Portal:Constructed languages/Language of the month
Contents
- 1 Archive of Language of the month items
- 1.1 November 2005
- 1.2 December 2005
- 1.3 January 2006
- 1.4 February 2006
- 1.5 March 2006
- 1.6 April 2006
- 1.7 May 2006
- 1.8 June 2006
- 1.9 July 2006
- 1.10 August 2006
- 1.11 September 2006
- 1.12 October 2006
- 1.13 November 2006
- 1.14 December 2006
- 1.15 January 2007
- 1.16 February 2007
- 1.17 March 2007
- 1.18 April 2007
- 1.19 May 2007
- 1.20 June 2007
- 1.21 July 2007
- 1.22 August 2007
- 1.23 September 2007
- 1.24 October 2007
- 1.25 November 2007
- 1.26 December 2007
- 1.27 January 2008
- 1.28 February 2008
- 1.29 March 2008
- 1.30 May 2008
- 1.31 June 2008
- 1.32 July 2008
- 1.33 August 2008
- 1.34 September 2008
- 1.35 October 2008
- 1.36 November 2008
- 1.37 December 2008
- 1.38 January 2009
- 1.39 February 2009
- 1.40 March 2009
- 1.41 April 2009
- 1.42 May 2009
- 1.43 June 2009
- 1.44 July 2009
- 1.45 August 2009
- 1.46 September 2009
- 1.47 October 2009
- 1.48 November 2009
- 1.49 December 2009
- 1.50 January 2010
- 1.51 February 2010
- 1.52 March 2010
- 1.53 April 2010
- 1.54 May 2010
- 1.55 June 2010
- 1.56 July 2010
- 1.57 August 2010
- 1.58 September 2010
- 1.59 October 2010
- 1.60 November 2010
- 1.61 December 2010
- 1.62 January 2011
- 1.63 February 2011
- 1.64 March 2011
- 1.65 April 2011
- 1.66 May 2011
- 1.67 July 2011
- 1.68 August 2011
- 1.69 September 2011
- 1.70 October 2011
- 1.71 November 2011
- 1.72 December 2011
- 1.73 January 2012
- 1.74 February 2012
- 1.75 March 2012
- 1.76 April 2012
- 1.77 May 2012
- 1.78 June 2012
- 1.79 July 2012
- 1.80 August 2012
- 1.81 September 2012
- 1.82 October 2012
- 1.83 November 2012
- 1.84 December 2012
- 1.85 January 2013
- 1.86 February 2013
- 1.87 March 2013
- 1.88 April 2013
- 1.89 May 2013
- 1.90 June 2013
- 1.91 July 2013
- 1.92 August 2013
- 1.93 September 2013
- 1.94 October 2013
- 1.95 November 2013
- 1.96 December 2013
- 1.97 January 2014
- 1.98 February 2014
- 1.99 March 2014
- 1.100 April 2014
- 1.101 May 2014
- 1.102 June 2014
- 1.103 July 2014
- 1.104 August 2014
- 1.105 September 2014
- 1.106 October 2014
- 1.107 November 2014
- 1.108 December 2014
- 1.109 January 2015
- 1.110 February 2015
- 1.111 March 2015
- 1.112 April 2015
- 1.113 May 2015
- 1.114 June 2015
- 1.115 July 2015
- 1.116 August 2015
- 1.117 September 2015
- 1.118 October 2015
- 1.119 November 2015
- 1.120 December 2015
- 1.121 January 2016
- 1.122 February 2016
- 1.123 March 2016
- 1.124 April 2016
- 1.125 May 2016
- 1.126 June 2016
Archive of Language of the month items
To suggest an item, please do so here.
November 2005
Ido is a constructed language, arguably the second-most used International Auxiliary Language in the world. It was developed in the early 1900s, and retains a small following today, primarily in Europe. It is largely based on Esperanto, created by L. L. Zamenhof. Ido first appeared in 1907 as a result of a desire to reform perceived flaws in Esperanto that its supporters believed to be a hindrance in its propagation as an easy-to-learn second language. Many other reform projects appeared after Ido: examples such as Occidental and Novial appeared afterwards but have since faded into obscurity. At present Ido, along with Esperanto and Interlingua are the only auxiliary languages with a large body of literature and a relatively large speaker base. The name of the language likely traces its origin to the Ido pronunciation of "I.D." (from "International Delegation", see below) or the word ido, "descendant (of Esperanto)". Find out more...
December 2005
Quenya is one of the languages spoken by the Elves in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. It was the language developed by those non-Telerin Elves who reached Valinor (the "High Elves") from an earlier language called Common Eldarin. Of the Three Houses of the Elves, the Ñoldor and the Vanyar spoke slightly different, though mutually intelligible, dialects of Quenya (Quenya and Vanyarin Quenya (also Quendya), respectively). The language was also adopted by the Valar, who made some new introductions into it from their own original language, though these are more numerous in the Vanyarin dialect than the Ñoldorin one. This is probably the case because of the enduringly close relationship the Vanyar had with the Valar. The Third House, the Teleri, spoke a different, closely related language, Telerin, although this was by some seen as a dialect of Quenya, which is untrue in a historic perspective but plausible in a linguistic one; the languages do not share a common history, but are very much alike. Find out more...
January 2006
Ithkuil (Iţkuîl) is an extremely complicated constructed human language created by American linguist John Quijada between 1978 and 2004.
In the author's description of Ithkuil: "A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language", it appears as a cross between an a priori philosophical language and a logical language. The creator attempts to show how human languages could or may function. Ithkuil is designed to convey large amounts of linguistic information using fewer and shorter words than naturally-evolved languages; most sentences in other languages will be shorter when translated into Ithkuil. Find out more...
February 2006
The Klingon language or Klingonese (tlhIngan Hol in Klingon) is a constructed language (an artistic language created by Marc Okrand for Paramount Pictures and spoken by Klingons in the fictional Star Trek universe). He designed the language with Object Verb Subject (OVS) word order to give an alien feel to the language. Klingon is similar to Native American languages in several aspects. The basic sound (and a very few words) were first devised by James Doohan for Star Trek: The Motion Picture; the film marked the first time the language had been heard on screen, all previous appearances of the Klingons being in English (through the in-universe use of universal translators).
Klingon is sometimes referred to as Klingonese (most notably in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles"), but among the Klingon-speaking community this is often understood to refer to another Klingon language that is described in John M. Ford's Star Trek novels as Klingonaase. Find out more...
March 2006
Lingua Franca Nova is an auxiliary constructed language created by Dr. C. George Boeree of Shippensburg University, Pennsylvania. It is based on French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. Lingua Franca Nova is usually abbreviated to LFN and has also been referred to as Europijin and Creol. The language is phonetically spelled, using 21 letters of either the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets. The grammar is inspired by the Romance creoles. Like most creoles, LFN has a highly simplified grammar system. However, this system does not mean that one is not able to be as expressive in LFN as one could be in any other language. Find out more...
April 2006
Brithenig is an invented language, or constructed language ("conlang"). It was created as a hobby in 1996 by Andrew Smith from New Zealand, who also invented the alternate history of Ill Bethisad to "explain" it.
Brithenig was not invented to be used in the real world, like Esperanto, nor to provide detail to a work of fiction, like J.R.R. Tolkien's Elvish tongues or Klingon from the Star Trek scenarios. Rather, Brithenig started as a thought experiment to create a Romance language that might have evolved if Latin had displaced Old Celtic as the spoken language of the people in Great Britain. The result is a sister language to French, Spanish and Italian, albeit a test-tube child, which differs from them by having sound-changes similar to those that affected the Welsh language, and words that are borrowed from Old Celtic and from English throughout its pseudo-history. Find out more...
May 2006
Lojban (IPA [ˈloʒban], official full name Lojban: a realization of Loglan) is a constructed language which was created by the Logical Language Group in 1987 based on the earlier Loglan, with the intent to make the language more complete, usable, and freely available. It has the ISO 639 language code jbo.
The language itself shares many of the features and goals of Loglan; in particular, Lojban:
- Has a grammar that is based on predicate logic, and is capable of expressing complex logical constructs precisely.
- Has no irregularities or ambiguities in spelling or grammar, so it can be easily parsed by computer.
- Is designed to be as culturally neutral as possible.
- Is simple to learn and use compared to many natural languages.
- Possesses an intricate system for effectively communicating contextual emotion.
While the initial goal of the Loglan project was to investigate the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, the active Lojban community has additional goals for the language. Find out more...
June 2006
Lingua Ignota (Latin for unknown language) was a language described by Hildegard of Bingen, abbess of Rupertsberg, in the 12th century, apparently for mystical purposes. Hildegard used an alphabet of 23 letters, the litterae ignotae, to go with the language.
Hildegard partially described the language in a work titled Lingua Ignota per simplicem hominem Hildegardem prolata, which survived in two manuscripts, both dating to ca. 1200, the Wiesbaden Codex and a Berlin MS. The text is a glossary of 1011 words in Lingua Ignota, with glosses mostly in Latin, sometimes in German; the words appear to be a priori coinages, mostly nouns with a few adjectives. Grammatically it appears to be a partial relexification of Latin, that is, a language formed by substituting new vocabulary into an existing grammar. Find out more...
July 2006
Novial [nov-, new + IAL, International Auxiliary Language] is a constructed language devised by Professor Otto Jespersen, a Danish linguist who had previously been involved in the Ido movement. He devised Novial to be an international auxiliary language (IAL), which would facilitate international communication and friendship, without displacing anyone's native language.
It features a vocabulary based largely on the Germanic and Romance languages, and a grammar heavily influenced by English.
The first introduction of Novial was in Jespersen's book An International Language in 1928, with an update in his dictionary, Novial Lexike, published two years later. Further modifications were proposed in the 1930s, but with Jespersen's death in 1943, it became dormant, although in the 1990s, with the revival of interest in artificial language brought on by the Internet, many people rediscovered Novial. Find out more...
August 2006
Toki Pona is a constructed language which was first published online in mid-2001. It was designed by Canadian translator and linguist Sonja Elen Kisa (b. 1978), of Toronto.
Toki Pona is a minimal language. Like a pidgin, it focuses on simple concepts and elements that are relatively universal among cultures. Kisa designed Toki Pona to express maximal meaning with minimal complexity. The language has 14 phonemes and 118 words. It is not designed as an international auxiliary language but is instead inspired by Taoist philosophy, among other things.
The language is designed to shape the thought processes of its users, in the style of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. This goal, together with Toki Pona's deliberately restricted vocabulary, have led some to feel that the language, whose name literally means "simple language", "good language", or "goodspeak", resembles George Orwell's fictional language Newspeak. Find out more...
September 2006
Solresol is an artificial language, devised by a Frenchman, François Sudre, beginning in 1817. He published his major book on it, Langue musicale universelle, in 1866, though he had already been publicizing it for some years. Solresol enjoyed a brief spell of popularity, reaching its pinnacle with Boleslas Gajewski's 1902 publication of Grammaire du Solresol.
Solresol words are made up of only seven different syllables. These syllables can be represented in a number of different ways -- as musical notes of different pitch, as spoken syllables (based on solfege, a way of identifying musical notes), with colours, symbols, hand gestures etc. Thus, theoretically Solresol communication can be done through speaking, singing, flags of different color, etc. — even painting. Find out more...
October 2006
The Verdurian language is a constructed language (or conlang) designed by Mark Rosenfelder. It is the most developed of the languages featured in Rosenfelder's constructed world of Almea and is spoken by the inhabitants of Verduria, a country in that planet. The language's name for itself is soa Sfahe, "the speech". The language has its own alphabet.
The language has a grammar and vocabulary that borrows deliberately from a variety of European languages, particularly French, Russian, Latin, and German. Find out more...
November 2006
The constructed language Interlingua is an international auxiliary language (IAL) published in 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). It is the most successful naturalistic constructed language. In appearance, Interlingua combines a Romance vocabulary with a simplified Romance grammar, and can thus be seen as a modernized and simplified Latin (or Vulgar Latin to be more precise). It is sometimes called IALA Interlingua to distinguish it from the other uses of interlingua.
The expansive movements of science, technology, trade, diplomacy, and the arts, combined with the historical dominance of the Greek and Latin languages have resulted in a large common vocabulary among Western languages. Interlingua uses a mostly rigid procedure to extract and standardize the most widespread word (or, occasionally, words) for a concept found in a set of control languages (English, French, Italian and Spanish/Portuguese, with German and Russian as secondary references). The resulting vocabulary corresponds closely with the Neolatin element in international scientific vocabulary. Find out more...
December 2006
Baronh is an artificial language created by Japanese science fiction author Morioka Hiroyuki and used in Crest of the Stars and Banner of the Stars. The name Baronh means "language of the Abh".
The Baronh language is derived from the ancient Japanese language, spoken till the beginning of the ninth century and recorded in Kojiki, Man'yōshū and other ancient documents. It is not precisely the ancient language itself, but a reconstructed one which is named Takamagahara language after the mythological heaven in Kojiki. In Crest of the Stars, Japanese revolutionists seeking to remove foreign influence from the Japanese language created their own "purified" version, which removed borrowed words and expressions and revived ancient ones. It was these revolutionists who established the colony that created the Abh, giving them their language. Find out more...
January 2007
Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed international language. The name derives from Doktoro Esperanto, the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof first published the Unua Libro in 1887. The word itself means 'one who hopes'. Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy and flexible language as a universal second language to foster peace and international understanding.
Although no country has adopted the language officially, it has enjoyed continuous usage by a community estimated at between 100,000 and 2 million speakers. The 2005 edition of the Ethnologue estimates that there are about a thousand native speakers.
Today, Esperanto is employed in world travel, correspondence, cultural exchange, conventions, literature, language instruction, television (Internacia Televido) and radio broadcasting. Some state education systems offer elective courses in Esperanto; there is evidence that learning Esperanto is a useful preparation for later language learning. Find out more...
February 2007
Wenedyk (in English: Venedic) is a constructed language of the naturalistic kind, created by the Dutch translator Jan van Steenbergen. It is used in the fictional Republic of the Two Crowns (based on the Republic of Two Nations), in the alternate timeline of Ill Bethisad. Officially, Wenedyk is a descendant of Vulgar Latin with a strong Slavic admixture, based on the premise that the Roman Empire incorporated the ancestors of the Poles in their territory. Less officially, it tries to show what Polish would have looked like if it had been a Romance instead of a Slavic language. Find out more...
March 2007
Láadan is a constructed language created by Suzette Haden Elgin in 1982 to test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis for women, specifically to determine if Western natural languages were better suited for expressing the views of men than women. The language was included in her Native Tongue science fiction series. Láadan contains a number of words that are used to make unambiguous statements that include how one feels about what one is saying. According to Elgin, this is designed to counter male-centred language's limitations on women, who are forced to respond "I know I said that, but I meant this". Find out more...
April 2007
Teonaht is a constructed language that has been developed since 1962 by science fiction writer and University of Rochester English professor Sarah Higley, under the pseudonym of Sally Caves. It is spoken in the fantasy setting of the Teonim, a race of polydactyl humans who have a cultural history of worshipping catlike deities.
Teonaht uses the Object Subject Verb (OSV) word order, which is rare in natural languages. An interesting feature of Teonaht is that the end of the sentence is the place of greatest emphasis, as what is mentioned last is uppermost in the mind. The language has a "Law of Detachment" whereby suffixes can be moved to the beginnings of words for emphasis and even attach onto other words such as pronouns.
Teonaht is a highly elaborated language, and many consider it one of the finest examples of an artistic language since the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. It is often cited, like Verdurian, as an example of the genre in articles on the world of Internet-hosted amateur conlanging. Find out more...
May 2007
Blissymbolics or Blissymbols were conceived of as an ideographic writing system consisting of several hundred basic symbols, each representing a concept, which can be composed together to generate new symbols that represent new concepts. Blissymbols differ from all the world's major writing systems in that the characters do not correspond at all to the sounds of any spoken language.
They were invented by Charles K. Bliss (1897-1985) after the Second World War. Bliss wanted to create an easy-to-learn international auxiliary language to allow communication between people who do not speak the same language. He was inspired by Chinese ideograms, with which Bliss became familiar while in Shanghai as a refugee from Nazi anti-semitic persecution. His system World Writing was explained in his work Semantography (1949). This work laid out the language structure and vocabulary for his utopian vision of easy communication, but it failed to gain popularity. However, since the 1960s, Blissymbols have become popular as a method of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) for non-speaking people with cerebral palsy or other disorders, for whom it can be impossible to otherwise communicate with spoken language. Find out more...
June 2007
Zaum (Russian: заумь or заумный язык) is a word used to describe the linguistic experiments in sound symbolism and language creation of Russian Futurist poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh.
Coined by Kruchenykh in 1913, the word zaum is made up of the Russian prefix за "beyond, behind" and noun ум "the mind, nous" and has been translated as "transreason" or "beyonsense" (Paul Schmidt). According to scholar Gerald Janecek, zaum can be defined as experimental poetic language characterized by indeterminacy in meaning.
As Kruchenykh has it, zaum is a transrational language, "wild, flaming, explosive (wild paradise, fiery languages, blazing coal)," which awakens creative imagination from the manacles of everyday speech. Zaum "can provide a universal poetic language, born organically, and not artificially like Esperanto." Find out more...
July 2007
Afrihili is a constructed language designed in 1970 by K. A. Kumi Attobrah to be used as a lingua franca in all of Africa. The name of the language is a combination of Africa and Swahili. The author, a native of Akrokerri in Ghana, originally conceived of the idea in 1967 while on a sea voyage from English Dover to French Calais. His intention was that "it would promote unity and understanding among the different peoples of the continent, reduce costs in printing due to translations and promote trade". It is meant to be easy for Africans to learn.
Afrihili draws its phonology, morphology and syntax from various African languages. The lexicon covers as many African languages as possible, as well as words from many other sources "so Africanized that they do not appear foreign", although no specific etymologies are indicated by the author.
The language uses the Latin alphabet with the addition of two vowel symbols, ɛ and ɔ, which denote the same sounds as in IPA, namely open-mid front and back vowels, as in several Western African languages like Ewe and Yorùbá. Find out more...
August 2007
Khuzdûl is the language of the Dwarves in J. R. R. Tolkien's fiction of Middle-earth. Khuzdûl is usually written with the Cirth script. It appears to be based, like the Semitic languages, on triconsonantal roots: kh-z-d, b-n-d, z-g-l.
Little is known of Khuzdûl, as the Dwarves kept it to themselves, except for their battle-cry: Baruk Khazâd! Khazâd ai-mênu! meaning Axes of the Dwarves! The Dwarves are upon you!; and the runes written on Balin's tomb in Moria can be translated to read "Balin Fundinul Uzbad Khazad-dumu", meaning "Balin, son of Fundin, Lord of Moria". This secrecy extended to Dwarven names: with the exception of the Petty-dwarves, all Dwarven names are either from another language (Dalish) or nicknames/titles, and Dwarves don't even record their names on their tombstones. Only few non-Dwarves are recorded of having learnt Khuzdûl, most notably Eöl.
Placenames were not subject to this secrecy, and form the major sample of known Khuzdûl. Unlike their private names, Dwarves seemed eager to share these names with others. Find out more...
September 2007
Basic English is a constructed language with a small number of words created by Charles Kay Ogden and described in his book Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar (1930). The language is based on a simplified version of English, in essence a subset of it.
Ogden said that it would take seven years to learn English, seven months for Esperanto, and seven weeks for Basic English, comparable with Ido. Thus Basic English is used by companies who need to make complex books for international use, and by language schools that need to give people some knowledge of English in a short time. Ogden did not put any words into Basic English that could be paraphrased with other words, and he strove to make the words work for speakers of any other language. He put his set of words through a large number of tests and adjustments. He also simplified the grammar but tried to keep it normal for English users.
The concept gained its greatest publicity just after the Second World War as a tool for world peace. Find out more...
October 2007
Sindarin is an artificial language developed by J. R. R. Tolkien. In Tolkien's mythos, it was the Elvish language most commonly spoken in Middle-earth in the Third Age. It was the language of the Sindar, those Teleri which had been left behind on the Great Journey of the Elves. It was derived from an earlier language called Common Telerin. When the Noldor returned to Middle-earth, they adopted the Sindarin language, although they believed their native Quenya more beautiful. Sindarin shared common roots with Quenya, and the two languages had many similar words. Sindarin was said to be more changeful than the older tongue, however, and there were a number of regional 'dialects' of the tongue. The Sindarin spoken in Doriath was said to be the highest and most noble form of the language.
Before the downfall, most of the Men of Númenor also spoke the language. Knowledge of it was kept in the Númenórean exile realm of Gondor, especially amongst the learned. Sindarin is the language referred to as the Elven-tongue in The Lord of the Rings. Find out more...
November 2007
Signuno is a manual encoding of Esperanto, derived from Gestuno roots and Esperanto morphology by an anonymous author.
Its alphabet has signs for Esperanto's diacritic letters : Ŝ, Ĥ, Ĝ, Ŭ are derived from their base letters S, H, G, U; while Ĉ and Ĵ (like J) are of Cyrillic origin. H, P, Q are from the Irish manual alphabet, while Z (shaped like an ASL 3) appears to be unique to Signuno. The other letters follow international norms. (That is, similar to ASL but with an Irish T.)
The system works to capture Esperanto grammar rather than exploit the spatial options available to sign language; it faces similar shortcomings as did de l'Épée's "methodical signs" in comparison to French Sign Language. Because of this, it is unlikely to be viable as an independent sign language. In effect, Signuno is a manual, logographic orthography for Esperanto; comparable to Manually Coded English vis a vis spoken English. Find out more...
December 2007
The Talossan language (El Glheþ Talossán) is a constructed language created by R. Ben Madison for the micronation he founded, the Kingdom of Talossa. It's also the official language in the other Talossan micronation which split off in 2004, the Republic of Talossa.
Talossan is a constructed Gallo-Romance language, inspired by French and Occitan, and very naturalistic (with quite a few irregularities). In an effort to create a kind of "national mythology" for his micronation, Madison discovered in 1985 that one of the Berber sub-tribes of Morocco was called the Talesinnt, and decided that Talossans were "inexplicably and inextricably connected somehow to Berbers." This resulted in the Talossan language being inspired by Berber languages. More recently however, words are derived from Romance roots and given a French/Provençal feeling to them (some see a Romanian influence as well), but there is no one set of rules for derivation through which every word can be predicted. The word "Talossa" itself is not Romance, but Finno-Ugric in origin: it comes from the Finnish word for "inside the house" (Talossa began in Madison's bedroom.). Find out more...
January 2008
The language Occidental, later Interlingue, is a planned language created by the Baltogerman naval officer and teacher Edgar de Wahl and published in 1922.
Occidental is devised with great care to ensure that many of its derived word forms reflect the similar forms common to a number of Western European languages. This was done through application of de Wahl's rule which is actually a small set of rules for converting verb infinitives into derived nouns and adjectives. The result is a language relatively easy to understand at first sight for individuals acquainted with several Western European languages. Coupled with a simplified grammar, this made Occidental exceptionally popular in Europe during the 15 years before World War II, and it is believed that it was at its height the fourth most popular planned language, after Volapük, Esperanto and perhaps Ido in order of appearance. Find out more...
February 2008
The Black Speech is the fictional language of Mordor in The Lord of the Rings. Sauron created the Black Speech, as an artificial language, to be the sole language of all the servants of Mordor, replacing the many different varieties of Orkish and other languages used by his servants. Tolkien describes the language as existing in two forms, the ancient "pure" forms used by Sauron himself, the Nazgûl, and the Olog-hai, and the more "debased" form used by the soldiery of the Barad-dûr at the end of the Third Age.
Having designed the Black Speech to be unpleasant, J. R. R. Tolkien did not enjoy writing in it (according to Tolkien, he once received a goblet from a fan with the Ring inscription on it in Black Speech, and, finding it distasteful, used it only as an ashtray). As a result, the Black Speech is one of the more fragmentary languages in the novels. The forces of good refuse to utter it, as it attracts the attention of the Eye of Sauron. Unlike Elvish, there are no poems or songs written in it (apart from the Ring's inscription). Find out more...
March 2008
Ro is an a priori constructed language created by Edward Powell Foster beginning in 1904. In Ro, words are constructed using a category system. For example, the word for red is "bofoc", and yellow is "bofof". All words starting with "bofo-" signify colors. Foster did not simply try to design a better language in general, but to optimize his language for one design criterion: recognizability of unknown words. Foster wrote about Ro: "Ro did not begin with attempting to rival or supplant any other language whatever, either natural or artificial, nor was it suggested by any of them. Unexpectedly came the thought: 'how strange it is that there is nothing in the appearance of a written or printed word that gives the slightest hint of its meaning. Why should a word not be a picture? A new word, never seen before would then, like a painting seen for the first time, convey at least some of the meaning to the eye.'" Find out more...
May 2008
Ro is an a priori constructed language created by Rev. Edward Powell Foster beginning in 1904. In Ro, words are constructed using a category system. For example, the word for red is "bofoc", and yellow is "bofof". All words starting with "bofo-" signify colors. Foster did not simply try to design a better language in general, but to optimize his language for one design criterion: recognizability of unknown words. Foster wrote about Ro:
- Ro did not begin with attempting to rival or supplant any other language whatever, either natural or artificial, nor was it suggested by any of them.
- Unexpectedly came the thought: "How strange it is that there is nothing in the appearance of a written or printed word that gives the slightest hint of its meaning. Why should a word not be a picture? A new word, never seen before would then, like a painting seen for the first time, convey at least some of the meaning to the eye." Find out more...
June 2008
Volapük (/ˈvɒləpʊk/; locally: [volaˈpyk]) is a constructed language, created in 1879–1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Roman Catholic priest in Baden, Germany. Schleyer felt that God had told him in a dream to create an international language. Volapük conventions took place in 1884 (Friedrichshafen), 1887 (Munich), and 1889 (Paris). The first two conventions used German, and the last conference used only Volapük. In 1889, there were an estimated 283 clubs, 25 periodicals in or about Volapük, and 316 textbooks in 25 languages. Today there are an estimated 20-30 Volapük speakers in the world. Volapük was largely displaced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by simpler and more easily-learned languages, such as Esperanto and Latino Sine Flexione. Find out more...
July 2008
Europanto is a linguistic jest presented as a "constructed language" with a hodge-podge vocabulary from many European languages. It was created in 1996 by Diego Marani, a journalist, author and translator for the European Council of Ministers in Brussels. Marani created it in response to the perceived dominance of the English language; it is an emulation of the effect that non-native speakers struggling to learn a language typically add words and phrases from their native language to express their meanings clearly.
The main feature of Europanto is that there are no fixed rules - merely a set of suggestions. This means that anybody can start to speak Europanto immediately; on the other hand, it is the speaker's responsibility to draw on an assumed common vocabulary and grammar between himself and the audience and to make himself understood. Find out more...
August 2008
Newspeak is a fictional language in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel, it is described as being "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year." Orwell included an essay about it in the form of an appendix in which the basic principles of the language are explained. Newspeak is closely based on English but has a greatly reduced and simplified vocabulary and grammar. This suits the totalitarian regime of the Party, whose aim is to make any alternative thinking – "thoughtcrime", or "crimethink" in the newest edition of Newspeak – or speech impossible by removing any words or possible constructs which describe the ideas of freedom, rebellion and so on. One character says admiringly of the shrinking volume of the new dictionary: "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."
The Newspeak term for the English language is Oldspeak. Oldspeak was intended to have been completely eclipsed by Newspeak before 2050. Find out more...
September 2008
Loglan is a constructed language originally designed for linguistic research, particularly for investigating the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. The language was developed beginning in 1955 by Dr. James Cooke Brown with the goal of making a language so different from natural languages that people learning it would think in a different way if the hypothesis were true. Loglan is the first among, and the main inspiration for, the languages known as logical languages, which also includes Lojban and Ceqli.
Dr. Brown founded The Loglan Institute to develop the language and other applications of it. He always considered the language an incomplete research project, and although he released many papers about its design, he continued to claim legal restrictions on its use. Because of this, a group of his followers later formed The Logical Language Group to create the language Lojban along the same principles, but with the intention to make it freely available and encourage its use as a real language. Find out more...
October 2008
The Latin term characteristica universalis, commonly interpreted as universal characteristic, or universal character in English, is a universal and formal language imagined by the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz able to express mathematical, scientific, and metaphysical concepts. Leibniz thus hoped to create a language usable within the framework of a universal logical calculation or calculus ratiocinator.
The characteristica universalis is a recurring concept in the writings of Gottfried Leibniz. When writing in French, he sometimes employed the phrase spécieuse générale to the same effect. The concept is sometimes paired with his notion of a calculus ratiocinator and with his plans for an encyclopaedia as a compendium of all human knowledge. Find out more...
November 2008
Ido /ˈiːdoʊ/ is a constructed language created with the goal of becoming a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds as a language easier to learn than ethnic languages. This intended usage parallels the current use of English as a lingua franca, and of French, Latin, and Greek in earlier eras. Unlike English, which is a natural and frequently irregular language, Ido was specifically designed for grammatical, orthographic, and lexicographical regularity, and to favor no one who might otherwise be advantaged in a situation due to native fluency in a widespread language. In this sense, Ido is classified as a consciously created International Auxiliary Language (conIAL). Of the most widely used conIALs, the first one is Esperanto, Ido's predecessor; it is disputable whether the second place in usage goes to Ido or Interlingua. Find out more...
December 2008
Quenya (IPA: [ˈkʷɛɲa]) is one of the fictional languages spoken by the Elves (the Quendi, "those who speak with voices" because when they first awoke they were the only creatures they knew who used words to speak), in the fantasy works of J. R. R. Tolkien. It was the language developed by those non-Telerin Elves who reached Valinor (the "High Elves") from an earlier language called Common Eldarin, which also evolved from the original Primitive Quendian. Of the Three Houses of the Elves, the Noldor and the Vanyar spoke slightly different, though mutually intelligible, dialects of Quenya (Quenya [also Noldorin Quenya and later when they followed Fëanor in Arda Exilic Quenya] and Vanyarin Quenya [also Quendya], respectively). The language was also adopted by the Valar, who made some new introductions into it from their own original language, though these are more numerous in the Vanyarin dialect than the Noldorin one. This is probably the case because of the enduringly close relationship the Vanyar had with the Valar. Find out more...
January 2009
Ithkuil is a constructed human language marked by outstanding grammatical complexity and an innovative system of writing.
The language’s author, John Quijada, presents Ithkuil as a cross between an a priori philosophical language and a logical language designed to express deeper levels of human cognition overtly and clearly, yet briefly. The many examples from Quijada’s original grammar show that, in the general case, a message would take significantly longer to explicate in a natural language than in Ithkuil.
Quijada deems his creation to be too complex and rational a language to have developed “naturally”, yet a one usable for general conversation and literature. No person is hitherto known to be able to speak Ithkuil; Quijada, for one, does not. Find out more...
February 2009
The Klingon language (tlhIngan Hol in Klingon) is the constructed language spoken by Klingons in the fictional Star Trek universe. Deliberately designed by Marc Okrand to be "alien", it contains many peculiarities, such as Object Verb Subject (OVS) word order. The language's basic sound, along with a few words, was first devised by actor James Doohan ("Scotty") for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. That film marked the first time the language had been heard on screen; in all previous appearances, Klingons spoke in English. Klingon was subsequently developed by Okrand into a full-fledged language.
Klingon is sometimes referred to as "Klingonese" (most notably in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles", where it was actually pronounced by a Klingon character as /klɪŋgoni/), but among the Klingon-speaking community this is often understood to refer to another Klingon language that is described in John M. Ford's Star Trek novels as Klingonaase.
A small number of people, mostly dedicated Star Trek fans or language aficionados, can converse in Klingon. Its vocabulary, heavily centered on Star Trek-Klingon concepts such as "spacecraft" or "warfare", can sometimes make it cumbersome for everyday use – for instance, while there are words for "transporter ionizer unit" (jolvoy') or "bridge (of a ship)" (meH), there is currently no word for "bridge" in the sense of a crossing over water. Nonetheless, mundane conversations are common among skilled speakers. Find out more...
March 2009
Lingua Franca Nova (abbreviated LFN) is an auxiliary constructed language created by Dr. C. George Boeree of Shippensburg University, Pennsylvania. Its vocabulary is based on French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. The grammar is highly reduced and similar to the Romance creoles. The language is phonetically spelled, using 22 letters of either the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets.
Dr. C. George Boeree began working on LFN in 1965, with the goal to create a simple, creole-like international auxiliary language. He was inspired to do this by the Mediterranean Lingua Franca, a pidgin used in the Mediterranean in centuries past. He used French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan, all of them Romance languages, as the basis for his new language. LFN was first presented on the Internet in 1998. Find out more...
April 2009
Brithenig is an invented language, or constructed language ("conlang"). It was created as a hobby in 1996 by Andrew Smith from New Zealand, who also invented the alternate history of Ill Bethisad to "explain" it.
Brithenig was not developed to be used in the real world, like Esperanto or Interlingua, nor to provide detail to a work of fiction, like J.R.R. Tolkien's Elvish tongues or Klingon from the Star Trek scenarios. Rather, Brithenig started as a thought experiment to create a Romance language that might have evolved if Latin had displaced Old Celtic as the spoken language of the people in Great Britain.
The result is a sister language to French, Spanish and Italian, albeit a test-tube child, which differs from them by having sound-changes similar to those that affected the Welsh language, and words that are borrowed from Old Celtic and from English throughout its pseudo-history. One important distinction between Brithenig and Welsh is that while Welsh is P-Celtic, Latin was a Q-Italic language (as opposed to P-Italic, like Oscan), and this trait was passed onto Brithenig. Find out more...
May 2009
Lojban (IPA: [ˈloʒban]) is a constructed, syntactically unambiguous human language based on predicate logic. Its predecessor is Loglan, the original logical language by James Cooke Brown.
Development of the language began in 1987 by The Logical Language Group (LLG), who intended to realize Loglan's purposes as well as further complement the language by making it more usable, and freely available (as indicated by its official full English name "Lojban: a realization of Loglan"). After a long initial period of debating and testing, the baseline was completed in 1998 with the publication of The Complete Lojban Language. The name "Lojban" is a combination of loj and ban, which are short forms of logji (logic) and bangu (language), respectively.
The principal sources of its basic vocabulary were the six (at the time) most widely spoken languages: Mandarin, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic, chosen to reduce the unfamiliarity or strangeness of the root words to people of diverse linguistic backgrounds. The language has drawn on other constructed languages' components, a notable instance of which is Láadan's set of indicators. Also Toki Pona and Esperanto have mutuality with Lojban to some extent. Find out more...
June 2009
A Lingua Ignota (Latin for "unknown language") was described by the 12th century abbess of Rupertsberg, Hildegard of Bingen. A recognized saint of the Roman Catholic Church, she apparently used it for mystical purposes. To write it, she used an alphabet of 23 letters, the litterae ignotae.
She partially described the language in a work titled Lingua Ignota per simplicem hominem Hildegardem prolata, which survived in two manuscripts, both dating to ca. 1200, the Wiesbaden Codex and a Berlin MS. The text is a glossary of 1011 words in Lingua Ignota, with glosses mostly in Latin, sometimes in German; the words appear to be a priori coinages, mostly nouns with a few adjectives. Grammatically it appears to be a partial relexification of Latin, that is, a language formed by substituting new vocabulary into an existing grammar.
It is unknown what the precise purpose of Lingua Ignota was; nor do we know who besides its creator were familiar with it. In the 19th century some believed that Hildegard intended her language to be an ideal, universal language. However, nowadays it is generally assumed that Lingua Ignota was devised as a secret language; like Hildegard's "unheard music", it would have come to her by divine inspiration. Inasmuch as the language was constructed by Hildegard, it may be considered one of the earliest known constructed languages. Find out more...
July 2009
Kēlen is a constructed language created by Sylvia Sotomayor. It is possibly one of the most thorough attempts to create a truly alien language. It violates a key linguistic universal — namely that all human languages have verbs. In Kēlen, relationships between the noun phrases making up the sentence are expressed by one of four relationals. Despite this, Kēlen is an expressive and intelligible language; texts written in Kēlen have been translated into other languages by several people other than the creator of the language, as may be seen here. In this interview Sotomayor states that she aims for Kēlen to be naturalistic apart from its verblessness, and that to achieve this she employs the principle "change one thing and keep everything else the same".
In its concultural setting, Kēlen is spoken by an alien species (the Kēleñi). Find out more...
August 2009
Novial [nov- ("new") + IAL, International Auxiliary Language] is a constructed international auxiliary language (IAL) intended to facilitate international communication and friendship, without displacing anyone's native language. It was devised by Professor Otto Jespersen, a Danish linguist who was previously involved in the Ido movement, and subsequently in the development of Interlingua.
Its vocabulary is based largely on the Germanic and Romance languages and its grammar is influenced by English.
Novial was first introduced in Jespersen's book An International Language in 1928. It was updated in his dictionary, Novial Lexike, published two years later and further modifications were proposed in the 1930s, but the language became dormant with Jespersen's death in 1943. In the 1990s, with the revival of interest in constructed languages brought on by the Internet, some people rediscovered Novial. Find out more...
September 2009
Toki Pona is a constructed language first published online in mid-2001. It was designed by translator and linguist Sonja Elen Kisa of Toronto.
Toki Pona is a minimal language. Like a pidgin, it focuses on simple concepts and elements that are relatively universal among cultures. Kisa designed Toki Pona to express maximal meaning with minimal complexity. The language has 14 phonemes and 120 root words. It is not designed as an international auxiliary language but is instead inspired by Taoist philosophy, among other things.
The language is designed to shape the thought processes of its users, in the style of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in Zen-like fashion. This goal, together with Toki Pona's deliberately restricted vocabulary, has led some to feel that the language, whose name literally means "simple language", "good language", or "goodspeak", resembles George Orwell's fictional language Newspeak. Find out more...
October 2009
Solresol is an artificial language devised by François Sudre, beginning in 1827. He published his major book on it, Langue musicale universelle, in 1866, though he had already been publicizing it for some years. Solresol enjoyed a brief spell of popularity, reaching its pinnacle with Boleslas Gajewski's 1902 posthumous publication of Grammaire du Solresol.
Solresol words are made up of only seven different syllables. These syllables can be represented in a number of different ways — as musical notes of different pitch, as spoken syllables (based on solfège, a way of identifying musical notes), with colours, symbols, hand gestures etc. Thus, theoretically Solresol communication can be done through speaking, singing, flags of different color — even painting. Find out more...
November 2009
Baronh is an artificial language created by Japanese science fiction author Morioka Hiroyuki and used in Crest of the Stars and Banner of the Stars. The name Baronh means "language of the Abh".
The Baronh language is derived from the ancient Japanese language, spoken until the beginning of the ninth century and recorded in Kojiki, Man'yōshū and other ancient documents. It is not precisely the ancient language itself, but a reconstructed one which is named Takamagahara language after the mythological heaven in Kojiki. In Crest of the Stars, Japanese revolutionists seeking to remove foreign influence from the Japanese language created their own "purified" version, which removed borrowed words and expressions and revived ancient ones. It was these revolutionists who established the colony that created the Abh, giving them their language. After the Abh were freed from slavery, their language quickly, in a few generations, changed into the form seen in Morioka's works of fiction. Having not been allowed to write as slaves, the Abh previously had no writing system, and that is the biggest reason why this change proceeded so swiftly. In order to write Baronh, an alphabet called Ath, which means "letter", was created, based to some extent on the Japanese kana scripts. Find out more...
December 2009
Interlingua (ISO 639 language codes ia, ina) is an international auxiliary language (IAL), developed between 1937 and 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). It is the second or third most widely used IAL (after Esperanto and perhaps Ido) and the most widely used naturalistic IAL: in other words, its vocabulary, grammar and other characteristics are largely derived from natural languages. Interlingua was developed to combine a simple, mostly regular grammar with a vocabulary common to the widest possible range of languages, making it unusually easy to learn, at least for those whose native languages were sources of Interlingua's vocabulary and grammar. Conversely, it is used as a rapid introduction to many natural languages. Interlingua is also unusual for being immediately understandable to hundreds of millions of people who speak a Romance language. Find out more...
January 2010
Portal:Constructed languages/Language of the month/January 2010
February 2010
<phonos file="Eo-Esperanto.ogg">Esperanto</phonos> is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto, the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887. The word esperanto means "one who hopes" in the language itself. Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy to learn and politically neutral language that would serve as a universal second language to foster peace and international understanding. Esperanto has between 100,000 and 2 million speakers in about 115 countries, and approximately one thousand native speakers, i.e. people who learned Esperanto as one of their native languages from their parents. Although no country has adopted the language officially, Esperanto did get official recognition by UNESCO in 1954. Today, Esperanto is employed in world travel, correspondence, cultural exchange, conventions, literature, language instruction, television, movies, and radio broadcasting. Find out more...
March 2010
Wenedyk (in English: Venedic) is a naturalistic constructed language, created by the Dutch translator Jan van Steenbergen. It is used in the fictional Republic of the Two Crowns (based on the Republic of Two Nations), in the alternate timeline of Ill Bethisad. Officially, Wenedyk is a descendant of Vulgar Latin with a strong Slavic admixture, based on the premise that the Roman Empire incorporated the ancestors of the Poles in their territory. Less officially, it tries to show what Polish would have looked like if it had been a Romance instead of a Slavic language. An alternative Polish term for the language could thus be either polskowłoski, incorporating the term włoski, originally meaning Vlach but now applied in Polish to Italian, or polskoromański, literally "Polish-Romance". On the Internet, it is well-recognized as an example of the altlang genre, much like Brithenig and Breathanach. Find out more...
April 2010
Láadan is a constructed language created by Suzette Haden Elgin in 1982 to test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, specifically to determine if development of a language aimed at expressing the views of women would shape a culture; a subsidiary hypothesis was that Western natural languages may be better suited for expressing the views of men than women. The language was included in her science fiction Native Tongue series. Láadan contains a number of words that are used to make unambiguous statements that include how one feels about what one is saying. According to Elgin, this is designed to counter male-centred language's limitations on women, who are forced to respond "I know I said that, but I meant this". Find out more...
May 2010
Teonaht /ˈteɪ.oʊnɑːθ/ is a constructed language that has been developed since 1962 by science fiction writer and University of Rochester English professor Sarah Higley, under the pseudonym of Sally Caves. It is spoken in the fantasy setting of the Teonim, a race of polydactyl humans who have a cultural history of worshipping catlike deities.
Teonaht uses the Object Subject Verb (OSV) word order, which is rare in natural languages. An interesting feature of Teonaht is that the end of the sentence is the place of greatest emphasis, as what is mentioned last is uppermost in the mind. The language has a "Law of Detachment" whereby suffixes can be moved to the beginnings of words for emphasis and even attach onto other words such as pronouns.
Teonaht is a highly elaborated language, and many consider it one of the finest examples of an artistic language since the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. It is often cited as an example of the genre in articles on the world of Internet-hosted amateur conlanging. Find out more...
June 2010
Blissymbols or Blissymbolics were conceived of as an ideographic writing system consisting of several hundred basic symbols, each representing a concept, which can be composed together to generate new symbols that represent new concepts. Blissymbols differ from most of the world's major writing systems in that the characters do not correspond at all to the sounds of any spoken language.
They were invented by Charles K. Bliss (1897–1985) after the Second World War. Bliss wanted to create an easy-to-learn international auxiliary language to allow communication between people who do not speak the same language. He was inspired by Chinese characters (which are actually logograms rather than ideograms), with which Bliss became familiar while in the Shanghai Ghetto as a refugee from Nazi anti-semitic persecution. His system World Writing was explained in his work Semantography (1949). This work laid out the language structure and vocabulary for his utopian vision of easy communication, but it failed to gain popularity. Find out more...
July 2010
Zaum (Russian: заумь or заумный язык) is a word used to describe the linguistic experiments in sound symbolism and language creation of Russian Futurist poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh. Coined by Kruchenykh in 1913, the word zaum is made up of the Russian prefix за "beyond, behind" and noun ум "the mind, nous" and has been translated as "transreason" or "beyonsense" (Paul Schmidt). According to scholar Gerald Janecek, Zaum can be defined as an experimental poetic language characterized by indeterminacy in meaning.
As Kruchenykh has it, Zaum is a transrational language, "wild, flaming, explosive (wild paradise, fiery languages, blazing coal)," which awakens creative imagination from the manacles of everyday speech. Zaum "can provide a universal poetic language, born organically, and not artificially like Esperanto." Find out more...
August 2010
Slovianski (Словянски and Словјански in Cyrillic) is a Slavic interlanguage, created in 2006 by a group of language creators from different countries. Its purpose is to facilitate communication between representatives of different Slavic nations, as well as to allow people who don't know any Slavic language to communicate with Slavs. For the latter, it can fulfill an educational role as well.
Slovianski can be classified as a semi-artificial language. It has its roots in the various improvized language forms Slavs have been using for centuries to communicate with Slavs of other nationalities, for example in multi-Slavic environments and on the Internet. The purpose of Slovianski is to provide these with a scientific base. Thus, both grammar and vocabulary are based on the commonalities between the Slavic languages, and artificial elements are avoided. Its main focus lies on instant understandability rather than easy learning, which is a feature typical for naturalistic languages.
Slovianski can be written using the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabets. Find out more...
September 2010
Khuzdûl is a fictional language in the fantasy works of J. R. R. Tolkien. One of the languages of Arda in Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium, it is spoken by the Dwarves. Khuzdûl is usually written with the Cirth script. It appears to be based, like the Semitic languages, on triconsonantal roots: kh-z-d, b-n-d, z-g-l.
In the fictional setting of Middle-earth, little is known of Khuzdûl, as the Dwarves kept it to themselves, except for their battle-cry: Baruk Khazâd! Khazâd ai-mênu! meaning Axes of the Dwarves! The Dwarves are upon you!; and the runes written on Balin's tomb in Moria can be transliterated to read BALIN FUNDINUL UZBAD KHAZAD-DŪMU, meaning "Balin, son of Fundin, Lord of Moria". This secrecy extended to Dwarven names: with the exception of the Petty-dwarves, all recorded Dwarven names are either from another language (Dalish) or nicknames/titles, and Dwarves do not even record their names on their tombstones. Only few non-Dwarves are recorded as having learnt Khuzdûl, most notably Eöl. Find out more...
October 2010
Afrihili is a constructed language designed in 1970 by K. A. Kumi Attobrah to be used as a lingua franca in all of Africa. The name of the language is a combination of Africa and Swahili. The author, a native of Akrokerri in Ghana, originally conceived of the idea in 1967 while on a sea voyage from Dover to Calais. His intention was that "it would promote unity and understanding among the different peoples of the continent, reduce costs in printing due to translations and promote trade". It is meant to be easy for Africans to learn.
Afrihili draws its phonology, morphology and syntax from various African languages. The lexicon covers as many African languages as possible, as well as words from many other sources "so Africanized that they do not appear foreign", although no specific etymologies are indicated by the author. The language uses the Latin alphabet with the addition of two vowel symbols, ɛ and ɔ, which denote the same sounds as in IPA, namely open-mid front and back vowels, as in several Western African languages like Ewe and Yorùbá. Find out more...
November 2010
Basic English, also known as Simple English, is an English-based controlled language created (in essence as a simplified subset of English) by linguist and philosopher Charles Kay Ogden as an international auxiliary language, and as an aid for teaching English as a Second Language. It was presented in Ogden's book Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar (1930). Capitalised, BASIC is sometimes taken as an acronym that stands for British American Scientific International Commercial.
Ogden's Basic, and the concept of a simplified English, gained its greatest publicity just after the Allied victory in the Second World War as a tool for world peace. Although Basic English was not built into a program, similar simplifications have been devised for various international uses. Ogden's associate I. A. Richards promoted its use in schools in China. More recently, it has influenced the creation of Voice of America's Special English for news broadcasting, and Simplified English, another English-based controlled language designed to write technical manuals.
What survives today of Ogden's Basic English is the basic 850-word list used as the beginner's vocabulary of the English language taught worldwide, especially in Asia. Find out more...
December 2010
Sindarin is a fictional language in the fantasy works of J. R. R. Tolkien. One of the languages of Arda in Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium, it was the Elvish language most commonly spoken in Middle-earth in the Third Age. It was the language of the Sindar, those Teleri which had been left behind on the Great Journey of the Elves. It was derived from an earlier language called Common Telerin. Although the Telerin spoken in Aman remained relatively close to Quenya, Sindarin diverged significantly. When the Noldor returned to Middle-earth, they adopted the Sindarin language, although they believed their native Quenya more beautiful. Sindarin shared common roots with Quenya, and the two languages had many similar words. Sindarin was said to be more changeful than the older tongue, however, and there were a number of regional 'dialects' of the tongue. The Sindarin spoken in Doriath, known as the Doriathrin dialect, was said to be the highest and most noble form of the language. Find out more...
January 2011
The Talossan language (El Glheþ Talossan) is a constructed language created by R. Ben Madison in 1980 for the micronation he founded, the Kingdom of Talossa. Talossan is the best-known example of the micronational language genre of conlang. The language is spoken and used in the Kingdom of Talossa (El Regipäts Talossan), a "constitutional monarchy" with its own parliament and a bicameral legislature, founded by Madison on December 26, 1979, and also in the Talossan Republic (La Repúblicâ Talossán), formed in 2004 by ex-citizens of the Kingdom.
Talossan is one of the best-known artistic languages on the Internet. It garners perennial interest and respect from online conlangers and conlang aficionados. Of particular interest to them is its large vocabulary—with over 28,000 words in its official dictionary, it is one of the most detailed fictional languages ever invented.
The language is overseen by the Comità per l'Útzil del Glheþ (CÚG; the Committee for the Use of the Language), a group formed in the Kingdom of Talossa by Madison in the 1980s. This group periodically issues Arestadas (reformations) which describe and document changes in the usage of the language, and to the vocabulary. The Kingdom and the CÚG maintain extensive Webpages for language information, research, and online translation to and from English. Find out more...
February 2011
The language Occidental, later Interlingue, is a planned language created by the Balto-German naval officer and teacher Edgar de Wahl and published in 1922.
Occidental is devised so that many of its derived word forms reflect the similar forms common to a number of Western European languages. This was done through application of de Wahl's rule which is a set of rules for converting verb infinitives into derived nouns and adjectives. The result is a language easy to understand at first sight for individuals acquainted with several Western European languages. Coupled with a simplified grammar, this made Occidental exceptionally popular in Europe during the 15 years before World War II, and it is believed that it was at its height the fourth most popular planned language, after Volapük, Esperanto and perhaps Ido in order of appearance.
But some have believed that its intentional emphasis on European forms coupled with a Eurocentric philosophy espoused by several of its leading lights hindered its spread elsewhere. Still, Occidental gained adherents in many nations including Asian nations. Before WWII it had grown to become the second largest international auxiliary language in numbers of adherents, after Esperanto. A majority of Ido adherents took up Occidental in place of Ido.
Occidental survived World War II, undergoing a name change to Interlingue, but faded into insignificance following the appearance of a competing naturalistic project, Interlingua, in the early 1950s. Find out more...
March 2011
The Black Speech is a constructed language devised by J. R. R. Tolkien. One of the languages of Arda in Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium, it was spoken in the realm of Mordor. Tolkien describes the language as being created by Sauron as an artificial language to be the sole language of all the servants of Mordor, thereby replacing the many different varieties of Orkish and other languages used by his servants. Tolkien describes the language as existing in two forms, the ancient "pure" forms used by Sauron himself, the Nazgûl, and the Olog-hai, and the more "debased" form used by the soldiery of the Barad-dûr at the end of the Third Age.
For Black Speech, like for all the languages invented by Tolkien, we must distinguish two timelines of evolution:
- the external one, concern the evolving conceptions of the language, its actual development done by Tolkien;
- the internal one, deals with the fictional historical evolution of the language inside the imaginary world of "Middle-earth".
April 2011
Ro is an a priori constructed language created by Rev. Edward Powell Foster beginning in 1904. In Ro, words are constructed using a category system. For example, all words starting with "bofo-" signify colors; the word for red is "bofoc", and yellow is "bofof". Foster did not simply try to design a better language in general, but to optimize his language for one design criterion: recognizability of unknown words. Foster wrote about Ro:
- Ro did not begin with attempting to rival or supplant any other language whatever, either natural or artificial, nor was it suggested by any of them. Unexpectedly came the thought: "How strange it is that there is nothing in the appearance of a written or printed word that gives the slightest hint of its meaning. Why should a word not be a picture? A new word, never seen before would then, like a painting seen for the first time, convey at least some of the meaning to the eye."
After working on the language for about two years, Foster published the first booklet about Ro in 1906. Find out more...
May 2011
Volapük or Volapuk (/ˈvɒləpʊk/; [volaˈpyk]) is a constructed language, created in 1879–1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Roman Catholic priest in Baden, Germany. Schleyer felt that God had told him in a dream to create an international language. Volapük conventions took place in 1884 (Friedrichshafen), 1887 (Munich) and 1889 (Paris). The first two conventions used German, and the last conference used only Volapük. In 1889, there were an estimated 283 clubs, 25 periodicals in or about Volapük, and 316 textbooks in 25 languages. In 2000, it was estimated that there were 20–30 Volapük speakers in the world; the Yahoo Group for Volapük has over 200 members. Volapük was largely displaced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, specifically by Esperanto, Ido and Interlingua; all three have fewer distinct vowels, and are easier for English and Spanish speakers to pronounce. Find out more...
July 2011
Newspeak is a fictional language in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel, it refers to the deliberately impoverished language promoted by the state. Orwell included an essay about it in the form of an appendix in which the basic principles of the language are explained. Newspeak is closely based on English but has a greatly reduced and simplified vocabulary and grammar. This suits the totalitarian regime of the Party, whose aim is to make any alternative thinking—"thoughtcrime", or "crimethink" in the newest edition of Newspeak—impossible by removing any words or possible constructs which describe the ideas of freedom, rebellion and so on. One character, Syme, says admiringly of the shrinking volume of the new dictionary: "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."
The Newspeak term for the English language is Oldspeak. Oldspeak is intended to have been completely supplanted by Newspeak before 2050 (with the exception of the Proles, who are not trained in Newspeak and whom the Party barely regards as human).
The genesis of Newspeak can be found in the constructed language Basic English, which Orwell promoted from 1942 to 1944 before emphatically rejecting it in his essay "Politics and the English Language". Find out more...
August 2011
Loglan is a constructed language originally designed for linguistic research, particularly for investigating the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis. The language was developed beginning in 1955 by Dr James Cooke Brown with the goal of making a language so different from natural languages that people learning it would think in a different way if the hypothesis were true. Loglan is the first among, and the main inspiration for, the languages known as logical languages, which also includes Lojban and Ceqli.
Brown founded The Loglan Institute (TLI) to develop the language and other applications of it. He always considered the language an incomplete research project, and although he released many papers about its design, he continued to claim legal restrictions on its use. Because of this, a group of his followers later formed the Logical Language Group to create the language Lojban along the same principles, but with the intention to make it freely available and encourage its use as a real language. Supporters of Lojban use the term Loglan as a generic term to refer to both their own language, and Brown's Loglan, referred to as "TLI Loglan" when in need of disambiguation. Although the non-trademarkability of the term Loglan was eventually upheld by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, many supporters and members of The Loglan Institute find this usage offensive, and reserve Loglan for the TLI version of the language. Find out more...
September 2011
The Dothraki language is the constructed language of the Dothraki, the indigenous inhabitants of the Dothraki Sea in the series A Song of Ice and Fire written by George R. R. Martin. It was created by David J. Peterson, a member of the Language Creation Society, for HBO's television series Game of Thrones. Dothraki was designed to fit George R. R. Martin's original conception of the language, based upon the few extant phrases and words in his original books.
As of October 26th, 2010, there were already over 2,500 words in the lexicon, but only the creator knows its entire vocabulary and grammar. However, there is a growing community of Dothraki language fans, with websites like "Learn Dothraki" offering information on the state of the language.
The Dothraki vocabulary was created by Peterson well in advance of the adaptation. HBO hired the Language Creation Society to create the language, and after an application process involving over thirty conlangers, David Peterson was chosen to develop the Dothraki language. He delivered over 1700 words to HBO before the initial shooting. Peterson drew inspiration from George R.R. Martin’s description of the language, as well as from such languages as Russian, Turkish, Estonian, Inuktitut and Swahili. Find out more...
October 2011
The Latin term characteristica universalis, commonly interpreted as universal characteristic, or universal character in English, is a universal and formal language imagined by the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz able to express mathematical, scientific, and metaphysical concepts. Leibniz thus hoped to create a language usable within the framework of a universal logical calculation or calculus ratiocinator.
The characteristica universalis is a recurring concept in the writings of Gottfried Leibniz. When writing in French, he sometimes employed the phrase spécieuse générale to the same effect. The concept is sometimes paired with his notion of a calculus ratiocinator and with his plans for an encyclopaedia as a compendium of all human knowledge.
Many Leibniz scholars writing in English seem to agree that he intended his characteristica universalis or "universal character" to be a form of pasigraphy, or ideographic language. This was to be based on a rationalised version of the 'principles' of Chinese characters, as Europeans understood these characters in the seventeenth century. From this perspective it is common to find the characteristica universalis associated with contemporary universal language projects like Esperanto, auxiliary languages like Interlingua, and formal logic projects like Frege's Begriffsschrift. The global expansion of European commerce in Leibniz's time provided mercantilist motivations for a universal language of trade so that traders could communicate with any natural language. Find out more...
November 2011
Uropi is a constructed language which was created by Joël Landais, a French English teacher. Uropi is a synthesis of European languages, explicitly based on the common Indo-European roots and aims at being used as an international auxiliary language for Europe and thus contributing to building a European identity. Besides, given the spread of Indo-European languages outside Europe (today half the world population speaks an I-E language), Uropi can also be considered as an international auxiliary language.
Uropi was initiated in 1983; since then, it has undergone certain modifications; its vocabulary keeps growing (the French-Uropi dictionary has over 10,000 words). Uropi became known in Europe in the early '90s. Find out more...
December 2011
Ido /ˈiːdoʊ/ is a constructed language created with the goal of becoming a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds as a language easier to learn than ethnic languages. Unlike English, which is a natural and often irregular language, Ido was specifically designed for grammatical, orthographic, and lexicographical regularity, and to favor no one who might otherwise be advantaged in a situation due to native fluency in a widespread language. In this sense, Ido is classified as a consciously created International Auxiliary Language (conIAL). Many other reform projects appeared after Ido: examples such as Occidental and Novial appeared afterwards but have since faded into obscurity. At present, Ido is one of the three auxiliary languages (along with Esperanto and Interlingua) with a large body of literature and a relatively large speaker base.
Ido was developed in the early 1900s, and retains a following today, primarily in Europe. It is largely based on Esperanto, created by L. L. Zamenhof. Ido first appeared in 1907 as a result of a desire to reform perceived flaws in Esperanto that some of its supporters believed to be a hindrance in its propagation as an easy-to-learn second language. The name of the language traces its origin to the Esperanto/Ido word ido, meaning "offspring", since the language was a "descendant" of Esperanto. Find out more...
January 2012
Portal:Constructed languages/Language of the month/January 2012
February 2012
Quenya (pronounced [ˈkʷɛnja]) is a fictional language devised by J. R. R. Tolkien, and used in his Secondary world, often called Middle-earth. Quenya is one of the many Elvish languages spoken by the immortal Elves, called Quendi in Quenya. The tongue actually called Quenya was in origin the speech of two clans of Elves living in Eldamar ("Elvenhome"), the Noldor and the Vanyar. Quenya translates as simply "language", or in contrast to other tongues that the Elves met later in their long history "elf-language". In the Second Age the Wise of Númenor learned the Quenya tongue. In the Third Age, (the time of the setting of The Lord of the Rings) Quenya was no longer a living language for the Noldor of Middle-earth. Exilic Quenya was learned at an early age by all Elves of Noldorin origin, and it continued to be used in spoken and written form, but their mother-tongue was another Elven-tongue, Sindarin.
Tolkien began with devising the language at around 1910 and re-structured the grammar four times until Quenya reached its final state. The vocabulary however remained relatively stable throughout the creation process. Also the name of the language itself was repeatedly changed by Tolkien from Elfin and Qenya to the eventual Quenya. The Finnish language has been a major source of inspiration but Tolkien also knew about Latin, Greek and ancient Germanic languages when he began constructing Quenya. Another notable feature of Tolkien's Elvish language was his development of a complex internal history of characters to speak that language in their own fictional universe since he felt an aesthetic need to provide a historical background for the language itself. Find out more...
March 2012
Ithkuil is a constructed language marked by outstanding grammatical complexity, expressed with a rich phonemic inventory or through an original, graphically structured, system of writing. The language’s author, John Quijada, presents Ithkuil as a cross between an a priori philosophical and a logical language designed to express deeper levels of human cognition overtly and clearly, particularly in regard to human categorization, yet briefly. It also strives to minimize the ambiguities and semantic vagueness found in natural human languages. The many examples from the original grammar book show that a message, like a meaningful phrase or a sentence, can usually be expressed in Ithkuil with fewer sounds, or lexically distinct speech-elements, than in natural human languages. J. Quijada deems his creation too complex and strictly regular a language to have developed “naturally”, but nonetheless a language suited for human conversation. No person is hitherto known to be able to speak Ithkuil fluently; Quijada, for one, does not. Find out more...
April 2012
Lingua Franca Nova (abbreviated LFN) is an auxiliary constructed language created by Dr. C. George Boeree of Shippensburg University, Pennsylvania. Its vocabulary is based on the Romance languages French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. The grammar is highly reduced and similar to the Romance creoles. The language has phonemic spelling, using 22 letters of either the Latin or Cyrillic scripts.
Boeree began working on LFN in 1965, with the goal to create a simple, creole-like international auxiliary language. He was inspired by the Mediterranean Lingua Franca, a pidgin used in the Mediterranean in centuries past, and by creoles such as Papiamento, Haitian Creole, and Bislama. He used French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan as the basis for his new language. LFN was first presented on the Internet in 1998. A Yahoo! Group was formed in 2002 by Bjorn Madsen and today has more than 250 members. Group members have contributed significantly to the further evolution of the language. Stefan Fisahn created a wiki for the language in 2005. A few issues of a journal called Orizones Nova (New Horizons) were published online by David MacLeod in late 2006 and early 2007. Also in 2007, Igor Vasiljevic began a Facebook page, which now has over 70 members. LFN was given an ISO 639-3 designation (lfn) by SIL in January 2008. Find out more...
May 2012
Brithenig is an invented language, or constructed language ("conlang"). It was created as a hobby in 1996 by Andrew Smith from New Zealand, who also invented the alternate history of Ill Bethisad to "explain" it. Brithenig was not developed to be used in the real world, like Esperanto or Interlingua, nor to provide detail to a work of fiction, like Klingon from the Star Trek scenarios. Rather, Brithenig started as a thought experiment to create a Romance language that might have evolved if Latin had displaced the native Celtic language as the spoken language of the people in Great Britain. The result is a sister language to French, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and Italian, albeit a test-tube child, which differs from them by having sound-changes similar to those that affected the Welsh language, and words that are borrowed from Brythonic and from English throughout its pseudo-history. One important distinction between Brithenig and Welsh is that while Welsh is P-Celtic, Latin was a Q-Italic language (as opposed to P-Italic, like Oscan), and this trait was passed onto Brithenig. Find out more...
June 2012
Lojban (pronounced locally: [ˈloʒban] (
listen)) is a constructed, syntactically unambiguous human language based on predicate logic, succeeding the project of Loglan. The name "Lojban" is a combination of loj and ban, which are short forms of logji (logic) and bangu (language), respectively.
Development of the language began in 1987 by The Logical Language Group (LLG), who intended to realize Loglan's purposes as well as further complement the language by making it more usable, and freely available (as indicated by its official full English name "Lojban: a realization of Loglan"). After a long initial period of debating and testing, the baseline was completed in 1998 with the publication of The Complete Lojban Language. In an interview in 2010 with the New York Times, Arika Okrent, the author of In the Land of Invented Languages, stated: "The constructed language with the most complete grammar is probably Lojban – a language created to reflect the principles of logic." The main sources of its basic vocabulary were the six (at the time) most widely spoken languages: Mandarin, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic, chosen to reduce the unfamiliarity or strangeness of the root words to people of diverse linguistic backgrounds. The language has drawn on other constructed languages' components, a notable instance of which is Láadan's set of indicators. Find out more...
July 2012
A Lingua Ignota (Latin for "unknown language") was described by the 12th century abbess of Rupertsberg, Hildegard of Bingen, who apparently used it for mystical purposes. To write it, she used an alphabet of 23 letters, the litterae ignotae. She partially described the language in a work titled Lingua Ignota per simplicem hominem Hildegardem prolata, which survived in two manuscripts, both dating to ca. 1200, the Wiesbaden Codex and a Berlin MS. The text is a glossary of 1011 words in Lingua Ignota, with glosses mostly in Latin, sometimes in German; the words appear to be a priori coinages, mostly nouns with a few adjectives. Grammatically it appears to be a partial relexification of Latin, that is, a language formed by substituting new vocabulary into an existing grammar.
The purpose of Lingua Ignota is unknown; nor do we know who besides its creator was familiar with it. In the 19th century some believed that Hildegard intended her language to be an ideal, universal language. However, nowadays it is generally assumed that Lingua Ignota was devised as a secret language; like Hildegard's "unheard music", it would have come to her by divine inspiration. Inasmuch as the language was constructed by Hildegard, it may be considered one of the earliest known constructed languages.
August 2012
Kēlen is a constructed language created by Sylvia Sotomayor. It is an attempt to create a truly alien language by violating a key linguistic universal — namely that all human languages have verbs. In Kēlen, relationships between the noun phrases making up the sentence are expressed by one of four relationals. Despite this, Kēlen is an expressive and intelligible language; texts written in Kēlen have been translated into other languages by several people other than the creator of the language, as may be seen here. In this interview Sotomayor states that she aims for Kēlen to be naturalistic apart from its verblessness, and that to achieve this she employs the principle "change one thing and keep everything else the same".
In its concultural setting, Kēlen is spoken by an alien species (the Kēleñi). Find out more...
September 2012
Novial [nov- ("new") + IAL, International Auxiliary Language] is a constructed international auxiliary language (IAL) intended to facilitate international communication and friendship, without displacing anyone's native language. It was devised by Professor Otto Jespersen, a Danish linguist who was previously involved in the Ido movement, and subsequently in the development of Interlingua.
Its vocabulary is based largely on the Germanic and Romance languages and its grammar is influenced by English.
Novial was first introduced in Jespersen's book An International Language in 1928. It was updated in his dictionary, Novial Lexike, published two years later and further modifications were proposed in the 1930s, but the language became dormant with Jespersen's death in 1943. In the 1990s, with the revival of interest in constructed languages brought on by the Internet, some people rediscovered Novial. Find out more...
October 2012
Toki Pona is a constructed language, first published online in mid-2001. It was designed by translator and linguist Sonja Elen Kisa of Toronto.
Toki Pona is a minimal language. Like a pidgin, it focuses on simple concepts and elements that are relatively universal among cultures. Kisa designed Toki Pona to express maximal meaning with minimal complexity. The language has 14 phonemes and 123 root words. It is not designed as an international auxiliary language but is instead inspired by Taoist philosophy, among other things.
The language is designed to shape the thought processes of its users, in the style of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis in Zen-like fashion. This goal, together with Toki Pona's deliberately restricted vocabulary, has led some to feel that the language, whose name literally means "simple language", "good language", or "goodspeak", resembles George Orwell's fictional language Newspeak. Find out more...
November 2012
Solresol is a constructed language devised by François Sudre, beginning in 1827. His major book on it, Langue musicale universelle, was published after his death in 1866, though he had already been publicizing it for some years. Solresol enjoyed a brief spell of popularity, reaching its pinnacle with Boleslas Gajewski's 1902 posthumous publication of Grammaire du Solresol.
The teaching of sign languages to the deaf was discouraged between 1880 and 1991 in France, contributing to Solresol's descent into obscurity. After a few years of popularity, Solresol nearly vanished in the face of more successful languages, such as Volapük and Esperanto. There is still a small community of Solresol enthusiasts scattered across the world, better able to communicate with one another now more than before thanks to the Internet. Find out more...
December 2012
Simlish is a fictional language featured in EA Games' Sim series of games. It debuted in SimCopter, and has been especially prominent in The Sims, The Sims 2 and The Sims 3. The Sims development team created the unique Simlish language by experimenting with fractured Ukrainian, French, Latin, Finnish, English, Fijian and Tagalog. Simlish can also be heard in SimCity 4 and SimCity Societies, but far less frequently. Civilized Creatures in Spore can also be taught to speak Simlish. It is also featured to an extent in the Firaxis game Sid Meier's SimGolf. Designer Will Wright was conscious of the need for dialogue in the game, but thought that using a real language would make it sound too repetitive and would also be too costly to hire translators for world languages.
January 2013
Baronh is a fictional language created by Japanese science fiction author Morioka Hiroyuki and used in Crest of the Stars and Banner of the Stars. The name Baronh means "language of the Abh".
The Baronh language is derived from the ancient Japanese language, spoken until the beginning of the ninth century and recorded in Kojiki, Man'yōshū and other ancient documents. It is not precisely the ancient language itself, but a reconstructed one which is named Takamagahara language after the mythological heaven in Kojiki. In Crest of the Stars, Japanese revolutionists seeking to remove foreign influence from the Japanese language created their own "purified" version, which removed borrowed words and expressions and revived ancient ones. It was these revolutionists who established the colony that created the Abh, giving them their language. After the Abh were freed from slavery, their language quickly, in a few generations, changed into the form seen in Morioka's works of fiction. Having not been allowed to write as slaves, the Abh previously had no writing system, and that is the biggest reason why this change proceeded so swiftly. In order to write Baronh, an alphabet called Ath, which means "letter", was created, based to some extent on the Japanese kana. Find out more...
February 2013
Interlingua (/ɪntərˈlɪŋɡwə/; ISO 639 language codes ia, ina) is an international auxiliary language (IAL), developed between 1937 and 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). It ranks among the top three most widely used IALs (after Esperanto and perhaps Ido), and is the most widely used naturalistic IAL: in other words, its vocabulary, grammar and other characteristics are largely derived from natural languages. Interlingua was developed to combine a simple, mostly regular grammar with a vocabulary common to the widest possible range of languages, making it unusually easy to learn, at least for those whose native languages were sources of Interlingua's vocabulary and grammar. Conversely, it is used as a rapid introduction to many natural languages. Interlingua literature maintains that (written) Interlingua is comprehensible to the hundreds of millions of people who speak a Romance language, though it is actively spoken by only a few hundred.
The name Interlingua comes from the Latin words inter, meaning between, and lingua, meaning tongue or language. These morphemes are identical in Interlingua. Thus, Interlingua would be "between language", or intermediary language. Find out more...
March 2013
The Naʼvi language is the constructed language of the Naʼvi, the sapient humanoid indigenous inhabitants of the fictional moon Pandora in the 2009 film Avatar. It was created by Paul Frommer, a professor at the USC Marshall School of Business with a doctorate in linguistics. Naʼvi was designed to fit James Cameron's conception of what the language should sound like in the film, to be realistically learnable by the fictional human characters of the film, and to be pronounceable by the actors, but to not closely resemble any single human language. When the film was released in 2009, Naʼvi had a growing vocabulary of about a thousand words, but understanding of its grammar was limited to the language's creator.
However, this has changed subsequently as Frommer has expanded the lexicon to more than 1,500 words and has published the grammar, thus making Naʼvi a relatively complete and learnable language. Find out more...
April 2013
<phonos file="Eo-Esperanto.ogg">Esperanto</phonos> is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto ("Esperanto" translates as "one who hopes"), the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, on July 26, 1887. Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy-to-learn and politically neutral language that transcends nationality and would foster peace and international understanding between people with different regional and/or national languages. Nowadays Esperanto is seen by Esperantists as an alternative to the all-in-English spreading the world. Esperanto is found as an ethical solution (for the threat about the cultural and linguistic diversity related to the expansion of English as well as an economical alternative (for foreigners the learning of Esperanto is much easier than the learning of English). Estimates of Esperanto speakers range from 10,000 to 2,000,000 active or fluent speakers, as well as perhaps a thousand native speakers, that is, people who learned Esperanto from birth as one of their native languages. Find out more...
May 2013
Wenedyk (in English: Venedic) is a naturalistic constructed language, created by the Dutch translator Jan van Steenbergen (who also co-created the international auxiliary language Slovianski). It is used in the fictional Republic of the Two Crowns (based on the Republic of Two Nations), in the alternate timeline of Ill Bethisad. Officially, Wenedyk is a descendant of Vulgar Latin with a strong Slavic admixture, based on the premise that the Roman Empire incorporated the ancestors of the Poles in their territory. Less officially, it tries to show what Polish would have looked like if it had been a Romance instead of a Slavic language. An alternative Polish term for the language could thus be either polskowłoski, incorporating the term włoski, originally meaning Vlach but now applied in Polish to Italian, or polskoromański, literally "Polish-Romance". On the Internet, it is well-recognized as an example of the altlang genre, much like Brithenig and Breathanach. Find out more...
June 2013
Europanto is a macaronic language concept with a fluid vocabulary from multiple European languages of the user's choice or need. It was conceived in 1996 by Diego Marani (a journalist, author and translator for the European Council of Ministers in Brussels) based on the common practice of word-borrowing usage of many EU languages. Marani used it in response to the perceived dominance of the English language; it is an emulation of the effect that non-native speakers struggling to learn a language typically add words and phrases from their native language to express their meanings clearly.
The main concept of Europanto is that there are no fixed rules — merely a set of suggestions. This means that anybody can start to speak Europanto immediately; on the other hand, it is the speaker's responsibility to draw on an assumed common vocabulary and grammar to communicate.
Marani wrote regular newspaper columns about the language and published a novel using it. As of 2005, he no longer actively promotes it.
The language's name "europanto" is a portmanteau of Europa (the word for Europe in some European languages) and the Greek root πάντ- ("pant-"; in English "all", "whole") and bears an intentional similarity with the name of the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language Esperanto. Find out more...
July 2013
Kotava is a proposed international auxiliary language (IAL) that focuses especially on the principle of cultural neutrality. The name means "the language of one and all," and the Kotava community has adopted the slogan "a project humanistic and universal, utopian and realistic."
Kotava was invented by Staren Fetcey, who began the project in 1975, on the basis of her study of previous IAL projects. The language was first made available to the public in 1978, and two major revisions were made in 1988 and 1993. Since then, the language has stabilized, with a lexicon of more than 17,000 basic roots. In 2005, a committee of seven members was established with the responsibility of guiding the future evolution of the language.
The overall goal was to create a potential IAL that was not based on a particular cultural substrate. Find out more...
August 2013
Láadan is a constructed language created by Suzette Haden Elgin in 1982 to test the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis, specifically to determine if development of a language aimed at expressing the views of women would shape a culture; a subsidiary hypothesis was that Western natural languages may be better suited for expressing the views of men than women. The language was included in her science fiction Native Tongue series. Láadan contains a number of words that are used to make unambiguous statements that include how one feels about what one is saying. According to Elgin, this is designed to counter male-centered language's limitations on women, who are forced to respond "I know I said that, but I meant this".
Unusual for constructed languages, Láadan is a tonal language. Find out more...
September 2013
Teonaht /ˈteɪ.oʊnɑːθ/, winner of the 2007 Smiley Award, is a constructed language that has been developed since 1962 by science fiction writer and University of Rochester English professor Sarah Higley, under the pseudonym of Sally Caves. It is spoken in the fantasy setting of the Teonim, a race of polydactyl humans who have a cultural history of worshiping catlike deities.
Teonaht uses the object–subject–verb (OSV) word order, which is rare in natural languages. An interesting feature of Teonaht is that the end of the sentence is the place of greatest emphasis, as what is mentioned last is uppermost in the mind. The language has a "Law of Detachment" whereby suffixes can be moved to the beginnings of words for emphasis and even attach onto other words such as pronouns.
Teonaht is often cited as an example of the genre in articles on the world of Internet-hosted amateur conlanging. Find out more...
October 2013
Blissymbols or Blissymbolics was conceived as an ideographic writing system called Semantography consisting of several hundred basic symbols, each representing a concept, which can be composed together to generate new symbols that represent new concepts. Blissymbols differ from most of the world's major writing systems in that the characters do not correspond at all to the sounds of any spoken language.
Blissymbols was invented by Charles K. Bliss (1897–1985), born Karl Kasiel Blitz in the Austro-Hungarian city of Czernowitz (at present the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi), which had a mixture of different nationalities that “hated each other, mainly because they spoke and thought in different languages.” Bliss graduated as a chemical engineer at the Vienna University of Technology, and joined an electronics company as a research chemist. As the German Army invaded Austria in 1938, he was sent to the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. His German wife Claire managed to get him released, and they finally became exiles in Shanghai, where Bliss had a cousin. Bliss devised Blissymbols while a refugee at the Shanghai Ghetto and Sydney, from 1942 to 1949. He wanted to create an easy-to-learn international auxiliary language to allow communication between different linguistic communities. He was inspired by Chinese characters, with which he became familiar at Shanghai. Find out more...
November 2013
Zaum (Russian: зáумь) is a word used to describe the linguistic experiments in sound symbolism and language creation of Russian Futurist poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh.
Coined by Kruchenykh in 1913, the word zaum is made up of the Russian prefix за "beyond, behind" and noun ум "the mind, nous" and has been translated as "transreason", "transration" or "beyonsense" (Paul Schmidt).
Kruchenykh, in Declaration of the Word as Such (1913), declares zaum "a language which does not have any definite meaning, a transrational language" that "allows for fuller expression" whereas, he maintains, the common language of everyday speech "binds". He further maintained, in Declaration of Transrational Language (1921), that zaum "can provide a universal poetic language, born organically, and not artificially, like Esperanto." Find out more...
December 2013
Slovianski (Словянски and Словјански in Cyrillic) is a Slavic interlanguage, created in 2006 by a group of language creators from different countries. Its purpose is to facilitate communication between representatives of different Slavic nations, as well as to allow people who don't know any Slavic language to communicate with Slavs. For the latter, it can fulfill an educational role as well. It is spoken by 2000 people.
Slovianski can be classified as a semi-artificial language. It has its roots in the various improvised language forms Slavs have been using for centuries to communicate with Slavs of other nationalities, for example in multi-Slavic environments and on the Internet. The purpose of Slovianski is to provide these with a scientific base. Thus, both grammar and vocabulary are based on the commonalities between the Slavic languages, and artificial elements are avoided. Its main focus lies on instant understandability rather than easy learning, which is a feature typical for naturalistic languages. Find out more...
January 2014
Khuzdul is a constructed language devised by J. R. R. Tolkien. It is one of the many fictional languages set in Middle-earth. It was the secret language of the dwarves.
Tolkien noted some similarities between Dwarves and Jews: both were "at once natives and aliens in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue…". Tolkien also commented of the Dwarves that "their words are Semitic obviously, constructed to be Semitic." Tolkien based Dwarvish language on the Semitic languages. Like these, Khuzdul has triconsonantal roots: kh-z-d, b-n-d, z-g-l. Also other similarities to Hebrew in phonology and morphology have been observed.
Although only a very limited vocabulary is known, Tolkien mentioned that he had developed the language to a certain extent. It is unknown whether such writings still exist.
In the fictional setting of Middle-earth, little is known of Khuzdul (once written Khuzdûl), for the Dwarves kept it secret, except for place names and a few phrases such as their battle-cry: Baruk Khazâd! Khazâd ai-mênu! meaning Axes of the Dwarves! The Dwarves are upon you! Find out more...
February 2014
Afrihili (Ni Afrihili Oluga 'the Afrihili language') is a constructed language designed in 1970 by Ghanaian historian K. A. Kumi Attobrah (Kumi Atɔbra) to be used as a lingua franca in all of Africa. The name of the language is a combination of Africa and Swahili. The author, a native of Akrokerri (Akrokɛri) in Ghana, originally conceived of the idea in 1967 while on a sea voyage from Dover to Calais. His intention was that "it would promote unity and understanding among the different peoples of the continent, reduce costs in printing due to translations and promote trade". It is meant to be easy for Africans to learn.
Afrihili draws its phonology, morphology and syntax from various African languages, particularly Swahili and Akan. The lexicon covers various African languages, as well as words from many other sources "so Africanized that they do not appear foreign", although no specific etymologies are indicated by the author. However, the semantics is quite English, with many calques of English expressions, perhaps due to the strong English influence on written Swahili and Akan. For example, mu is 'in', to is 'to', and muto is 'into'; similarly, kupitia is 'through' (as in 'through this remedy'), paasa is 'out' (as in to go outside), and kupitia-paasa is 'throughout'—at least in the original, 1970 version of the language. Find out more...
March 2014
Basic English is an English-based controlled language created by linguist and philosopher Charles Kay Ogden as an international auxiliary language, and as an aid for teaching English as a second language. Basic English is, in essence, a simplified subset of regular English. It was presented in Ogden's book Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar (1930). Capitalised, BASIC is sometimes taken as an acronym that stands for British American Scientific International Commercial.
Ogden's Basic, and the concept of a simplified English, gained its greatest publicity just after the Allied victory in the Second World War as a means for world peace. Although Basic English was not built into a program, similar simplifications have been devised for various international uses. Ogden's associate I. A. Richards promoted its use in schools in China. More recently, it has influenced the creation of Voice of America's Special English for news broadcasting, and Simplified English, another English-based controlled language designed to write technical manuals.
What survives today of Ogden's Basic English is the basic 850-word list used as the beginner's vocabulary of the English language taught worldwide, especially in Asia. Find out more...
April 2014
Sindarin is a fictional language devised by J. R. R. Tolkien for use in his secondary world known as Middle-earth. Sindarin is one of the many languages spoken by the immortal Elves, called the Eledhrim [ˈɛlɛðrim] or Edhellim [ɛˈðɛllim] in Sindarin. The word Sindarin is itself a Quenya form. The only known Sindarin word for this language is Eglathrin. It was probably only used in the First Age (see Eglath).
Called in English "Grey-elvish" or "Grey-elven", it was the language of the Sindarin Elves of Beleriand. These were Elves of the Third Clan who remained behind in Beleriand after the Great Journey. Their language became estranged from that of their kin who sailed over sea. Sindarin derives from an earlier form of language called Common Telerin which itself had evolved from Common Eldarin, the tongue of the Eldar before their divisions, e.g. those Elves who decided to follow the Vala Oromë and undertook the Great March to Valinor. Even before that the Eldar Elves spoke the original speech of all Elves, or Primitive Quendian.
In the Third Age (the setting of The Lord of the Rings), Sindarin was the language most commonly spoken by most Elves in the Western part of Middle-earth. Sindarin is the language usually referred to as the elf-tongue or elven-tongue in The Lord of the Rings. When the Quenya-speaking Noldor returned to Middle-earth, they adopted the Sindarin language. Quenya and Sindarin were related, with many cognate words but differing greatly in grammar and structure. Find out more...
May 2014
The language Occidental, later Interlingue, is a planned international auxiliary language created by the Balto-German naval officer and teacher Edgar de Wahl, and published in 1922. The vocabulary is based on already existing international words. The language is thereby naturalistic, at the same time as it is constructed to be regular. Occidental was quite popular in the years before the Second World War, but declined in the years thereafter.
Occidental is devised so that many of its derived word forms reflect the similar forms common to a number of Western European languages, primarily those in the Romance family. This was done through application of De Wahl's rule which is a set of rules for converting verb infinitives into derived nouns and adjectives. The result is a language easy to understand at first sight for individuals acquainted with several Western European languages. Coupled with a simplified grammar, this made Occidental exceptionally popular in Europe during the 15 years before World War II. Find out more...
June 2014
The Talossan language (El Glheþ Talossan) is a constructed language created by R. Ben Madison in 1980 for the micronation he founded, the Kingdom of Talossa. The Association of Talossan Language Organisations (ATLO) maintains talossan.com, a website describing the language for new learners, providing language information, research, and online translation to and from English.
Talossan is perhaps one of the best-known examples of the micronational language genre of conlang. The language is spoken and used in the Kingdom of Talossa (El Regipäts Talossan), a "constitutional monarchy" with its own parliament and a bicameral legislature, founded by Madison on December 26, 1979. Talossan is also one of the best-known artistic languages on the Internet. It garners perennial interest and respect from online conlangers and conlang aficionados. Of particular interest to them is its large vocabulary—with over 28,000 words in its official dictionary, it is one of the most detailed fictional languages ever invented.
The language is overseen by the Comità per l'Útzil del Glheþ (CÚG; the Committee for the Use of the Language), a group formed in the Kingdom of Talossa by Madison in the 1980s. Find out more...
July 2014
Volapük (/ˈvɒləpʊk/ in English; [volaˈpyk] in Volapük) is a constructed language, created in 1879–1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Roman Catholic priest in Baden, Germany. Schleyer felt that God had told him in a dream to create an international language. Volapük conventions took place in 1884 (Friedrichshafen), 1887 (Munich) and 1889 (Paris). The first two conventions used German, and the last conference used only Volapük. In 1889, there were an estimated 283 clubs, 25 periodicals in or about Volapük, and 316 textbooks in 25 languages; at that time the language claimed nearly a million adherents. Volapük was largely displaced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Esperanto and Ido.
Schleyer first published a sketch of Volapük in May 1879 in Sionsharfe, a Catholic poetry magazine of which he was editor. This was followed in 1880 by a full-length book in German. Schleyer himself did not write books on Volapük in other languages, but other authors soon did. Find out more...
August 2014
Newspeak is the fictional language in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, written by George Orwell. It is a controlled language created by the totalitarian state as a tool to limit freedom of thought, and concepts that pose a threat to the regime such as freedom, self-expression, individuality, and peace. Any form of thought alternative to the party’s construct is classified as a "thoughtcrime".
Newspeak is explained in chapters 4 and 5 of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and in an appendix to the book. The language follows, for the most part, the same grammatical rules as English, but has a much more limiting, and constantly shifting vocabulary. Any synonyms or antonyms, along with undesirable concepts are eradicated. The goal is for everyone to be speaking this language by the year 2050 (the story is set in the year 1984 — hence the title). In the mean time, Oldspeak (current English) is still spoken among the Proles — the working-class citizens of Oceania.
Orwell was inspired to invent Newspeak by the constructed language Basic English, which he promoted from 1942 to 1944 before emphatically rejecting it in his essay "Politics and the English Language". Find out more...
September 2014
Loglan is a constructed language originally designed for linguistic research, particularly for investigating the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis. The language was developed beginning in 1955 by Dr James Cooke Brown with the goal of making a language so different from natural languages that people learning it would think in a different way if the hypothesis were true. In 1960 Scientific American published an article introducing the language. Loglan is the first among, and the main inspiration for, the languages known as logical languages, which also includes Lojban and Ceqli.
Brown founded The Loglan Institute (TLI) to develop the language and other applications of it. He always considered the language an incomplete research project, and although he released many papers about its design, he continued to claim legal restrictions on its use. Because of this, a group of his followers later formed the Logical Language Group to create the language Lojban along the same principles, but with the intention to make it freely available and encourage its use as a real language. Find out more...
October 2014
The Dothraki language is a constructed fictional language in George R. R. Martin's fantasy novel series A Song of Ice and Fire and its television adaptation Game of Thrones, where it is spoken by the Dothraki, the indigenous inhabitants of the Dothraki Sea. The language was developed for the TV series by the linguist David J. Peterson based on the Dothraki words and phrases in Martin's novels.
As of September 2011[update], the language comprised 3,163 words, not all of which have been made public. In 2012, 146 newborn girls in the U.S. were named "Khaleesi", the Dothraki term for the wife of a khal or ruler, and the title adopted in the series by Daenerys Targaryen.
The Dothraki vocabulary was created by Peterson well in advance of the adaptation. HBO hired the Language Creation Society to create the language, and after an application process involving over thirty conlangers, David Peterson was chosen to develop the Dothraki language. He delivered over 1700 words to HBO before the initial shooting. Peterson drew inspiration from George R. R. Martin’s description of the language, as well as from such languages as Turkish, Russian, Estonian, Inuktitut and Swahili. David J. Peterson and his development of the Dothraki language were featured on an April 8, 2012 episode of CNN's The Next List. He went on to create the Valyrian languages for season 3 of Game of Thrones. Find out more...
November 2014
The Latin term characteristica universalis, commonly interpreted as universal characteristic, or universal character in English, is a universal and formal language imagined by the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz able to express mathematical, scientific, and metaphysical concepts. Leibniz thus hoped to create a language usable within the framework of a universal logical calculation or calculus ratiocinator. The characteristica universalis is a recurring concept in the writings of Gottfried Leibniz. When writing in French, he sometimes employed the phrase spécieuse générale to the same effect. The concept is sometimes paired with his notion of a calculus ratiocinator and with his plans for an encyclopaedia as a compendium of all human knowledge.
Many Leibniz scholars writing in English seem to agree that he intended his characteristica universalis or "universal character" to be a form of pasigraphy, or ideographic language. This was to be based on a rationalised version of the 'principles' of Chinese characters, as Europeans understood these characters in the seventeenth century. From this perspective it is common to find the characteristica universalis associated with contemporary universal language projects like Esperanto, auxiliary languages like Interlingua, and formal logic projects like Frege's Begriffsschrift. The global expansion of European commerce in Leibniz's time provided mercantilist motivations for a universal language of trade so that traders could communicate with any natural language. Find out more...
December 2014
Ido /ˈiːdoʊ/ is a language created to be a universal second language for speakers of diverse backgrounds. Ido was specifically designed to be grammatically, orthographically, and lexicographically regular, and above all easy to learn and use. In this sense, Ido is classified as a constructed international auxiliary language.
Ido was created in 1907 out of a desire to reform flaws in Esperanto, a language that had been created for the same purpose 20 years earlier. The name of the language traces its origin to the Esperanto word ido, meaning "offspring", since the language is a "descendant" of Esperanto. After its inception, Ido gained support from some in the Esperanto community, but following the sudden death in 1914 of one of its most influential proponents, Louis Couturat, it declined in popularity. There were two reasons for this: first, the emergence of further schisms arising from competing reform projects; and second, a general lack of awareness of Ido as a candidate for an international language. These obstacles weakened the movement and it was not until the rise of the Internet that it began to regain momentum. As of the year 2000, there were approximately 100–200 Ido speakers in the world. Find out more...
January 2015
Quenya (pronounced [ˈkwɛnja]) is a fictional language devised by J. R. R. Tolkien, and used by the Elves in his fictional universe that is commonly known as Middle-earth.
Tolkien began devising the language at around 1910 and re-structured the grammar several times until Quenya reached its final state. The vocabulary remained relatively stable throughout the creation process. Also the name of the language was repeatedly changed by Tolkien from Elfin and Qenya to the eventual Quenya. The Finnish language had been a major source of inspiration, but Tolkien was also familiar with Latin, Greek and ancient Germanic languages when he began constructing Quenya. Another notable feature of Tolkien's Elvish languages was his development of a complex internal history of characters to speak those tongues in their own fictional universe since he felt that, as with the historical languages he studied professionally, his languages changed and developed over time not in a vacuum, but as a result of the migrations and interactions of the peoples who spoke them.
Within Tolkien's fictive universe, Quenya is one of the many Elvish languages spoken by the immortal Elves, called Quendi ('speakers') in Quenya. Quenya translates as simply "language", or, in contrast to other tongues that the Elves met later in their long history, "elf-language". Find out more...
February 2015
Ithkuil is a constructed language created by John Quijada, designed to express deeper levels of human cognition briefly yet overtly and clearly, particularly with regard to human categorization. Ithkuil is notable for its grammatical complexity and extensive phoneme inventory. The name "Ithkuil" is an anglicized form of Iţkuîl, which in the original form roughly means "hypothetical representation of a language".
Ithkuil is presented as a cross between an a priori philosophical and a logical language. It strives to minimize the ambiguities and semantic vagueness found in natural human languages.
The many examples from the original grammar book show that a message, like a meaningful phrase or a sentence, can usually be expressed in Ithkuil with fewer sounds, or lexically distinct speech-elements, than in natural human languages. Quijada deems his creation too complex and strictly regular a language to have developed naturally, but nonetheless a language suited to human conversation. No person, including Quijada, is known to be able to speak Ithkuil fluently. Find out more...
March 2015
Lingua Franca Nova (or Elefen) is an auxiliary constructed language originally created by C. George Boeree of Shippensburg University, Pennsylvania. Its vocabulary is based on the Romance languages French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. The grammar is highly reduced and similar to the Romance creoles. The language has phonemic spelling, using 22 letters of either the Latin or Cyrillic scripts.
Boeree was inspired by the Mediterranean Lingua Franca, a pidgin used in the Mediterranean in centuries past, and by creoles such as Papiamento, Haitian Creole, and Bislama. He used French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan as the basis for his new language.
LFN was first presented on the Internet in 1998. A Yahoo! Group was formed in 2002 by Bjorn Madsen and has more than 250 members. Group members have contributed significantly to the further evolution of the language. In 2007, Igor Vasiljevic began a Facebook page, which has over 200 members. LFN was given an ISO 639-3 designation (lfn) by SIL in January 2008. Find out more...
April 2015
Brithenig is an invented language, or constructed language ("conlang"). It was created as a hobby in 1996 by Andrew Smith from New Zealand, who also invented the alternate history of Ill Bethisad to "explain" it.
Brithenig was not developed to be used in the real world, like Esperanto or Interlingua, nor to provide detail to a work of fiction, like Klingon from the Star Trek scenarios. Rather, Brithenig started as a thought experiment to create a Romance language that might have evolved if Latin had displaced the native Celtic language as the spoken language of the people in Great Britain.
The result is a sister language to French, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and Italian, albeit a test-tube child, which differs from them by having sound-changes similar to those that affected the Welsh language, and words that are borrowed from Brythonic and from English throughout its pseudo-history. One important distinction between Brithenig and Welsh is that while Welsh is P-Celtic, Latin was a Q-Italic language (as opposed to P-Italic, like Oscan), and this trait was passed onto Brithenig. Find out more...
May 2015
Lojban (pronounced [ˈloʒban] ( listen)) is a constructed, syntactically unambiguous human language based on predicate logic, succeeding the Loglan project. The name "Lojban" is a compound formed from loj and ban, which are short forms of logji (logic) and bangu (language).
The Logical Language Group (LLG) began developing Lojban in 1987. The LLG intended to realize Loglan's purposes as well as further complement the language by making it more usable, and freely available (as indicated by its official full English name "Lojban: A Realization of Loglan"). After a long initial period of debating and testing, the baseline was completed in 1997 with the publication of The Complete Lojban Language. In an interview in 2010 with the New York Times, Arika Okrent, the author of In the Land of Invented Languages, stated: "The constructed language with the most complete grammar is probably Lojban – a language created to reflect the principles of logic." Lojban was developed to be a worldlang, with the main sources of its basic vocabulary being the six most widely spoken languages as of 1987: Mandarin, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic, chosen to reduce the unfamiliarity or strangeness of the root words to people of diverse linguistic backgrounds. Lojban has also taken components from other constructed languages, notably the set of evidential indicators from Láadan. Find out more...
June 2015
A Lingua Ignota (Latin for "unknown language") was described by the 12th century abbess of Rupertsberg, Hildegard of Bingen, who apparently used it for mystical purposes. To write it, she used an alphabet of 23 letters, the litterae ignotae.
She partially described the language in a work titled Lingua Ignota per simplicem hominem Hildegardem prolata, which survived in two manuscripts, both dating to ca. 1200, the Wiesbaden Codex and a Berlin MS. The text is a glossary of 1011 words in Lingua Ignota, with glosses mostly in Latin, sometimes in German; the words appear to be a priori coinages, mostly nouns with a few adjectives. Grammatically it appears to be a partial relexification of Latin, that is, a language formed by substituting new vocabulary into an existing grammar.
The purpose of Lingua Ignota is unknown; nor do we know who besides its creator was familiar with it. In the 19th century some believed that Hildegard intended her language to be an ideal, universal language. However, nowadays it is generally assumed that Lingua Ignota was devised as a secret language; like Hildegard's "unheard music", it would have come to her by divine inspiration. Inasmuch as the language was constructed by Hildegard, it may be considered one of the earliest known constructed languages. Find out more...
July 2015
Novial [nov- ("new") + IAL, International Auxiliary Language] is a constructed international auxiliary language (IAL) for universal communication between speakers of different native languages. It was devised by Otto Jespersen, a Danish linguist who was previously involved in the Ido movement, and subsequently in the development of Interlingua. Its vocabulary is based largely on the Germanic and Romance languages and its grammar is influenced by English.
Novial was first introduced in Jespersen's book An International Language in 1928. Part One of the book discusses the need for an IAL, the disadvantages of ethnic languages for that purpose, and common objections to constructed IALs. He also provides a critical overview of the history of constructed IALs with sections devoted to Volapük, Esperanto, Idiom Neutral, Ido, Latino sine Flexione and Occidental (Interlingue). The author makes it clear that he draws on a wealth of earlier work on the problem of a constructed IAL, not only the aforementioned IALs.
It was updated in his dictionary Novial Lexike in 1930, and further modifications were proposed in the 1930s, but the language became dormant with Jespersen's death in 1943. In the 1990s, with the revival of interest in constructed languages brought on by the Internet, some people rediscovered Novial. Find out more...
August 2015
Toki Pona is a constructed language, first published online in mid-2001. It was designed by translator and linguist Sonja Lang (formerly Sonja Elen Kisa) of Toronto.
Toki Pona is a minimal language. Like a pidgin, it focuses on simple concepts and elements that are relatively universal among cultures. Lang designed Toki Pona to express maximal meaning with minimal complexity. The language has 14 phonemes and 120 root words. It is not designed as an international auxiliary language but is instead inspired by Taoist philosophy, among other things.
The language is designed to shape the thought processes of its users, in the style of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, in Zen-like fashion. Find out more...
September 2015
Neo is an artificially constructed international auxiliary language created by Arturo Alfandari, a Belgian diplomat of Italian descent. The language combines features of Esperanto, Ido, Novial and Volapük. The root base of the language and grammar (in contrast to that of Esperanto and Ido) are closely related to that of the French language, with some English influences.
The first draft was published in 1937 by Arturo Alfandari but attracted wider attention in 1961 when Alfandari published his books Cours Pratique de Neo and The Rapid Method of Neo. The works included both brief and complete grammar, learning course of 44 lectures, translations of literary works (poetry and prose), original Neo literature, scientific and technical texts, idioms, detailed bidirectional French and English dictionaries. The total volume of the publications was 1304 pages, with dictionaries numbering some 75 000 words. Such a degree of details was unprecedented among constructed languages of the time.
The language stands in the tradition of international auxiliary languages such as Esperanto or Ido, with the same goal: a simple, neutral and easy to learn second language for everybody. Find out more...
October 2015
Solresol is a constructed language devised by François Sudre, beginning in 1827. His major book on it, Langue musicale universelle, was published after his death in 1866, though he had already been publicizing it for some years. Solresol enjoyed a brief spell of popularity, reaching its pinnacle with Boleslas Gajewski's 1902 posthumous publication of Grammaire du Solresol.
The teaching of sign languages to the deaf was discouraged between 1880 and 1991 in France, contributing to Solresol's descent into obscurity. After a few years of popularity, Solresol nearly vanished in the face of more successful languages, such as Volapük and Esperanto. There is still a small community of Solresol enthusiasts scattered across the world, better able to communicate with one another now than previously thanks to the Internet.
Solresol words are made up of from one to five syllables or notes. Each of these may be one of only seven basic phonemes, which may in turn be accented or lengthened. There is another phoneme, silence, which is used to separate words: words cannot be run together as they are in English. The phonemes can be represented in a number of different ways – as the seven musical notes in an octave, as spoken syllables (based on solfège, a way of identifying musical notes), with the seven colors of the rainbow, symbols, hand gestures etc. Thus, theoretically Solresol communication can be done through speaking, singing, flags of different color – even painting. Find out more...
November 2015
The Naʼvi language (Naʼvi: Lìʼfya leNaʼvi) is the constructed language of the Naʼvi, the sapient humanoid indigenous inhabitants of the fictional moon Pandora in the 2009 film Avatar. It was created by Paul Frommer, a professor at the USC Marshall School of Business with a doctorate in linguistics. Naʼvi was designed to fit James Cameron's conception of what the language should sound like in the film, to be realistically learnable by the fictional human characters of the film, and to be pronounceable by the actors, but to not closely resemble any single human language.
When the film was released in 2009, Naʼvi had a growing vocabulary of about a thousand words, but understanding of its grammar was limited to the language's creator. However, this has changed subsequently as Frommer has expanded the lexicon to more than 2000 words and has published the grammar, thus making Naʼvi a relatively complete and learnable language.
The Naʼvi language has its origins in James Cameron's early work on Avatar. In 2005, while the film was still in scriptment form, Cameron felt it needed a complete, consistent language for the alien characters to speak. He had written approximately thirty words for this alien language but wanted a linguist to create the language in full. His production company, Lightstorm Entertainment, contacted the linguistics department at the University of Southern California seeking someone who would be interested in creating such a language. Edward Finegan, a professor of linguistics at USC, thought that the project would appeal to Paul Frommer, with whom he had co-authored a linguistics textbook, and so forwarded Lightstorm's inquiry on to him. Frommer and Cameron met to discuss the director's vision for the language and its use in the film; at the end of the meeting, Cameron shook Frommer's hand and said "Welcome aboard." Find out more...
December 2015
Interlingua (/ɪntərˈlɪŋɡwə/; ISO 639 language codes ia, ina) is an international auxiliary language (IAL), developed between 1937 and 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). It ranks among the top most widely used IALs (along with Esperanto and Ido), and is the most widely used naturalistic IAL: in other words, its vocabulary, grammar and other characteristics are derived from natural languages. Interlingua was developed to combine a simple, mostly regular grammar with a vocabulary common to the widest possible range of languages, making it unusually easy to learn, at least for those whose native languages were sources of Interlingua's vocabulary and grammar. Conversely, it is used as a rapid introduction to many natural languages. Interlingua literature maintains that (written) Interlingua is comprehensible to the hundreds of millions of people who speak a Romance language, though it is actively spoken by only a few hundred.
The name Interlingua comes from the Latin words inter, meaning between, and lingua, meaning tongue or language. These morphemes are identical in Interlingua. Thus, Interlingua would be "between language", or intermediary language. Find out more...
January 2016
Europanto is a macaronic language concept with a fluid vocabulary from multiple European languages of the user's choice or need. It was conceived in 1996 by Diego Marani (a journalist, author and translator for the European Council of Ministers in Brussels) based on the common practice of word-borrowing usage of many EU languages. Marani used it in response to the perceived dominance of the English language; it is an emulation of the effect that non-native speakers struggling to learn a language typically add words and phrases from their native language to express their meanings clearly.
The main concept of Europanto is that there are no fixed rules — merely a set of suggestions. This means that anybody can start to speak Europanto immediately; on the other hand, it is the speaker's responsibility to draw on an assumed common vocabulary and grammar to communicate.
Marani wrote regular newspaper columns about the language and published a novel using it. As of 2005 he was no longer actively promoting it. Find out more...
February 2016
Esperanto (/ˌɛspəˈræntoʊ/ or /-ˈrɑː-/; [espeˈranto] <phonos file="Eo-Esperanto.ogg">listen</phonos>) is a constructed international auxiliary language. It is the most widely spoken constructed language in the world. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto ("Esperanto" translates as "one who hopes"), the pseudonym under which physician L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, on 26 July 1887. Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy-to-learn, politically neutral language that would transcend nationality and foster peace and international understanding between people with different languages.
Up to 2,000,000 people worldwide, to varying degrees, speak Esperanto, including perhaps 2,000 native speakers who learned Esperanto from birth. The World Esperanto Association has members in 120 countries. Its usage is highest in Europe, East Asia, and South America. lernu!, the most popular online learning platform for Esperanto, reported 150,000 registered users in 2013, and sees between 150,000 and 200,000 visitors each month. With about 229,000 articles, Esperanto Wikipedia is the 31st-largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles, and the largest Wikipedia in a constructed language. On 22 February 2012, Google Translate added Esperanto as its 64th language. On 28 May 2015, the language learning platform Duolingo launched an Esperanto course for English speakers. As of 14 January 2016[update], over 260,000 users had signed up.
The first World Congress of Esperanto was organized in France in 1905. Since then, congresses have been held in various countries every year, with the exceptions of years during the world wars. Although no country has adopted Esperanto officially, Esperanto was recommended by the French Academy of Sciences in 1921 and recognized by UNESCO in 1954, which recommended in 1985 that international non-governmental organizations use Esperanto. Find out more...
March 2016
Láadan is a feminist constructed language created by Suzette Haden Elgin in 1982 to test the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, specifically to determine if development of a language aimed at expressing the views of women would shape a culture; a subsidiary hypothesis was that Western natural languages may be better suited for expressing the views of men than women. The language was included in her science fiction Native Tongue series. Láadan contains a number of words that are used to make unambiguous statements that include how one feels about what one is saying. According to Elgin, this is designed to counter male-centered language's limitations on women, who are forced to respond "I know I said that, but I meant this".
Láadan is a tonal language. Find out more...
April 2016
Wenedyk (in English: Venedic) is a naturalistic constructed language, created by the Dutch translator Jan van Steenbergen (who also co-created the international auxiliary language Slovianski). It is used in the fictional Republic of the Two Crowns (based on the Republic of Two Nations), in the alternate timeline of Ill Bethisad. Officially, Wenedyk is a descendant of Vulgar Latin with a strong Slavic admixture, based on the premise that the Roman Empire incorporated the ancestors of the Poles in their territory. Less officially, it tries to show what Polish would have looked like if it had been a Romance instead of a Slavic language. On the Internet, it is well-recognized as an example of the altlang genre, much like Brithenig and Breathanach.
The idea for the language was inspired by such languages as Brithenig and Breathanach, languages that bear a similar relationship to the Celtic languages as Wenedyk does to Polish. The language itself is based entirely on (Vulgar) Latin and Polish: all phonological, morphological, and syntactic changes that made Polish develop from Common Slavic are applied to Vulgar Latin. As a result, vocabulary and morphology are predominantly Romance in nature, whereas phonology, orthography and syntax are essentially the same as in Polish. Wenedyk uses the modern standard Polish orthography, including (for instance) ⟨w⟩ for /v/ and ⟨ł⟩ for /w/. Find out more...
May 2016
Blissymbols or Blissymbolics was conceived as an ideographic writing system called Semantography consisting of several hundred basic symbols, each representing a concept, which can be composed together to generate new symbols that represent new concepts. Blissymbols differ from most of the world's major writing systems in that the characters do not correspond at all to the sounds of any spoken language.
Blissymbols was invented by Charles K. Bliss (1897–1985), born Karl Kasiel Blitz in the Austro-Hungarian city of Czernowitz (at present the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi), which had a mixture of different nationalities that “hated each other, mainly because they spoke and thought in different languages.” Bliss graduated as a chemical engineer at the Vienna University of Technology, and joined an electronics company as a research chemist. As the German Army invaded Austria in 1938, Bliss, a Jew, was sent to the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. His German wife Claire managed to get him released, and they finally became exiles in Shanghai, where Bliss had a cousin. Bliss devised Blissymbols while a refugee at the Shanghai Ghetto and Sydney, from 1942 to 1949. He wanted to create an easy-to-learn international auxiliary language to allow communication between different linguistic communities. He was inspired by Chinese characters, with which he became familiar at Shanghai. Find out more...
June 2016
Zaum (Russian: зáумь) are the linguistic experiments in sound symbolism and language creation of Russian-empire Futurist poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh. Coined by Kruchenykh in 1913, the word zaum is made up of the Russian prefix за "beyond, behind" and noun ум "the mind, nous" and has been translated as "transreason", "transration" or "beyonsense" (Paul Schmidt). According to scholar Gerald Janecek, zaum can be defined as experimental poetic language characterized by indeterminacy in meaning.
Kruchenykh, in “Declaration of the Word as Such (1913),” declares zaum “a language which does not have any definite meaning, a transrational language” that “allows for fuller expression” whereas, he maintains, the common language of everyday speech “binds.” He further maintained, in “Declaration of Transrational Language (1921),” that zaum “can provide a universal poetic language, born organically, and not artificially, like Esperanto."
Examples of zaum include Kruchenykh's poem "Dyr bul shchyl", Kruchenykh's libretto for the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun with music by Mikhail Matyushin and stage design by Kazimir Malevich, and Khlebnikov's so-called "language of the birds", "language of the gods" and "language of the stars". The poetic output is perhaps comparable to that of the contemporary Dadaism but the linguistic theory or metaphysics behind zaum was entirely devoid of the gentle self-irony of that movement and in all seriousness intended to recover the sound symbolism of a lost aboriginal tongue. Find out more...
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