Constructed language
Encyclopedia
A planned or constructed language—known colloquially
as a conlang—is a language
whose phonology
, grammar
, and/or vocabulary
has been consciously devised by an individual or group, instead of having evolved natural
ly. There are many possible reasons to create a constructed language: to ease human communication
(see international auxiliary language
and code
); to give fiction
or an associated constructed world an added layer of realism; for linguistic
experimentation; for artistic creation
; and for language games.
The expression planned language is sometimes used to mean international auxiliary languages and other languages designed for actual use in human communication. Some prefer it to the term "artificial", as that term may have pejorative connotations in some languages. Outside the Esperanto community, the term language planning
means the prescriptions given to a natural language to standardize it; in this regard, even "natural languages" may be artificial in some respects. Prescriptive grammars, which date to ancient times for classical languages such as Latin and Sanskrit are rule-based codifications of natural languages, such codifications being a middle ground between naive natural selection and development of language and its explicit construction. The term glossopoeia is also used to mean language construction, particularly construction of artistic language
s.
consider their language artificial, since they assert that it has no invented content: Interlingua's vocabulary is taken from a small set of natural languages, and its grammar is based closely on these source languages, even including some degree of irregularity; its proponents prefer to describe its vocabulary and grammar as standardized rather than artificial or constructed. Similarly, Latino sine Flexione
(LsF) is a simplification of Latin from which the inflections have been removed. As with Interlingua, some prefer to describe its development as "planning" rather than "constructing". Some speakers of Esperanto
and Ido
also avoid the term "artificial language" because they deny that there is anything "unnatural" about the use of their language in human communication. By contrast, some philosophers have argued that all human languages are conventional or artificial. François Rabelais
, for instance, stated: "C'est abus de dire que nous avons une langue naturelle; les langues sont par institution arbitraires et conventions des peuples." (It's misuse to say that we have a natural language; languages are by institution arbitrary and conventions of peoples.) This article deals with "planned" or "constructed" languages designed for human/human-like communication.
or a posteriori languages
. The grammar and vocabulary of the former are created from scratch, either by the author's imagination or by computation; the latter possess a grammar and vocabulary derived from natural language.
In turn, a posteriori languages are divided into schematic languages, in which a natural or partly natural vocabulary is altered to fit pre-established rules, and naturalistic languages, in which a natural vocabulary retains its normal sound and appearance. While Esperanto
is generally considered schematic, Interlingua
is viewed as naturalistic. Ido
is presented either as a schematic language or as a compromise between the two types.
Further, fictional and experimental languages can be naturalistic in that they are meant to sound natural, have realistic amounts of irregularity, and, if derived a posteriori from a real-world natural language or real-world reconstructed proto-language
(such as Vulgar Latin
or Proto-Indo-European
) or from a fictional proto-language, they try to imitate natural processes of phonological
, lexical and grammatical
change. In contrast with Interlingua, these languages are not usually intended for easy learning or communication; and most artlangers would not consider Interlingua to be naturalistic in the sense in which this term is used in artlang criticism. Thus, a naturalistic fictional language tends to be more difficult and complex. While Interlingua has simpler grammar, syntax, and orthography than its source languages (though more complex and irregular than Esperanto or Ido), naturalistic fictional languages typically mimic behaviors of natural languages like irregular verbs and nouns and complicated phonological processes.
In terms of purpose, most constructed languages can broadly be divided into:
The boundaries between these categories are by no means clear. A constructed language could easily fall into more than one of the above categories. A logical language created for aesthetic
reasons would also be classifiable as an artistic language, which might be created by someone with philosophical motives intending for said conlang to be used as an auxiliary language. There are no rules, either inherent in the process of language construction or externally imposed, that would limit a constructed language to fitting only one of the above categories.
A constructed language can have native speakers if young children learn it from parents who speak it fluently. According to Ethnologue
, there are "200–2000 who speak Esperanto as a first language
" (most famously George Soros
). A member of the Klingon Language Institute
, d'Armond Speers, attempted to raise his son as a native (bilingual with English) Klingon
speaker.
As soon as a constructed language has a community of fluent speakers, especially if it has numerous native speakers, it begins to evolve and hence loses its constructed status. For example, Modern Hebrew
was modeled on Biblical Hebrew rather than engineered from scratch, and has undergone considerable changes since the state of Israel
was founded in 1948 (Hetzron 1990:693). However, linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann argues that Modern Hebrew, which he terms "Israeli", is a Semito-European hybrid, based not only on Hebrew but also on Yiddish and other languages spoken by revivalists. Zuckermann therefore endorses the translation of the Hebrew Bible into what he calls "Israeli". Esperanto
as a living spoken language has evolved significantly from the prescriptive blueprint published in 1887, so that modern editions of the Fundamenta Krestomatio, a 1903 collection of early texts in the language, require many footnotes on the syntactic and lexical differences between early and modern Esperanto.
Proponents of constructed languages often have many reasons for using them. The famous but disputed Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
is sometimes cited; this claims that the language one speaks influences the way one thinks. Thus, a "better" language should allow the speaker to think more clearly or intelligently or to encompass more points of view; this was the intention of Suzette Haden Elgin
in creating Láadan
, the language embodied in her feminist science fiction
series Native Tongue. A constructed language could also be used to restrict thought, as in George Orwell
's Newspeak
, or to simplify thought, as in Toki Pona
. In contrast, linguists such as Stephen Pinker argue that ideas exist independently of language. Thus, children spontaneously re-invent slang and even grammar with each generation. (See The Language Instinct
.) If this is true, attempts to control the range of human thought through the reform of language would fail, as concepts like "freedom" will reappear in new words if the old vanish.
Proponents claim a particular language makes it easier to express and understand concepts in one area, and more difficult in others. An example can be taken from the way various computer languages make it easier to write certain kinds of programs and harder to write others.
Another reason cited for using a constructed language is the telescope rule; this claims that it takes less time to first learn a simple constructed language and then a natural language, than to learn only a natural language. Thus, if someone wants to learn English, some suggest learning Basic English
first. Constructed languages like Esperanto and Ido are in fact often simpler due to the typical lack of irregular verbs and other grammatical quirks. Some studies have found that learning Esperanto helps in learning a non-constructed language later (see Propaedeutic value of Esperanto
).
The ISO 639-2
standard reserves the language code "art
" to denote artificial languages. However, some constructed languages have their own ISO 639
language codes (e.g. "eo" and "epo" for Esperanto, "io" and "ido" for Ido, "ia" and "ina" for Interlingua
, "qny" for Quenya
).
, appearing for instance in Plato
's Cratylus
in Hermogenes's contention that words are not inherently linked to what they refer to; that people apply "a piece of their own voice...to the thing." Athenaeus
of Naucratis, in Book III of Deipnosophistae
, tells the story of two figures: Dionysius of Sicily and Alexarchus. Dionysius of Sicily created neologisms like menandros “virgin” (from menei “waiting” and andra “husband”), menekratēs “pillar” (from menei "it remains in one place” and kratei “it is strong"), and ballantion “javelin” (from balletai enantion “thrown against someone”). Incidentally, the more common Greek words for those three are parthenos, stulos, and akon. Alexarchus of Macedon, the brother of King Cassander of Macedon, was the founder of the city of Ouranopolis. Athenaeus recounts a story told by Heracleides of Lembos that Alexarchus “introduced a peculiar vocabulary, referring to a rooster as a “dawn-crier,” a barber as a “mortal-shaver,” a drachma as “worked silver”...and a herald as an aputēs [from ēputa “loud-voiced”]. "He once wrote something...to the public authorities in Casandreia...As for what this letter says, in my opinion not even the Pythian god could make sense of it.” While the mechanisms of grammar suggested by classical philosophers were designed to explain existing languages (Latin
, Greek
, Sanskrit
), they were not used to construct new grammars. Roughly contemporary to Plato, in his descriptive grammar of Sanskrit, Pāṇini constructed a set of rules for explaining language, so that the text of his grammar may be considered a mixture of natural and constructed language.
The earliest non-natural languages were considered less "constructed" than "super-natural", mystical, or divinely inspired. The Lingua Ignota
, recorded in the 12th century by St. Hildegard of Bingen
is an example; apparently it is a form of private mystical cant
(see also language of angels
). An important example from Middle-Eastern culture is Balaibalan
, invented in the 16th century. Kabbalistic grammatical speculation was directed at recovering the original language spoken by Adam and Eve
in Paradise
, lost in the confusion of tongues
. The first Christian
project for an ideal language is outlined in Dante Alighieri
's De vulgari eloquentia
, where he searches for the ideal Italian
vernacular suited for literature. Ramon Llull
's Ars magna was a project of a perfect language with which the infidels could be convinced of the truth of the Christian faith. It was basically an application of combinatorics on a given set of concepts. During the Renaissance
, Lullian and Kabbalistic ideas were drawn upon in a magical
context, resulting in cryptographic
applications. The Voynich manuscript
may be an example of this.
, notably the discovery of the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo
, and first encounters with the Chinese script directed efforts towards a perfect written language. Johannes Trithemius
, in Steganographia and Polygraphia, attempted to show how all languages can be reduced to one. In the 17th century, interest in magical
languages was continued by the Rosicrucians and Alchemists
(like John Dee
). Jakob Boehme in 1623 spoke of a "natural language" (Natursprache) of the senses.
Musical language
s from the Renaissance were tied up with mysticism
, magic and alchemy
, sometimes also referred to as the language of the birds
. The Solresol
project of 1817 re-invented the concept in a more pragmatic context.
These early taxonomic conlangs produced systems of hierarchical classification that were intended to result in both spoken and written expression. Leibniz
had a similar purpose for his lingua generalis of 1678, aiming at a lexicon of characters upon which the user might perform calculations that would yield true propositions automatically, as a side-effect developing binary calculus. These projects were not only occupied with reducing or modelling grammar, but also with the arrangement of all human knowledge into "characters" or hierarchies, an idea that with the Enlightenment
would ultimately lead to the Encyclopédie
. Many of these 17th-18th centuries conlangs were pasigraphies
, or purely written languages with no spoken form or a spoken form that would vary greatly according to the native language of the reader.
Leibniz and the encyclopedists realized that it is impossible to organize human knowledge unequivocally in a tree diagram, and consequently to construct an a priori language based on such a classification of concepts. Under the entry Charactère, D'Alembert critically reviewed the projects of philosophical languages of the preceding century. After the Encyclopédie, projects for a priori languages moved more and more to the lunatic fringe. Individual authors, typically unaware of the history of the idea, continued to propose taxonomic philosophical languages until the early 20th century (e.g. Ro), but most recent engineered language
s have had more modest goals; some are limited to a specific field, like mathematical formalism or calculus (e.g. Lincos and programming language
s), others are designed for eliminating syntactical ambiguity (e.g., Loglan
and Lojban
) or maximizing conciseness (e.g., Ithkuil
).
attention began to focus on a posteriori auxiliary languages. Joachim Faiguet de Villeneuve in the article on Langue already wrote a short proposition of a "laconic" or regularized grammar of French. During the 19th century, a bewildering variety of such International Auxiliary Languages (IALs) were proposed, so that Louis Couturat
and Leopold Leau
in Histoire de la langue universelle (1903) reviewed 38 projects.
The first of these that made any international impact was Volapük
, proposed in 1879 by Johann Martin Schleyer
; within a decade, 283 Volapükist clubs were counted all over the globe. However, disagreements between Schleyer and some prominent users of the language led to schism, and by the mid 1890s it fell into obscurity, making way for Esperanto
, proposed in 1887 by Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof
. Ido
, made public in 1907, was a reform of Esperanto. Interlingua
, the most recent auxlang to gain a significant number of speakers, emerged in 1951, when the International Auxiliary Language Association
published its Interlingua-English Dictionary
and an accompanying grammar
. The success of Esperanto did not stop others from trying to construct new auxiliary languages, such as Leslie Jones' Eurolengo
, which mixes elements of English and Spanish, or He Yafu's Mondlango, which introduces more English roots instead of Latin ones.
Loglan
(1955) and its descendants constitute a pragmatic return to the aims of the a priori languages, tempered by the requirement of usability of an auxiliary language. Thus far, these modern a priori languages have garnered only small groups of speakers.
, and in Utopia
n contexts), but they only seem to gain notability as serious projects beginning in the 20th century. A Princess of Mars
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
was possibly the first fiction of that century to feature a constructed language. Tolkien was the first to develop a family of related fictional languages and was the first academic to publicly discuss artistic languages, giving a lecture entitled "A Secret Vice
" circa 1930 at a congress. (Orwell's Newspeak is considered a satire of an IAL rather than an artistic language proper.)
By the beginning of the first decade of the 21st century, it had become common for science-fiction and fantasy works set in other worlds to feature constructed languages, or more commonly, an extremely limited but defined vocabulary which suggests the existence of a complete language, and constructed languages are a regular part of the genre, appearing in Star Wars
, Star Trek
, Lord of the Rings, Stargate SG-1
, Atlantis: The Lost Empire
, Game of Thrones
, Avatar, Dune
and the Myst
series of computer adventure games.
The Conlang Mailing List was founded in 1991, and later split off an AUXLANG mailing list dedicated to international auxiliary languages. In the early-to-mid 1990s a few conlang-related zines were published as email or websites, such as Vortpunoj and Model Languages. The Conlang mailing list has developed a community of conlangers with its own customs, such as translation challenges and translation relays, and its own terminology. Sarah Higley reports from results of her surveys that the demographics of the Conlang list are primarily men from North America and western Europe, with a smaller number from Oceania, Asia, the Middle East, and South America, with an age range from thirteen to over sixty; the number of women participating has increased over time. More recently founded online communities include the Zompist Bulletin Board (ZBB; since 2001) and the Conlanger Bulletin Board. Discussion on these forums includes presentation of members' conlangs and feedback from other members, discussion of natural languages, whether particular conlang features have natural language precedents, and how interesting features of natural languages can be repurposed for conlangs, posting of interesting short texts as translation challenges, and meta-discussion about the philosophy of conlanging, conlangers' purposes, and whether conlanging is an art or a hobby. Another 2001 survey by Patrick Jarrett showed an average age of 30.65, with the average time since starting to invent languages 11.83 years. A more recent thread on the ZBB showed that many conlangers spend a relatively small amount of time on any one conlang, moving from one project to another; about a third spend years on developing the same language.
, was created by a single person in 1979. However, as interest in Talossan grew, guidance of the language became (in 1983) the province of a recommending body, the Comità per l'Útzil del Glheþ
, and other independent organizations of enthusiasts. Villnian draws on Latin, Greek and the Scandinavian languages. In its syntax and grammar it is reminiscent of Chinese. The core elements were created by a single person and its vocabulary is now enlarged by suggestions from the internet community.
While most constructed languages begin as did Talossan, having been created by a single person, a few are created by group collaborations; examples of these are Interlingua, which was developed by the International Auxiliary Language Association
, and Lojban
, which was developed by a breakaway group of Loglanists.
Group collaboration has apparently become more common in recent years, as constructed language designers have started using Internet
tools to coordinate design efforts. NGL/Tokcir was an early Internet collaborative engineered language whose designers used a mailing list
to discuss and vote on grammatical and lexical design issues. More recently, The Demos IAL Project was developing an international auxiliary language
with similar collaborative method
s. The Voksigid and Novial 98 languages were both worked on by mailing lists, though neither was issued in final form.
Several artistic language
s have been developed on different constructed language wiki
s, usually involving discussion and voting on phonology, grammatical rules and so forth. An interesting variation is the corpus approach, exemplified by Madjal (late 2004) and Kalusa (mid-2006), where contributors simply read the corpus of existing sentences and add their own sentences, perhaps reinforcing existing trends or adding new words and structures. The Kalusa engine adds the ability for visitors to rate sentences as acceptable or unacceptable. There is no explicit statement of grammatical rules or explicit definition of words in this corpus approach; the meaning of words is inferred from their use in various sentences of the corpus, perhaps in different ways by different readers and contributors, and the grammatical rules can be inferred from the structures of the sentences that have been rated highest by the contributors and other visitors.
A special example for this kind of language is Simplish: the German Artist Ulli Purwin tried to set a focus on (what Germans call) 'Anglicisms'—in a humorous way. Everyone is invited to increase the vocabulary: from 'ââtist' to 'ørn'...
Scholarship
Communities
How to
Directories
Wikis
Colloquialism
A colloquialism is a word or phrase that is common in everyday, unconstrained conversation rather than in formal speech, academic writing, or paralinguistics. Dictionaries often display colloquial words and phrases with the abbreviation colloq. as an identifier...
as a conlang—is a language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
whose phonology
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
, grammar
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
, and/or vocabulary
Vocabulary
A person's vocabulary is the set of words within a language that are familiar to that person. A vocabulary usually develops with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge...
has been consciously devised by an individual or group, instead of having evolved natural
Natural language
In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...
ly. There are many possible reasons to create a constructed language: to ease human communication
Communication
Communication is the activity of conveying meaningful information. Communication requires a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, although the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast...
(see international auxiliary language
International auxiliary language
An international auxiliary language or interlanguage is a language meant for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common native language...
and code
Code
A code is a rule for converting a piece of information into another form or representation , not necessarily of the same type....
); to give fiction
Fiction
Fiction is the form of any narrative or informative work that deals, in part or in whole, with information or events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary—that is, invented by the author. Although fiction describes a major branch of literary work, it may also refer to theatrical,...
or an associated constructed world an added layer of realism; for linguistic
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
experimentation; for artistic creation
Artistic language
An artistic language is a constructed language designed for aesthetic pleasure. Unlike engineered languages or auxiliary languages, artistic languages usually have irregular grammar systems, much like natural languages. Many are designed within the context of fictional worlds, such as J. R. R....
; and for language games.
The expression planned language is sometimes used to mean international auxiliary languages and other languages designed for actual use in human communication. Some prefer it to the term "artificial", as that term may have pejorative connotations in some languages. Outside the Esperanto community, the term language planning
Language planning
Language planning is a deliberate effort to influence the function, structure, or acquisition of languages or language variety within a speech community. It is often associated with government planning, but is also used by a variety of non-governmental organizations, such as grass-roots...
means the prescriptions given to a natural language to standardize it; in this regard, even "natural languages" may be artificial in some respects. Prescriptive grammars, which date to ancient times for classical languages such as Latin and Sanskrit are rule-based codifications of natural languages, such codifications being a middle ground between naive natural selection and development of language and its explicit construction. The term glossopoeia is also used to mean language construction, particularly construction of artistic language
Artistic language
An artistic language is a constructed language designed for aesthetic pleasure. Unlike engineered languages or auxiliary languages, artistic languages usually have irregular grammar systems, much like natural languages. Many are designed within the context of fictional worlds, such as J. R. R....
s.
Planned, constructed, artificial
The terms "planned", "constructed", and "artificial" are used differently in some traditions. For example, few speakers of InterlinguaInterlingua
Interlingua is an international auxiliary language , developed between 1937 and 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association...
consider their language artificial, since they assert that it has no invented content: Interlingua's vocabulary is taken from a small set of natural languages, and its grammar is based closely on these source languages, even including some degree of irregularity; its proponents prefer to describe its vocabulary and grammar as standardized rather than artificial or constructed. Similarly, Latino sine Flexione
Latino sine Flexione
Latino sine flexione , or Peano’s Interlingua , is an international auxiliary language invented by the Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano in 1903. It is a simplified version of Latin, and retains its vocabulary...
(LsF) is a simplification of Latin from which the inflections have been removed. As with Interlingua, some prefer to describe its development as "planning" rather than "constructing". Some speakers of Esperanto
Esperanto
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...
and Ido
Ido
Ido 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...
also avoid the term "artificial language" because they deny that there is anything "unnatural" about the use of their language in human communication. By contrast, some philosophers have argued that all human languages are conventional or artificial. François Rabelais
François Rabelais
François Rabelais was a major French Renaissance writer, doctor, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He has historically been regarded as a writer of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, bawdy jokes and songs...
, for instance, stated: "C'est abus de dire que nous avons une langue naturelle; les langues sont par institution arbitraires et conventions des peuples." (It's misuse to say that we have a natural language; languages are by institution arbitrary and conventions of peoples.) This article deals with "planned" or "constructed" languages designed for human/human-like communication.
Overview
Constructed languages are categorized as either a priori languagesA priori (languages)
An a priori language is any constructed language whose vocabulary is not based on existing languages, unlike a posteriori constructed languages. Examples of a priori languages include Ro, Solresol, Mirad, Klingon, and Na'vi...
or a posteriori languages
A posteriori (languages)
An "a posteriori language" , according to Louis Couturat, is any constructed language whose elements are borrowed or based on existing languages, as opposed to the a priori languages....
. The grammar and vocabulary of the former are created from scratch, either by the author's imagination or by computation; the latter possess a grammar and vocabulary derived from natural language.
In turn, a posteriori languages are divided into schematic languages, in which a natural or partly natural vocabulary is altered to fit pre-established rules, and naturalistic languages, in which a natural vocabulary retains its normal sound and appearance. While Esperanto
Esperanto
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...
is generally considered schematic, Interlingua
Interlingua
Interlingua is an international auxiliary language , developed between 1937 and 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association...
is viewed as naturalistic. Ido
Ido
Ido 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...
is presented either as a schematic language or as a compromise between the two types.
Further, fictional and experimental languages can be naturalistic in that they are meant to sound natural, have realistic amounts of irregularity, and, if derived a posteriori from a real-world natural language or real-world reconstructed proto-language
Proto-language
A proto-language in the tree model of historical linguistics is the common ancestor of the languages that form a language family. Occasionally, the German term Ursprache is used instead.Often the proto-language is not known directly...
(such as Vulgar Latin
Vulgar Latin
Vulgar Latin is any of the nonstandard forms of Latin from which the Romance languages developed. Because of its nonstandard nature, it had no official orthography. All written works used Classical Latin, with very few exceptions...
or Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...
) or from a fictional proto-language, they try to imitate natural processes of phonological
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
, lexical and grammatical
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
change. In contrast with Interlingua, these languages are not usually intended for easy learning or communication; and most artlangers would not consider Interlingua to be naturalistic in the sense in which this term is used in artlang criticism. Thus, a naturalistic fictional language tends to be more difficult and complex. While Interlingua has simpler grammar, syntax, and orthography than its source languages (though more complex and irregular than Esperanto or Ido), naturalistic fictional languages typically mimic behaviors of natural languages like irregular verbs and nouns and complicated phonological processes.
In terms of purpose, most constructed languages can broadly be divided into:
- Engineered languageEngineered languageEngineered languages are constructed languages devised to test or prove some hypotheses about how languages work or might work. There are at least three subcategories, philosophical languages , logical languages , and experimental languages...
s (engelangs /ˈɛnd͡ʒlæŋz/), further subdivided into logical languages (loglangs), philosophical languages and experimental languages; devised for the purpose of experimentation in logicLogicIn philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
, philosophyPhilosophyPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
, or linguisticsLinguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
; - Auxiliary languageInternational auxiliary languageAn international auxiliary language or interlanguage is a language meant for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common native language...
s (auxlangs) devised for international communication (also IALs, for International Auxiliary Language); - Artistic languageArtistic languageAn artistic language is a constructed language designed for aesthetic pleasure. Unlike engineered languages or auxiliary languages, artistic languages usually have irregular grammar systems, much like natural languages. Many are designed within the context of fictional worlds, such as J. R. R....
s (artlangs) devised to create aesthetic pleasure or humorous effect, just for fun; usually secret languages and mystical languages are classified as artlangs
The boundaries between these categories are by no means clear. A constructed language could easily fall into more than one of the above categories. A logical language created for aesthetic
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
reasons would also be classifiable as an artistic language, which might be created by someone with philosophical motives intending for said conlang to be used as an auxiliary language. There are no rules, either inherent in the process of language construction or externally imposed, that would limit a constructed language to fitting only one of the above categories.
A constructed language can have native speakers if young children learn it from parents who speak it fluently. According to Ethnologue
Ethnologue
Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a web and print publication of SIL International , a Christian linguistic service organization, which studies lesser-known languages, to provide the speakers with Bibles in their native language and support their efforts in language development.The Ethnologue...
, there are "200–2000 who speak Esperanto as a first language
Native Esperanto speakers
Native Esperanto speakers are born into families in which Esperanto is spoken . This usually occurs when the parents meet each other at an Esperanto gathering but do not know each other’s native language...
" (most famously George Soros
George Soros
George Soros is a Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, philosopher, and philanthropist. He is the chairman of Soros Fund Management. Soros supports progressive-liberal causes...
). A member of the Klingon Language Institute
Klingon Language Institute
The Klingon Language Institute is an independent organization located in Flourtown, Pennsylvania, USA. Its goal is to promote the Klingon language and culture.- General :About 2500 members in over 50 countries all over the world have joined the KLI...
, d'Armond Speers, attempted to raise his son as a native (bilingual with English) Klingon
Klingon language
The Klingon language is the constructed language spoken by the fictional Klingons in the Star Trek universe....
speaker.
As soon as a constructed language has a community of fluent speakers, especially if it has numerous native speakers, it begins to evolve and hence loses its constructed status. For example, Modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew , also known as Israeli Hebrew or Modern Israeli Hebrew, is the language spoken in Israel and in some Jewish communities worldwide, from the early 20th century to the present....
was modeled on Biblical Hebrew rather than engineered from scratch, and has undergone considerable changes since the state of Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
was founded in 1948 (Hetzron 1990:693). However, linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann argues that Modern Hebrew, which he terms "Israeli", is a Semito-European hybrid, based not only on Hebrew but also on Yiddish and other languages spoken by revivalists. Zuckermann therefore endorses the translation of the Hebrew Bible into what he calls "Israeli". Esperanto
Esperanto
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...
as a living spoken language has evolved significantly from the prescriptive blueprint published in 1887, so that modern editions of the Fundamenta Krestomatio, a 1903 collection of early texts in the language, require many footnotes on the syntactic and lexical differences between early and modern Esperanto.
Proponents of constructed languages often have many reasons for using them. The famous but disputed Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
Linguistic relativity
The principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers are able to conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view...
is sometimes cited; this claims that the language one speaks influences the way one thinks. Thus, a "better" language should allow the speaker to think more clearly or intelligently or to encompass more points of view; this was the intention of Suzette Haden Elgin
Suzette Haden Elgin
Suzette Haden Elgin is an American science fiction author. She founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and is considered an important figure in the field of science fiction constructed languages...
in creating Láadan
Láadan
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...
, the language embodied in her feminist science fiction
Feminist science fiction
Feminist science fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction which tends to deal with women's roles in society. Feminist science fiction poses questions about social issues such as how society constructs gender roles, the role reproduction plays in defining gender and the unequal political and...
series Native Tongue. A constructed language could also be used to restrict thought, as in George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
's Newspeak
Newspeak
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...
, or to simplify thought, as in Toki Pona
Toki Pona
Toki Pona is a constructed language, first published online in mid-2001. It was designed by translator and linguist Sonja Elen Kisa of Toronto....
. In contrast, linguists such as Stephen Pinker argue that ideas exist independently of language. Thus, children spontaneously re-invent slang and even grammar with each generation. (See The Language Instinct
The Language Instinct
The Language Instinct is a book by Steven Pinker for a general audience, published in 1994. In it, Pinker argues that humans are born with an innate capacity for language. In addition, he deals sympathetically with Noam Chomsky's claim that all human language shows evidence of a universal grammar...
.) If this is true, attempts to control the range of human thought through the reform of language would fail, as concepts like "freedom" will reappear in new words if the old vanish.
Proponents claim a particular language makes it easier to express and understand concepts in one area, and more difficult in others. An example can be taken from the way various computer languages make it easier to write certain kinds of programs and harder to write others.
Another reason cited for using a constructed language is the telescope rule; this claims that it takes less time to first learn a simple constructed language and then a natural language, than to learn only a natural language. Thus, if someone wants to learn English, some suggest learning Basic English
Basic English
Basic English, also known as Simple 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...
first. Constructed languages like Esperanto and Ido are in fact often simpler due to the typical lack of irregular verbs and other grammatical quirks. Some studies have found that learning Esperanto helps in learning a non-constructed language later (see Propaedeutic value of Esperanto
Propaedeutic value of Esperanto
The propaedeutic value of Esperanto is the benefit that using Esperanto as an introduction to foreign language study has on the teaching of subsequent foreign languages...
).
The ISO 639-2
ISO 639-2
ISO 639-2:1998, Codes for the representation of names of languages — Part 2: Alpha-3 code, is the second part of the ISO 639 standard, which lists codes for the representation of the names of languages. The three-letter codes given for each language in this part of the standard are referred to as...
standard reserves the language code "art
ISO 639:art
art is the ISO 639-2 collective language code, as well as the ISO 639-5 code, for artificial languages that do not have their own code.The artificial languages that have their own ISO 639-2 code are*afh Afrihili*epo Esperanto*ido Ido*ile Interlingue...
" to denote artificial languages. However, some constructed languages have their own ISO 639
ISO 639
ISO 639 is a set of standards by the International Organization for Standardization that is concerned with representation of names for language and language groups....
language codes (e.g. "eo" and "epo" for Esperanto, "io" and "ido" for Ido, "ia" and "ina" for Interlingua
Interlingua
Interlingua is an international auxiliary language , developed between 1937 and 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association...
, "qny" for Quenya
Quenya
Quenya 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...
).
Ancient linguistic experiments
Grammatical speculation dates from Classical AntiquityClassical antiquity
Classical antiquity is a broad term for a long period of cultural history centered on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, collectively known as the Greco-Roman world...
, appearing for instance in Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
's Cratylus
Cratylus (dialogue)
Cratylus is the name of a dialogue by Plato. Most modern scholars agree that it was written mostly during Plato's so-called middle period...
in Hermogenes's contention that words are not inherently linked to what they refer to; that people apply "a piece of their own voice...to the thing." Athenaeus
Athenaeus
Athenaeus , of Naucratis in Egypt, Greek rhetorician and grammarian, flourished about the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd century AD...
of Naucratis, in Book III of Deipnosophistae
Deipnosophistae
The Deipnosophistae may be translated as The Banquet of the Learned or Philosophers at Dinner or The Gastronomers...
, tells the story of two figures: Dionysius of Sicily and Alexarchus. Dionysius of Sicily created neologisms like menandros “virgin” (from menei “waiting” and andra “husband”), menekratēs “pillar” (from menei "it remains in one place” and kratei “it is strong"), and ballantion “javelin” (from balletai enantion “thrown against someone”). Incidentally, the more common Greek words for those three are parthenos, stulos, and akon. Alexarchus of Macedon, the brother of King Cassander of Macedon, was the founder of the city of Ouranopolis. Athenaeus recounts a story told by Heracleides of Lembos that Alexarchus “introduced a peculiar vocabulary, referring to a rooster as a “dawn-crier,” a barber as a “mortal-shaver,” a drachma as “worked silver”...and a herald as an aputēs [from ēputa “loud-voiced”]. "He once wrote something...to the public authorities in Casandreia...As for what this letter says, in my opinion not even the Pythian god could make sense of it.” While the mechanisms of grammar suggested by classical philosophers were designed to explain existing languages (Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
, Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
), they were not used to construct new grammars. Roughly contemporary to Plato, in his descriptive grammar of Sanskrit, Pāṇini constructed a set of rules for explaining language, so that the text of his grammar may be considered a mixture of natural and constructed language.
Early constructed languages
Lingua Ignota
A Lingua Ignota was described by the 12th century abbess of Rupertsberg, Hildegard of Bingen, who apparently used it for mystical purposes...
, recorded in the 12th century by St. Hildegard of Bingen
Hildegard of Bingen
Blessed Hildegard of Bingen , also known as Saint Hildegard, and Sibyl of the Rhine, was a German writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, Benedictine abbess, visionary, and polymath. Elected a magistra by her fellow nuns in 1136, she founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and...
is an example; apparently it is a form of private mystical cant
Cant (language)
A Cant is the jargon or argot of a group, often implying its use to exclude or mislead people outside the group.-Derivation in Celtic linguistics:...
(see also language of angels
Language of angels
Language of angels may refer to:*Enochian a name often applied to an occult or angelic language recorded in the private journals of John Dee and his seer Edward Kelley in the late 16th century....
). An important example from Middle-Eastern culture is Balaibalan
Balaibalan
Balaibalan is a constructed language that probably originated from the 14th century mystic Fadl Allah from Asterabad or else his followers in the 15th century. The language is also known as Balibilen, Bala-i-Balan and Balaïbalan...
, invented in the 16th century. Kabbalistic grammatical speculation was directed at recovering the original language spoken by Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve were, according to the Genesis creation narratives, the first human couple to inhabit Earth, created by YHWH, the God of the ancient Hebrews...
in Paradise
Paradise
Paradise is a place in which existence is positive, harmonious and timeless. It is conceptually a counter-image of the miseries of human civilization, and in paradise there is only peace, prosperity, and happiness. Paradise is a place of contentment, but it is not necessarily a land of luxury and...
, lost in the confusion of tongues
Confusion of tongues
The confusion of tongues is the initial fragmentation of human languages described in the Book of Genesis 11:1–9, as a result of the construction of the Tower of Babel....
. The first Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...
project for an ideal language is outlined in Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri
Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...
's De vulgari eloquentia
De vulgari eloquentia
De vulgari eloquentia is the title of an essay by Dante Alighieri, written in Latin and initially meant to consist of four books, but abandoned in the middle of the second. It was probably composed shortly after Dante went into exile; internal evidence points to a date between 1302 and 1305...
, where he searches for the ideal Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
vernacular suited for literature. Ramon Llull
Ramon Llull
Ramon Llull was a Majorcan writer and philosopher, logician and tertiary Franciscan. He wrote the first major work of Catalan literature. Recently-surfaced manuscripts show him to have anticipated by several centuries prominent work on elections theory...
's Ars magna was a project of a perfect language with which the infidels could be convinced of the truth of the Christian faith. It was basically an application of combinatorics on a given set of concepts. During the Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
, Lullian and Kabbalistic ideas were drawn upon in a magical
Magical thinking
Magical thinking is causal reasoning that looks for correlation between acts or utterances and certain events. In religion, folk religion, and superstition, the correlation posited is between religious ritual, such as prayer, sacrifice, or the observance of a taboo, and an expected benefit or...
context, resulting in cryptographic
Cryptography
Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...
applications. The Voynich manuscript
Voynich manuscript
The Voynich manuscript, described as "the world's most mysterious manuscript", is a work which dates to the early 15th century, possibly from northern Italy. It is named after the book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who purchased it in 1912....
may be an example of this.
Perfecting language
Renaissance interest in Ancient EgyptAncient Egypt
Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
, notably the discovery of the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo
Horapollo
Horapollo is supposed author of a treatise on Egyptian hieroglyphs, extant in a Greek translation by one Philippus, titled Hieroglyphica, dating to about the 5th century.-Horapollo:...
, and first encounters with the Chinese script directed efforts towards a perfect written language. Johannes Trithemius
Johannes Trithemius
Johannes Trithemius , born Johann Heidenberg, was a German abbot, lexicographer, historian, cryptographer, polymath and occultist who had an influence on later occultism. The name by which he is more commonly known is derived from his native town of Trittenheim on the Mosel in Germany.-Life:He...
, in Steganographia and Polygraphia, attempted to show how all languages can be reduced to one. In the 17th century, interest in magical
Magical thinking
Magical thinking is causal reasoning that looks for correlation between acts or utterances and certain events. In religion, folk religion, and superstition, the correlation posited is between religious ritual, such as prayer, sacrifice, or the observance of a taboo, and an expected benefit or...
languages was continued by the Rosicrucians and Alchemists
Alchemy
Alchemy is an influential philosophical tradition whose early practitioners’ claims to profound powers were known from antiquity. The defining objectives of alchemy are varied; these include the creation of the fabled philosopher's stone possessing powers including the capability of turning base...
(like John Dee
John Dee (mathematician)
John Dee was an English mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, occultist, navigator, imperialist and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I. He devoted much of his life to the study of alchemy, divination and Hermetic philosophy....
). Jakob Boehme in 1623 spoke of a "natural language" (Natursprache) of the senses.
Musical language
Musical language
Musical languages are languages based on musical sounds, either instead of or in addition to articulation. They can be categorized as constructed languages, and as whistled languages. Whistled languages are dependent on an underlying articulatory language, in actual use in various cultures as a...
s from the Renaissance were tied up with mysticism
Mysticism
Mysticism is the knowledge of, and especially the personal experience of, states of consciousness, i.e. levels of being, beyond normal human perception, including experience and even communion with a supreme being.-Classical origins:...
, magic and alchemy
Alchemy
Alchemy is an influential philosophical tradition whose early practitioners’ claims to profound powers were known from antiquity. The defining objectives of alchemy are varied; these include the creation of the fabled philosopher's stone possessing powers including the capability of turning base...
, sometimes also referred to as the language of the birds
Language of the birds
In mythology, medieval literature and occultism, the language of the birds is postulated as a mystical, perfect divine language, green language, adamic language, enochian language, angelic language or a mythical or magical language used by birds to communicate with the initiated.-History:In...
. The Solresol
Solresol
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...
project of 1817 re-invented the concept in a more pragmatic context.
17th and 18th century: advent of philosophical languages
The 17th century saw the rise of projects for "philosophical" or "a priori" languages, such as:- Francis LodwickFrancis LodwickFrancis Lodwick was a pioneer of a priori languages . He was a merchant of Dutch origin who lived in London...
's A Common Writing (1647) and The Groundwork or Foundation laid (or So Intended) for the Framing of a New Perfect Language and a Universal Common Writing (1652) - Sir Thomas UrquhartThomas UrquhartSir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty was a Scottish writer and translator, most famous for his translation of Rabelais.-Life:...
's Ekskybalauron (1651) and Logopandecteision (1652) - George DalgarnoGeorge DalgarnoGeorge Dalgarno was a Scottish intellectual interested in linguistic problems. Originally from Aberdeen, he later worked as a schoolteacher in Oxford in collaboration with John Wilkins, although the two parted company intellectually in 1659.-Works:...
's Ars signorum, 1661 - John WilkinsJohn WilkinsJohn Wilkins FRS was an English clergyman, natural philosopher and author, as well as a founder of the Invisible College and one of the founders of the Royal Society, and Bishop of Chester from 1668 until his death....
' Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language, 1668
These early taxonomic conlangs produced systems of hierarchical classification that were intended to result in both spoken and written expression. Leibniz
Gottfried Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German philosopher and mathematician. He wrote in different languages, primarily in Latin , French and German ....
had a similar purpose for his lingua generalis of 1678, aiming at a lexicon of characters upon which the user might perform calculations that would yield true propositions automatically, as a side-effect developing binary calculus. These projects were not only occupied with reducing or modelling grammar, but also with the arrangement of all human knowledge into "characters" or hierarchies, an idea that with the Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
would ultimately lead to the Encyclopédie
Encyclopédie
Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers was a general encyclopedia published in France between 1751 and 1772, with later supplements, revised editions, and translations. It was edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert...
. Many of these 17th-18th centuries conlangs were pasigraphies
Pasigraphy
A pasigraphy is a writing system where each written symbol represents a concept rather than a word or sound or series of sounds in a spoken language. The aim is to be intelligible to persons of all languages...
, or purely written languages with no spoken form or a spoken form that would vary greatly according to the native language of the reader.
Leibniz and the encyclopedists realized that it is impossible to organize human knowledge unequivocally in a tree diagram, and consequently to construct an a priori language based on such a classification of concepts. Under the entry Charactère, D'Alembert critically reviewed the projects of philosophical languages of the preceding century. After the Encyclopédie, projects for a priori languages moved more and more to the lunatic fringe. Individual authors, typically unaware of the history of the idea, continued to propose taxonomic philosophical languages until the early 20th century (e.g. Ro), but most recent engineered language
Engineered language
Engineered languages are constructed languages devised to test or prove some hypotheses about how languages work or might work. There are at least three subcategories, philosophical languages , logical languages , and experimental languages...
s have had more modest goals; some are limited to a specific field, like mathematical formalism or calculus (e.g. Lincos and programming language
Programming language
A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....
s), others are designed for eliminating syntactical ambiguity (e.g., Loglan
Loglan
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...
and Lojban
Lojban
See also discussed by Arthur Protin, Bob LeChevalier, Carl Burke, Doug Landauer, Guy Steele, Jack Waugh, Jeff Prothero, Jim Carter, and Robert Chassell, as well as , the concepts which "average English speakers won't recognize" because most of them "have no exact English counterpart".Like most...
) or maximizing conciseness (e.g., Ithkuil
Ithkuil
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....
).
19th and 20th century: auxiliary languages
Already in the EncyclopédieEncyclopédie
Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers was a general encyclopedia published in France between 1751 and 1772, with later supplements, revised editions, and translations. It was edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert...
attention began to focus on a posteriori auxiliary languages. Joachim Faiguet de Villeneuve in the article on Langue already wrote a short proposition of a "laconic" or regularized grammar of French. During the 19th century, a bewildering variety of such International Auxiliary Languages (IALs) were proposed, so that Louis Couturat
Louis Couturat
Louis Couturat was a French logician, mathematician, philosopher, and linguist.-Life:Born in Ris-Orangis, Essonne, France, he was educated in philosophy and mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure...
and Leopold Leau
Léopold Leau
Léopold Leau was a French mathematician, primarily known for his many well-documented ties to international auxiliary languages....
in Histoire de la langue universelle (1903) reviewed 38 projects.
The first of these that made any international impact was Volapük
Volapük
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 , 1887 and 1889 . The first two conventions used...
, proposed in 1879 by Johann Martin Schleyer
Johann Martin Schleyer
Martin Schleyer was a German Catholic priest who invented the constructed language Volapük. His official name was "Martin Schleyer"; he added the name "Johann" unofficially....
; within a decade, 283 Volapükist clubs were counted all over the globe. However, disagreements between Schleyer and some prominent users of the language led to schism, and by the mid 1890s it fell into obscurity, making way for Esperanto
Esperanto
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...
, proposed in 1887 by Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof
L. L. Zamenhof
Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof December 15, 1859 – April 14, 1917) was the inventor of Esperanto, the most successful constructed language designed for international communication.-Cultural background:...
. Ido
Ido
Ido 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...
, made public in 1907, was a reform of Esperanto. Interlingua
Interlingua
Interlingua is an international auxiliary language , developed between 1937 and 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association...
, the most recent auxlang to gain a significant number of speakers, emerged in 1951, when the International Auxiliary Language Association
International Auxiliary Language Association
The International Auxiliary Language Association was founded in 1924 to "promote widespread study, discussion and publicity of all questions involved in the establishment of an auxiliary language, together with research and experiment that may hasten such establishment in an intelligent manner and...
published its Interlingua-English Dictionary
Interlingua-English Dictionary
The Interlingua–English Dictionary , developed by the International Auxiliary Language Association under the direction of Alexander Gode and published by Storm Publishers in 1951, is the first Interlingua dictionary. The IED includes about 27,000 words drawn from about 10,000 roots. It also...
and an accompanying grammar
Interlingua: A Grammar of the International Language
Interlingua: A Grammar of the International Language, sometimes called the Interlingua Grammar, is the first grammar of Interlingua. Released in 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association , it remains an authoritative reference work for Interlingua speakers and students of...
. The success of Esperanto did not stop others from trying to construct new auxiliary languages, such as Leslie Jones' Eurolengo
Eurolengo
Eurolengo is a constructed language invented by Leslie Jones with the intention of it becoming a common international language, "intended as a practical tool for business and tourism." The vocabulary consists of words borrowed from English and Spanish and made to conform to a consistent phonetic...
, which mixes elements of English and Spanish, or He Yafu's Mondlango, which introduces more English roots instead of Latin ones.
Loglan
Loglan
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...
(1955) and its descendants constitute a pragmatic return to the aims of the a priori languages, tempered by the requirement of usability of an auxiliary language. Thus far, these modern a priori languages have garnered only small groups of speakers.
Artlangs
Artistic languages, constructed for literary enjoyment or aesthetic reasons without any claim of usefulness, begin to appear in Early Modern literature (in PantagruelGargantua and Pantagruel
The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel is a connected series of five novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It is the story of two giants, a father and his son and their adventures, written in an amusing, extravagant, satirical vein...
, and in Utopia
Utopia
Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...
n contexts), but they only seem to gain notability as serious projects beginning in the 20th century. A Princess of Mars
A Princess of Mars
A Princess of Mars is a science fiction novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first of his Barsoom series. It is also Burroughs' first novel, predating his famous Tarzan series. Full of swordplay and daring feats, the novel is considered a classic example of 20th century pulp fiction...
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American author, best known for his creation of the jungle hero Tarzan and the heroic Mars adventurer John Carter, although he produced works in many genres.-Biography:...
was possibly the first fiction of that century to feature a constructed language. Tolkien was the first to develop a family of related fictional languages and was the first academic to publicly discuss artistic languages, giving a lecture entitled "A Secret Vice
A Secret Vice
A Secret Vice is the title of a lecture written by J. R. R. Tolkien in 1931, given at a conference. Some twenty years later, Tolkien revised the manuscript for a second presentation....
" circa 1930 at a congress. (Orwell's Newspeak is considered a satire of an IAL rather than an artistic language proper.)
By the beginning of the first decade of the 21st century, it had become common for science-fiction and fantasy works set in other worlds to feature constructed languages, or more commonly, an extremely limited but defined vocabulary which suggests the existence of a complete language, and constructed languages are a regular part of the genre, appearing in Star Wars
Star Wars
Star Wars is an American epic space opera film series created by George Lucas. The first film in the series was originally released on May 25, 1977, under the title Star Wars, by 20th Century Fox, and became a worldwide pop culture phenomenon, followed by two sequels, released at three-year...
, Star Trek
Star Trek
Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. The core of Star Trek is its six television series: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise...
, Lord of the Rings, Stargate SG-1
Stargate SG-1
Stargate SG-1 is a Canadian-American adventure and military science fiction television series and part of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Stargate franchise. The show, created by Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner, is based on the 1994 feature film Stargate by Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich...
, Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Atlantis: The Lost Empire is a 2001 American animated film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation. Written by Tab Murphy, directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, and produced by Don Hahn, it is the first science fiction film in the Disney animated features canon and the 41st overall. The film...
, Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones (TV series)
Game of Thrones is an American medieval fantasy television series created for HBO by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. Based on author George R. R. Martin's best-selling A Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy novels, the first of which is called A Game of Thrones, the television series debuted in...
, Avatar, Dune
Dune universe
Dune is a science fiction franchise which originated with the 1965 novel Dune by Frank Herbert. Considered by many to be the greatest science fiction novel of all time, Dune is frequently cited as the best-selling science fiction novel in history...
and the Myst
Myst
Myst is a graphic adventure video game designed and directed by the brothers Robyn and Rand Miller. It was developed by Cyan , a Spokane, Washington––based studio, and published and distributed by Brøderbund. The Millers began working on Myst in and released it for the Mac OS computer on September...
series of computer adventure games.
Modern conlang organizations
Various paper zines on constructed languages were published from the 1970s through the 1990s, such as Glossopoeic Quarterly, Taboo Jadoo, and The Journal of Planned Languages.The Conlang Mailing List was founded in 1991, and later split off an AUXLANG mailing list dedicated to international auxiliary languages. In the early-to-mid 1990s a few conlang-related zines were published as email or websites, such as Vortpunoj and Model Languages. The Conlang mailing list has developed a community of conlangers with its own customs, such as translation challenges and translation relays, and its own terminology. Sarah Higley reports from results of her surveys that the demographics of the Conlang list are primarily men from North America and western Europe, with a smaller number from Oceania, Asia, the Middle East, and South America, with an age range from thirteen to over sixty; the number of women participating has increased over time. More recently founded online communities include the Zompist Bulletin Board (ZBB; since 2001) and the Conlanger Bulletin Board. Discussion on these forums includes presentation of members' conlangs and feedback from other members, discussion of natural languages, whether particular conlang features have natural language precedents, and how interesting features of natural languages can be repurposed for conlangs, posting of interesting short texts as translation challenges, and meta-discussion about the philosophy of conlanging, conlangers' purposes, and whether conlanging is an art or a hobby. Another 2001 survey by Patrick Jarrett showed an average age of 30.65, with the average time since starting to invent languages 11.83 years. A more recent thread on the ZBB showed that many conlangers spend a relatively small amount of time on any one conlang, moving from one project to another; about a third spend years on developing the same language.
Collaborative constructed languages
The Talossan language, a cultural base for the micronations known as TalossaTalossa
Talossa is the name of at least two micronations, the Kingdom of Talossa and the Republic of Talossa.The Kingdom was founded in 1979 by 14-year-old Robert Ben Madison of Milwaukee, and as such is one of the oldest micronations still in existence. It was one of the first to get a website , and...
, was created by a single person in 1979. However, as interest in Talossan grew, guidance of the language became (in 1983) the province of a recommending body, the Comità per l'Útzil del Glheþ
Comità per l'Útzil del Glheþ
La Comità per l'Útzil del Glheþ is the official regulatory body for the Talossan language. The function of the CÚG is to recognize and recommend modifications in the vocabulary, grammar, and use of Talossan...
, and other independent organizations of enthusiasts. Villnian draws on Latin, Greek and the Scandinavian languages. In its syntax and grammar it is reminiscent of Chinese. The core elements were created by a single person and its vocabulary is now enlarged by suggestions from the internet community.
While most constructed languages begin as did Talossan, having been created by a single person, a few are created by group collaborations; examples of these are Interlingua, which was developed by the International Auxiliary Language Association
International Auxiliary Language Association
The International Auxiliary Language Association was founded in 1924 to "promote widespread study, discussion and publicity of all questions involved in the establishment of an auxiliary language, together with research and experiment that may hasten such establishment in an intelligent manner and...
, and Lojban
Lojban
See also discussed by Arthur Protin, Bob LeChevalier, Carl Burke, Doug Landauer, Guy Steele, Jack Waugh, Jeff Prothero, Jim Carter, and Robert Chassell, as well as , the concepts which "average English speakers won't recognize" because most of them "have no exact English counterpart".Like most...
, which was developed by a breakaway group of Loglanists.
Group collaboration has apparently become more common in recent years, as constructed language designers have started using Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
tools to coordinate design efforts. NGL/Tokcir was an early Internet collaborative engineered language whose designers used a mailing list
Mailing list
A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is referred to as "the mailing list", or simply "the...
to discuss and vote on grammatical and lexical design issues. More recently, The Demos IAL Project was developing an international auxiliary language
International auxiliary language
An international auxiliary language or interlanguage is a language meant for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common native language...
with similar collaborative method
Collaborative method
Collaborative methods are processes, behaviors and conversations that relate to collaboration between individuals. These methods specifically aim to increase the success of teams as they engage in collaborative problem solving...
s. The Voksigid and Novial 98 languages were both worked on by mailing lists, though neither was issued in final form.
Several artistic language
Artistic language
An artistic language is a constructed language designed for aesthetic pleasure. Unlike engineered languages or auxiliary languages, artistic languages usually have irregular grammar systems, much like natural languages. Many are designed within the context of fictional worlds, such as J. R. R....
s have been developed on different constructed language wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
s, usually involving discussion and voting on phonology, grammatical rules and so forth. An interesting variation is the corpus approach, exemplified by Madjal (late 2004) and Kalusa (mid-2006), where contributors simply read the corpus of existing sentences and add their own sentences, perhaps reinforcing existing trends or adding new words and structures. The Kalusa engine adds the ability for visitors to rate sentences as acceptable or unacceptable. There is no explicit statement of grammatical rules or explicit definition of words in this corpus approach; the meaning of words is inferred from their use in various sentences of the corpus, perhaps in different ways by different readers and contributors, and the grammatical rules can be inferred from the structures of the sentences that have been rated highest by the contributors and other visitors.
A special example for this kind of language is Simplish: the German Artist Ulli Purwin tried to set a focus on (what Germans call) 'Anglicisms'—in a humorous way. Everyone is invited to increase the vocabulary: from 'ââtist' to 'ørn'...
See also
- Aboriginal constructed languages: DaminDaminDamin was a ceremonial language register used by the advanced initiated men of the Lardil and the Yangkaal tribes in Aboriginal Australia. Both inhabit islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria, the Lardil on Mornington Island, the largest island of the Wesley Group, and the Yangkaal and Forsyth Islands...
, EskayanEskayanEskayan is the language of the Eskaya cultural minority of Bohol, an island province of the Philippines. Relatively little is known about this speech variety which has been the object of occasional media attention in the Philippines since the 1980s... - ISO, SIL, and BCP language codes for constructed languagesISO, SIL, and BCP language codes for constructed languagesThis is a list of ISO 639 codes and BCP 47 language tags for individual constructed languages, complete as of November 2009.ISO 639-2 also has the code art for other artificial languages...
- Language Creation ConferenceLanguage Creation ConferenceThe Language Creation Conference is an annual conference about conlanging, organized by the Language Creation Society . It focuses primarily on the process of creating new languages, but also features talks that focus on features of various specific languages...
- Language construction
- Artificial script
- LangmakerLangmakerLangmaker.com was a website run by Jeffrey Henning that acted as a database of conlangs, neographies, and other resources related to conlanging and conworlding...
- Language Construction Kit
- Language gameLanguage gameA language game is a system of manipulating spoken words to render them incomprehensible to the untrained ear. Language games are used primarily by groups attempting to conceal their conversations from others...
- Language regulator
- List of language inventors
- Language modelling and translation
- Knowledge representationKnowledge representationKnowledge representation is an area of artificial intelligence research aimed at representing knowledge in symbols to facilitate inferencing from those knowledge elements, creating new elements of knowledge...
- Language translation
- MetalanguageMetalanguageBroadly, any metalanguage is language or symbols used when language itself is being discussed or examined. In logic and linguistics, a metalanguage is a language used to make statements about statements in another language...
- Universal grammarUniversal grammarUniversal grammar is a theory in linguistics that suggests that there are properties that all possible natural human languages have.Usually credited to Noam Chomsky, the theory suggests that some rules of grammar are hard-wired into the brain, and manifest themselves without being taught...
- Knowledge representation
- Mystical languages
- GlossolaliaGlossolaliaGlossolalia or speaking in tongues is the fluid vocalizing of speech-like syllables, often as part of religious practice. The significance of glossolalia has varied with time and place, with some considering it a part of a sacred language...
- Language of the birdsLanguage of the birdsIn mythology, medieval literature and occultism, the language of the birds is postulated as a mystical, perfect divine language, green language, adamic language, enochian language, angelic language or a mythical or magical language used by birds to communicate with the initiated.-History:In...
- Glossolalia
- Spontaneous emergence of grammar
- June and Jennifer GibbonsJune and Jennifer GibbonsJune and Jennifer Gibbons , were identical twins who grew up in Wales. They became known as 'The Silent Twins' owing to their choice to communicate only with their immediate family. They began writing works of fiction but turned to crime in a bid for recognition...
- Nicaraguan Sign LanguageNicaraguan Sign LanguageNicaraguan Sign Language is a signed language spontaneously developed by deaf children in a number of schools in western Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s...
- Origin of languageOrigin of languageThe origin of language is the emergence of language in the human species. This is a highly controversial topic. Empirical evidence is so limited that many regard it as unsuitable for serious scholars. In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris went so far as to ban debates on the subject...
- PidginPidginA pidgin , or pidgin language, is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the...
- Poto and CabengoPoto and CabengoPoto and Cabengo are identical twins , who used a language unknown to other people until the age of about eight. Poto and Cabengo is also the name of a documentary film about the girls made by Jean-Pierre Gorin and released in 1979.They were apparently of normal intelligence...
- June and Jennifer Gibbons
- Linguistic determinismLinguistic determinismLinguistic determinism is the idea that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought. Determinism itself refers to the viewpoint that all events are caused by previous events, and linguistic determinism can be used broadly to refer to a number of specific views.For...
- Linguistic relativityLinguistic relativityThe principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers are able to conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view...
- List of constructed languages
- PasigraphyPasigraphyA pasigraphy is a writing system where each written symbol represents a concept rather than a word or sound or series of sounds in a spoken language. The aim is to be intelligible to persons of all languages...
- Universal languageUniversal languageUniversal language may refer to a hypothetical or historical language spoken and understood by all or most of the world's population. In some circles, it is a language said to be understood by all living things, beings, and objects alike. It may be the ideal of an international auxiliary language...
External links
Scholarship
- Language Arts Outpost preserves several articles from the paper zine Journal of Planned Languages
- The Language Lab, Rick Harrison's site, also reprints several such articles on specific languages
- Language Creation ConferenceLanguage Creation ConferenceThe Language Creation Conference is an annual conference about conlanging, organized by the Language Creation Society . It focuses primarily on the process of creating new languages, but also features talks that focus on features of various specific languages...
Communities
- Language Creation SocietyLanguage Creation SocietyThe Language Creation Society is a non-profit organization formed to promote constructed languages , support makers of constructed languages , and inform the general public about conlangs and the conlanger community...
- The Conlang Mailing List, whence the term "conlang". Primarily discusses artlangs, but also engelangs sometimes.
- The AUXLANG Mailing List, split from Conlang; primarily discusses international auxiliary languages.
- Zompist Bulletin Board, a highly active online forum devoted to conlangs (and conworlds in general).
- LiveJournal Conlangs community
- Conlanger Bulletin Board, a multilingual forum primarily for conlangers.
- [irc://irc.freenode.net/conlang #conlang], the IRC channel #conlang on FreenodeFreenodefreenode, formerly known as Open Projects Network, is an IRC network used to discuss peer-directed projects. Their servers are all accessible from the domain name [irc://chat.freenode.net chat.freenode.net], which load balances connections by using the actual servers in rotation...
. - CWNC.Net, A place to post news articles about your conworlds. Writing in conlangs is permissible.
- Is a logically perfect language possible?
How to
- The Language Construction Kit (ISBN 098447000X) by Mark Rosenfelder
- How to Create a Language by Pablo David Flores.
- Essays on Language Design by Rick Morneau, primarily on creating efficient and unambiguous engelangs but also on how to create a realistic fictional language.
- New York Times - Schott's Vocabulary - Questions Answered: Invented Languages (Interview with Arika OkrentArika OkrentArika Okrent is an American linguist, known particularly for her 2009 book In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language, a result of her five years of research into the topic of constructed...
and Paul FrommerPaul FrommerPaul R. Frommer is an American communications professor at the University of Southern California and a linguistics consultant. He is the former Vice President, Special Projects Coordinator, Strategic Planner, and Writer-Researcher at Bentley Industries in Los Angeles, California...
)
Directories
- Conlang Atlas of Language Structures, a typological database of conlangs, based on the World Atlas of Language Structures.
- Blueprints For Babel, focusing on international auxiliary languages.
- Garrett's Links to Logical Languages
- Department of Planned Languages Esperanto Museum of the Austrian National LibraryAustrian National LibraryThe Austrian National Library , is the largest library in Austria, with 7.4 million items in its collections. It is located in the Hofburg Palace in Vienna; since 2005 some of the collections are located in the baroque Palais Mollard-Clary...
. - The Conlanger's Library
Wikis
- Conlang Wikia ("Conlang Free City").
- IAL Wiki, a wiki for the Auxlang community.
- Unilang.org, a database of language- and linguistic-related information.
- Conlangs at WikiVerb -- conjugate verbs of conlangs on-line.