses. In addition, it supports the creation and maintenance of online educational resources that align with the foundation’s priorities.

As the steward of NASK (the North American Summer Esperanto Workshop), ESF supports the teaching of Esperanto literature, history and culture through the medium of Esperanto, and encourages the development of best practice language immersion teaching methods. This aspect of our work is focused on North America.

Specifically, ESF priorities are to:

  • Support course and website developers in the above areas;
  • Encourage and support universities to offer courses in interlinguistics and Esperanto;
  • Raise awareness of the educational benefits and opportunities of teaching and learning in the above areas;
  • Support students, especially at the postgraduate level, seeking internships or voluntary experience in these areas.

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