The wiki cites sources, as it should, giving us two. The first is Ethnologue, a group which studies all languages, and which contrarily makes no claim towards there being any native speakers of Esperanto. Huh.
The second wiki source listed, though, is an article on the online language school Babbel's website called What Is Esperanto, And Who Speaks It? The article text is as you'd expect from the headline, and includes this quote: "And even though Esperanto was made to be an auxiliary language, there is a cohort of about 1,000 people who speak Esperanto as their first language, a few of whom were interviewed in the video above." The 'video above' is six minutes of casual interviews with ten-ish people entirely in Esperanto (and with no subtitles, in any language), so whether these people are native speakers and if so, how they came to be, is not possible for me to determine.
The next line of the Babbel article claims, "The most famous native speaker is Hungarian-American billionaire philanthropist George Soros, whose father was a devotee of the language." George Soros is a Jewish banker, liberal political donor, and conspiracy magnet, but he is also the son of Tivador Soros, an Esperanto author who changed his family name from Schwartz to Soros supposedly because of the Esperanto meaning will soar (or maybe he just was a fan of palindromes). But the Soros family was very much living in Hungary, and even if Tivador did teach his children Esperanto at a young age, surely they must have primarily used Hungarian in their day-to-day life, right?
This 2016 article from Tablet with a title referencing George Soros and Esperanto claims that while the invented language has an active and thriving community, it has no native speakers: "It’s probably better to spend your time learning Lithuanian or Tamil, which, unlike Esperanto, stand at the center of a living culture, with native speakers and a literary tradition." And later, "Esperanto was never supposed to be a native tongue, but rather an adaptable second language that would form a bridge between foreign speakers." But what about George Soros? Here, the article contradicts itself: "One currently world-famous Jew is that rarest of birds, a denaskulo (native speaker of Esperanto): George Soros." That and a few sentences following is his only mention in the article, although it does go on to mention an "Esperantist refuge called Bona Espero in rural Brazil." There, presumably, children could be raised speaking Esperanto natively... unless "the children prefer to speak Portuguese rather than Esperanto." [Aside: the article's worth a read for its detailing of the complicated relationship between Zamenhof, Esperanto, Judaism, and Zionism.]
In 2010, the New York Times says about George Soros: "He also recounted what it was like growing up in Budapest in the 1930s and ’40s in a home where Esperanto was spoken, making him one of the few native speakers in the room, if not the planet." But this contradicted by a Transparent Language Esperanto Blog 2011 post by (founder of the Esperanto-language wikipedia) Chuck Smith where the word "native" is crossed out in the quote "George Soros is the wealthiest native Esperanto speaker." Smith, in an interview with Esperanto advocate Humphrey Tonkin, prompts Tonkin into saying: "George Soros is not a native Esperanto speaker. Esperantists have made that claim on numerous occasions (it’s all over the Internet), but it’s simply not true. Soros learned Esperanto from his father when he was growing up, but his native language (his only native language) was Hungarian." (Tonkin also disputes that the name Soros was picked with its Esperanto meaning in mind.) But What Tonkin says makes sense, growing up learning a language even from childhood is not the same as being a native speaker. A native speaker of a language is a term without precise definition but connotes the person's mother tongue – the language in which they think.
Unreferenced on the Zamenhof wiki page is another wiki page, called Native Esperanto Speakers. While explicitly stating George Soros is not a native Esperanto speaker, it lists only five claimed native speakers by name, all notable people. First is Daniel Bovet, who won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of antihistamines. His wiki page claims he's a native Esperanto speaker (sourced to fellow tertiary source NNDB, which itself cites no sources) while neither his biographies at the Nobel Prize nor the Royal Society even mention the language. He also once claimed that tobacco increases its user's intelligence, so, um...
Second is Petr Ginz, a novelist and teenage Holocaust victim whose diary was published posthumously. While he was the son of Esperantists and fluent in the language, his novels and diary were written in Czech, arguing against him being a true native Esperanto speaker. Third is Carlo Minnaja, a mathematician and author of the Esperanto-Italian dictionary. While undoubtedly fluent at a young age, being that by the time he was 20 he was on the board of the World Esperanto Youth Organization, I can find no further claim that he is a native speaker.
But then we have people who may actually be the real deal. Kim J. Henriksen's claim is strong since he has had said about him by American linguist and Klingon-speaker Arika Okrent that he "appeared not to appreciate how bizarre it was to be a native speaker of an invented language. Esperanto was the medium of his parents' relationship and of the entire home life of their family." She then adds, "Before you start getting indignant on his behalf, know that growing up he had plenty of contact with the world outside his home and learned to speak Danish as a native too. But he considered Esperanto his true mother tongue. For Kimo, Esperanto was a completely normal fact of life in the same way that Polish would have been if both of his parents had been Polish."
And lastly we have Ino Kolbe, an author and proof-reader of the Esperanto-German dictionary. The wiki says "Her parents were so dedicated to the Esperanto movement that the only language they used around her was Esperanto; therefore before entering school she learned her German only from other children," and that she grew up in a hotbed of Esperantism and at a time when even the League of Nations was considering the language's use in its General Assembly. (The source is a German newspaper; the link is dead but presumably trustworthy.)
So are there really 1,000 native speakers of Esperanto out there in the world, as the original statement claims? Are there 1,000 people who were raised by dedicated, diehard Esperantists, speaking the constructed language in their households and utopian villages? The existence of at least three scholarly papers would seem to argue towards this claim's substance, each being a study of native speakers of the language. The 2001 study by Benjamin K. Bergen of the UC Berkeley Linguistics Department of eight native speakers claims to be the first ever (investigating the 'nativization' of Esperanto), even though the 1996 study by Renato Corsetti, an Esperantist, (in Italian and Esperanto) documents 350 families with Esperanto-speaking children, saying the closest linguistic parallel seems to be the Hebrew revival. The 2005 study, again by Corsetti and now joined by Maria A. Pinto and Maria Tolomeo, traces development of Esperanto-speaking children but points out that they all have "two or three mother-tongues."
Let's end this long, pointless, rambling entry by linking to another Transparent Language Esperanto Blog post, this one from 2013 and titled 3rd gen native Esperanto speaker: Nicole! Here, Chuck Smith says, "Some people don’t believe that native Esperanto speakers exist." Yes, this is true. And while the article is updated with the face-palm correction that she's actually only a 2nd-generation native speaker, a native speaker she is. Nicole when asked about it says, "Well, I can’t compare that to what my life would’ve been like as a non-native Esperanto speaker, of course. However, it wasn’t annoying at all, and often it was nice to have a 'secret' language. It’s difficult to describe, but it was part of the family and somehow always felt 'nice.'"
In light of Zamenhof Day (two days ago, whoops), the wiki page for the constructed language Esperanto's creator, L. L. Zamenhof, claims the language has an estimated 1,000 native speakers. It does? Really?
The wiki cites sources, as it should, giving us two. The first is Ethnologue, a group which studies all languages, and which contrarily makes no claim towards there being any native speakers of Esperanto. Huh.
The second wiki source listed, though, is an article on the online language school Babbel's website called What Is Esperanto, And Who Speaks It? The article text is as you'd expect from the headline, and includes this quote: "And even though Esperanto was made to be an auxiliary language, there is a cohort of about 1,000 people who speak Esperanto as their first language, a few of whom were interviewed in the video above." The 'video above' is six minutes of casual interviews with ten-ish people entirely in Esperanto (and with no subtitles, in any language), so whether these people are native speakers and if so, how they came to be, is not possible for me to determine.
The next line of the Babbel article claims, "The most famous native speaker is Hungarian-American billionaire philanthropist George Soros, whose father was a devotee of the language." George Soros is a Jewish banker, liberal political donor, and conspiracy magnet, but he is also the son of Tivador Soros, an Esperanto author who changed his family name from Schwartz to Soros supposedly because of the Esperanto meaning will soar (or maybe he just was a fan of palindromes). But the Soros family was very much living in Hungary, and even if Tivador did teach his children Esperanto at a young age, surely they must have primarily used Hungarian in their day-to-day life, right?
This 2016 article from Tablet with a title referencing George Soros and Esperanto claims that while the invented language has an active and thriving community, it has no native speakers: "It’s probably better to spend your time learning Lithuanian or Tamil, which, unlike Esperanto, stand at the center of a living culture, with native speakers and a literary tradition." And later, "Esperanto was never supposed to be a native tongue, but rather an adaptable second language that would form a bridge between foreign speakers." But what about George Soros? Here, the article contradicts itself: "One currently world-famous Jew is that rarest of birds, a denaskulo (native speaker of Esperanto): George Soros." That and a few sentences following is his only mention in the article, although it does go on to mention an "Esperantist refuge called Bona Espero in rural Brazil." There, presumably, children could be raised speaking Esperanto natively... unless "the children prefer to speak Portuguese rather than Esperanto." [Aside: the article's worth a read for its detailing of the complicated relationship between Zamenhof, Esperanto, Judaism, and Zionism.]
In 2010, the New York Times says about George Soros: "He also recounted what it was like growing up in Budapest in the 1930s and ’40s in a home where Esperanto was spoken, making him one of the few native speakers in the room, if not the planet." But this contradicted by a Transparent Language Esperanto Blog 2011 post by (founder of the Esperanto-language wikipedia) Chuck Smith where the word "native" is crossed out in the quote "George Soros is the wealthiest
nativeEsperanto speaker." Smith, in an interview with Esperanto advocate Humphrey Tonkin, prompts Tonkin into saying: "George Soros is not a native Esperanto speaker. Esperantists have made that claim on numerous occasions (it’s all over the Internet), but it’s simply not true. Soros learned Esperanto from his father when he was growing up, but his native language (his only native language) was Hungarian." (Tonkin also disputes that the name Soros was picked with its Esperanto meaning in mind.) But What Tonkin says makes sense, growing up learning a language even from childhood is not the same as being a native speaker. A native speaker of a language is a term without precise definition but connotes the person's mother tongue – the language in which they think.Unreferenced on the Zamenhof wiki page is another wiki page, called Native Esperanto Speakers. While explicitly stating George Soros is not a native Esperanto speaker, it lists only five claimed native speakers by name, all notable people. First is Daniel Bovet, who won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of antihistamines. His wiki page claims he's a native Esperanto speaker (sourced to fellow tertiary source NNDB, which itself cites no sources) while neither his biographies at the Nobel Prize nor the Royal Society even mention the language. He also once claimed that tobacco increases its user's intelligence, so, um...
Second is Petr Ginz, a novelist and teenage Holocaust victim whose diary was published posthumously. While he was the son of Esperantists and fluent in the language, his novels and diary were written in Czech, arguing against him being a true native Esperanto speaker. Third is Carlo Minnaja, a mathematician and author of the Esperanto-Italian dictionary. While undoubtedly fluent at a young age, being that by the time he was 20 he was on the board of the World Esperanto Youth Organization, I can find no further claim that he is a native speaker.
But then we have people who may actually be the real deal. Kim J. Henriksen's claim is strong since he has had said about him by American linguist and Klingon-speaker Arika Okrent that he "appeared not to appreciate how bizarre it was to be a native speaker of an invented language. Esperanto was the medium of his parents' relationship and of the entire home life of their family." She then adds, "Before you start getting indignant on his behalf, know that growing up he had plenty of contact with the world outside his home and learned to speak Danish as a native too. But he considered Esperanto his true mother tongue. For Kimo, Esperanto was a completely normal fact of life in the same way that Polish would have been if both of his parents had been Polish."
And lastly we have Ino Kolbe, an author and proof-reader of the Esperanto-German dictionary. The wiki says "Her parents were so dedicated to the Esperanto movement that the only language they used around her was Esperanto; therefore before entering school she learned her German only from other children," and that she grew up in a hotbed of Esperantism and at a time when even the League of Nations was considering the language's use in its General Assembly. (The source is a German newspaper; the link is dead but presumably trustworthy.)
So are there really 1,000 native speakers of Esperanto out there in the world, as the original statement claims? Are there 1,000 people who were raised by dedicated, diehard Esperantists, speaking the constructed language in their households and utopian villages? The existence of at least three scholarly papers would seem to argue towards this claim's substance, each being a study of native speakers of the language. The 2001 study by Benjamin K. Bergen of the UC Berkeley Linguistics Department of eight native speakers claims to be the first ever (investigating the 'nativization' of Esperanto), even though the 1996 study by Renato Corsetti, an Esperantist, (in Italian and Esperanto) documents 350 families with Esperanto-speaking children, saying the closest linguistic parallel seems to be the Hebrew revival. The 2005 study, again by Corsetti and now joined by Maria A. Pinto and Maria Tolomeo, traces development of Esperanto-speaking children but points out that they all have "two or three mother-tongues."
Let's end this long, pointless, rambling entry by linking to another Transparent Language Esperanto Blog post, this one from 2013 and titled 3rd gen native Esperanto speaker: Nicole! Here, Chuck Smith says, "Some people don’t believe that native Esperanto speakers exist." Yes, this is true. And while the article is updated with the face-palm correction that she's actually only a 2nd-generation native speaker, a native speaker she is. Nicole when asked about it says, "Well, I can’t compare that to what my life would’ve been like as a non-native Esperanto speaker, of course. However, it wasn’t annoying at all, and often it was nice to have a 'secret' language. It’s difficult to describe, but it was part of the family and somehow always felt 'nice.'"