Esperanto Speakers: No Significant Change in Numbers

I wanted to know whether the number of Esperanto speakers is growing or shrinking and found a Linguistic StackExchange post by Alexander Galkin helpful. In a part of his answer, he wrote:

Another metric is the number of people who participate in Universala Kongreso — the annual world conference of Esperanto-speakers. I don’t have a diagram for this statistic, but you can see the numbers here. The fluctuations here are much bigger and there is no clear trend — either increasing or decreasing — seen there.

So I decided to visualize those numbers.

Data Source

First, from the World Esperanto Congress Wikipedia page, I copied the contents of the History table and pasted it into an Excel file. I kept the columns of Year, City, Country, and the Number of participants. Then, saved the result as a CSV file.

By DALL-E. Prompt: Draw a painting of a conference of Esperanto Speakers that is viewed from afar.

Data Cleaning

In the vscode, I replaced a regex \[\d+\] with empty to remove the references such as [3], and [12].

Also, I manually removed the rows where the conference was not held due to events such as the World Wars.

Visualization

I used the plotly library to create some visualizations. The codes are available in a Google colab…