Esperanto-USA

Just returned from Slanchev Bryag (aka "Sunny Beach", though literally more like "Sunny Coast"), Bulgaria, where the International Linguistics Olympiad was held (though not in the above-mentioned hotel, but just down the street at the Amfora and Imperial Hotels ). 16 teams, representing 11 countries, competed in complex problem solving.

Though the problems themselves were available in 9 different languages, English did appear to be the lingua franca for the competition, despite the nearby hotel. The opening ceremony, along with instructions to the participants, and the review of the problems with the award ceremony, were all conducted in English. (Printed solutions were available in translation.) You can find copies of the questions, with solutions, here .

Slanchev Bryag is a somewhat international place, catering -- as best I could see -- to a large crowd of German tourists. (I was told Romanians and Poles used to come there, too, but the Poles now "have more money and prefer to go elsewhere"). There was probably more signage in English and German than Bulgarian -- which was certainly not the case in Sofia!

The US teams did very well, taking about one third of the individual awards, and sharing in -- or taking outright -- first place in both team awards. You can see a list of scores and rankings here .

When I spoke with students on the US team, I encountered some familiarity with Esperanto, along with the standard prejudices, and some linguistic disdain for the european vocabulary, the case markers, the orthography, and the consonant clusters. This is a tough crowd to please, though -- many of the students had dabbled in making their own conlangs at some time or other (in fact, they started a new one as a game one evening) -- and they all had their own sense of what the 'best' one should contain.

But I was also told that a girl on the Swedish team (possibly last year's team) was a denaskulo (ok, denaskulino), and certainly there was widespread agreement with the primary goal of Esperanto -- to enable people to keep their native languages while still participating in the larger world.
(Though some foreign students told my son that English -- while difficult to master -- is actually easier than many other languages to achieve a moderate level of competence in.)

We very much enjoyed out time in Bulgaria and would like to return sometime -- though not to Sunny Beach, I think we preferred our four days in Sofia -- and 2 hours in Plovdiv on the way to the sea coast.