Legitimacy in a multilingual community: how identity studies can benefit from experiences of the Esperanto community

The Esperanto community is composed mainly of non-native speakers. Studies indicate that they position themselves in the imagined community as multicompetent and multilingual legitimate speakers of the target language rather than simply language learners or “failed native speakers” (which is often the case for learners of ethnic foreign languages). It is therefore worth examining how Esperanto users construe their identity as users of a lingua franca, especially in comparison with ELF learners.