Norvega Esperantista Ligo

Norvega Esperantista Ligo (Norsk Esperanto-Forbund, Norwegian Esperanto League) was founded in 1911. As the Norwegian arm of the Esperanto movement, its aim is to spread knowledge and use of the international language Esperanto. The league has a modest size of a couple of hundred members, and work done within NEL is mostly voluntary. The youth wing of NEL is Norvega Junularo Esperantista.

Affiliated with the largest international Esperanto organization, the Universala Esperanto-Asocio (UEA), the association has a permanent office in Oslo (also used by the Esperanto club of Oslo) and local subgroups scattered around the country. The Grupo Esperantista de Trondheim (Norwegian: Trondheim Esperantoklubb), for example, celebrated its centennial on June 16, 2007.

Since 1985 the NEL has published a magazine, Norvega Esperantisto (six issues per year).

The Norwegian Esperanto League was founded January 27, 1911 after earlier groundwork had been laid some years earlier by Haldor Midthus (1841-1906), Norway's first Esperantist. In 1886 Midthus, a teacher from Os in Hordaland, had learned Volapük, another constructed language. Having been active in the Volapük movement for ten years, he came to prefer Esperanto and became an enthusiastic proponent for Esperanto as the ideal international language. Midthus attended the first World Esperanto Congress in 1905 a few months before his death.

In 1906 the first Esperanto club in Kristiania (now Oslo) was established. The first members were students and temperance activists. The International Order of Good Templars, an organization devoted to ending the consumption of alcohol, had established lodges in Scandinavia beginning in 1877. The Swedish parliamentarian Edvard Wavrinski, the international president of the IOGT, wrote a series of articles on Esperanto for the IOGT publication Goodtemplarbladet, and several leading members of the alcohol-abstention movement showed interest.

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