In the Auxlang mailing list, Todd Moody posted the following comment:
I thought the author's perception of a high number of young participants [in this year's national Esperanto conference in Britain —DH] was noteworthy.
I posted the following answer in Auxlang. I think it deserves quoting here.
Hi, Todd.
Noteworthy not to see so many young Esperanto speakers as to see that somebody somehow convinced them to show up at a national Esperanto conference.
The "graying" of the Esperanto movement has always been exaggerated by elderly Esperanto speakers who believe that club meetings and landaj kongresoj represent the Esperanto-speaking community. Actually, even in those limited venues there hasn't exactly been a "graying" over the past 50 years; the average age of participants in the San Francisco group and the annual ELNA congress today is pretty much the same as it was in the Los Angeles Esperanto Club and the annual ELNA congresses respectively when I was first active in around 1961-1962 (only difference is that the LK is generally bigger today).
It might be argued that there's a whole new generation of young people showing up in the Esperanto movement today, after years of absence, but I don't think that this is the case, either. Anybody who subscribed to Budapeŝta Informilo back in the mid-to-late-eighties, and looked at its "Deziras korespondi" column (perhaps the best available after El Popola Ĉinio went to a pay-as-you-go format), could easily see that a vast majority of those applying for pen pals were somewhere between 15 and 25 years of age.
I do have to admit, however, that when I saw, on-line, some overhead shots of a bunch of people at the All-Americas Esperanto Congress in Mexico City a few years ago, I exhaled: "Huh?" It was the first time I'd ever seen such an event where the hair showing was more black than gray or white. When my friend Ming-chi and I went to the UEA banquet in Beijing in 1986, there were well over a thousand people in the room, and the big majority had gray hair; Ming-chi and I, in our forties, were not the youngest people in the room, but probably in the youngest ten percent.
(On the other hand, we took a taxi back to the congress headquarters after the banquet and found a similar number of people having fun, dancing and the like; in that room, we certainly weren't the oldest people, but were probably in the oldest ten to twenty percent ...)
Traditionally, I've considered that there are two modes in the age range of the Esperanto movement, one in the fifties and early sixties, and a much smaller one in the late teens to early twenties. But if you go to amikumu.com and check the age stats for their 1200+ members (which are also shown as a bar graphic), you find a single mode at age 20 and no sign of a mode at the upper ages (above age 52, things get very sparse). As I've said before, it gripes me to find myself isolated out on a statistical tail ...
The one group historically lacking in the Esperanto movement has been that between the early twenties and retirement; it's been traditionally supposed that these people are too busy making a living to participate in the Esperanto movement, so that their children and parents can do so ... Interestingly, I was given a copy of the Japanese magazine La Revuo Orienta, April issue, today. There's a long article about 23 activists from eleven Asian countries (India, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Iran, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Vietnam) who are being invited especially to the UK in Yokohama; aside from the fact that they are as evenly split as you can get with an odd number between men and women (12 men, 11 women), their age range is from 18 to 47, with a mean age of 35.57 years and a median age of 38 years. So maybe as we get away from Europe and North America, the traditional rules of engagement will come to be meaningless.