Stela is one of a few thousand native speakers of Esperanto, a constructed international auxiliary language, or auxlang, created by L.L. Zamenhoff in 1887. There over a million Esperantists worldwide. Esperanto was a precursor to Ido, another auxlang.

This video of Stela Besenyei-Merger was recorded remotely due to COVID-19 by Gian Pablo Antonetti; she was in Budapest, Hungary, and he was near Scranton, Pennsylvania. Esperanto is a constructed international auxiliary language (auxlang), which is a variety of constructed languages (conlangs) that are intended for use in international communication. Esperanto was created by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, and has since spread around the world as an option for communication with people who choose to learn the language – people who do so are known as Esperantists. Estimates range greatly due to the fact that anyone can start to learn the language and pick it up or put it down without consequence, but there is anywhere from 60,000 to 2,000,000 people who speak the language worldwide.

Stela is a rarity in the Esperanto community because she is a native speaker of the language – there are less than 2,000 native speakers of Esperanto worldwide. She blogs about her experiences as a native speaker at https://stelachiamnurkritikas.wordpress.com/, and she has a podcast at https://www.laboren.org/.

This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. To download a copy, please contact hello@wikitongues.org.