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Proposal: Esperanto

The majority of questions would likely be in English, but then we all want to try out our Esperanto too... and it seems silly to limit to just those two languages.

Would questions in any language be appropriate, as long as they have something to do with Esperanto?

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It isn't silly at all. Stack Exchange is a de facto English-language network so we do not allow posting in other languages. But for a site geared towards learning a non-English language specficially, encouraging folks to post in a full-immersion environment is a well-established way to help folks learn that language. But that doesn't open these sites to posting in any language… any more so than we would allow non-English posts on a site like Stack Overflow (which incidentally has an international team creating sites explicitly for that purpose).

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    I think there will probably be two sorts of questions, those from people who are learning the language and those from people who already have a good command of the language but want help on expressing a particular point or translating a complicated structure. I hope we will allow the second type of question to be entirely in Esperanto because it is often much easier to talk about Esperanto grammar in Esperanto itself. It will also encourage experienced members of the Esperanto Academy to respond if they don't have to reply in English, a language in which they might not know well enough.
    – Neil Roberts
    Commented Aug 15, 2016 at 12:06
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this is tricky. do we expect anyone learning esperanto to learn english first in order to ask questions about the language?

if someone has a problem translating an idiom from a native language to esperanto, i don't think that translating the problem to english first would help. at best maybe a mix: 

how do i say: "ich liebe dich" in esperanto?
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As commitment is going up, maybe it's time to commit also to allow at least posts in Esperanto. I don't know who decides this or how, but a guess is: by voting.

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  • I think once it goes into beta, we'll also get a meta site that we can discuss and clarify what the rules should be.
    – sevenseacat
    Commented Aug 12, 2016 at 12:31
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    And I think it would be very nice to be clear on this already once beta starts. Because 1.) "Esperanto goes into beta on stack exchange" is a nice piece of news, and the question which languages are allowed is bound to arise instantly (my opinion), 2.) I have at least one question in mind which I might find time to translate to Esperanto beforehand, and maybe others are thinking along the same line. So that beta can start with a nice little bang. So it would be nice to know now whether questions in Esperanto will be allowed or not.
    – geh
    Commented Aug 12, 2016 at 13:46
  • makes sense, which is why I asked the original question :)
    – sevenseacat
    Commented Aug 13, 2016 at 7:18

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