How Useful are Conlangs?

Conlangs (constructed languages) are incredibly fascinating things. While most languages are the result of hundreds, thousands, and even millions of people talking to one another over thousands of years, conlangs are usually the creation of a single person or small group of people over a short period of time (in terms of human history, at least).

For those not familiar with conlangs, they are languages whose structure and vocabulary have been consciously devised by humans, rather than developing "naturally" over many years as other languages do. However, while I do find them very fascinating, the question of how useful they are keeps creeping into my mind.

What are conlangs for?

There are many reasons why conlangs are created. Some create them just for fun, while others create them in an attempt to create a universal language for all of the world's people to speak. Esperanto, for example, was created with this goal in mind.

In popular culture, science fiction probably makes more use of conlangs than other genre. This is because a fictional universe will always feel more convincing if an eight-eyed extraterrestrial speaks an alien language rather than plain old English.

But how useful are conlangs? Can they or will they replace natural languages? I'd like to try to answer a few of the most common questions surrounding these captivating creations.

How can you judge a conlang's utility?

First, let me say that you can only judge how useful something is if you know what you're trying to use it for. As I said, there are several reasons why you would create a conlang, and this will dictate how you create your language. If you are creating a conlang to be used in a handful of scenes in a film or a few pages in a book, you probably won't attempt to create a vast vocabulary where every word has hundreds of synonyms. However, if you are wanting you conlang to be used as a lingua franca, like Latin across the Roman Empire or English today, you might consider plenty of business and trade terms.

I believe the best way to judge a conlang's utility is by how well it accomplishes the goal of its creation.

What can they tell us about natural languages?

On an individual level, there are few things that will show you just how nuanced and complex languages are as trying to create your own. A lot of things you rarely think about when you speak a natural language will quickly come to the fore when you have to consider phonology, a writing system, creating a vocabulary and then putting a grammar system together.

Will a universal language ever build up a head of steam?

Will there ever be a universal language?

If a conlang such as Esperanto is designed to be everyone's second language, we have to first consider whether or not there is any trend towards there being a universal lingua franca, and if so, why would we pick one that has just been created, over one already spoken by millions or billions of people?

This is the main challenge for any conlang setting out with this goal. While there are conlangs that have thriving communities of speakers, none have ever come remotely close to achieving a widespread global status. Is this due to the languages themselves, or is there just too little demand for such a thing?

While languages are dying out at an alarming rate, this trend doesn't appear to be heading towards a singularity just yet. In fact, a number of minority languages have seen a revival in recent years and even extinct languages have come back from the dead (Manx, for example).

In fact, as long as people consider languages to be a part of their identity, the language which forms that identity will survive as long as that identity does. As long as the community and history that is home to a language still exists, people will continue to speak the languages that embody the shared history and culture.

This is why its almost impossible for a universal conlang to gain a footing on a global level. While there will always be those pragmatic people amongst us who wish to see an entire world communicating with one language, there will also always be those who don't.

So are they useful?

As I said, defining utility for conlangs is based on why they were created. For those created for fun, if you enjoy creating them and using them, then they serve their purpose. If you're trying to get the whole world to sing to the tune of just one conlang, you may be barking up the wrong arbo...

Agree or disagree? Tell us your thoughts on the utility on conlangs in the comments below!

Conlangs: Interlingua

Over the past week or so we've had a look at Esperanto as well as Ido, a constructed language that came from Esperanto reformists. Today we're rounding off with the last of the the three most popular conlangs, Interlingua.

Interlingua takes its name from the Latin words inter and lingua, effectively meaning "intermediary language". Unsurprisingly, in Interlingua, these words also mean exactly the same thing. Interlingua is younger than Esperanto and Ido, having been created between 1937 and 1951. The language has a similar number of speakers to Ido, having never really garnered as much support as the significantly more popular Esperanto.

Europe, home to the languages used to create Interlingua.

The vocabulary of Interlingua is based principally on a set of control languages which include the EFIGS languages (English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish), as well as Portuguese and Russian. However, as long as an international usage can be shown within these seven languages, vocabulary can also be taken from any language. As a result, Interlingua also features vocabulary from Japanese and Arabic, for example.

What makes Interlingua different from Esperanto and Ido is the way that it adds words to its vocabulary. As we have already said, it can borrow almost any word that is understood internationally. On top of that, Interlingua retains the spelling, pronunciation, and meaning of any words it adds to its vocabulary, unlike Esperanto and Ido, which prefer to change the word's spelling to conform to their rules. However, if loanwords feature a diacritic that does not affect pronunciation, they are removed.

Due to the aforementioned conventions, Interlingua is considered a naturalistic auxiliary language, as it takes vocabulary and loanwords much like naturally-occurring languages and, as a result of this, is the world's most widely-spoken language of this type.

The main criticism of Interlingua is its purpose as a Eurocentric auxiliary language. Due to its reliance on its control languages, it is fairly easy to learn amongst speakers of those languages. Interlingua is generally considered to be more expressive as it maintains elements from its control languages, in comparison to Esperanto which is more restrictive in its construction.

So while Interlingua is far from being as popular as Esperanto, it's not particularly fair to compare the two due to their different functions and constructions.

Ido: Reforming Esperanto

A few days ago, we covered the constructed language of Esperanto. As a result, it got us thinking about constructed languages and international auxiliary languages. As we said, Esperanto is the world's most popular constructed language. Ido, however, is not.

The flag of Ido

Ido was created in the early 20th century following complaints about Esperanto. The language was designed to address the flaws in Esperanto and to correct them. The Ido movement never really garnered much support, and it wasn't until the age of the internet that Ido actually gained any momentum. Even now, it only has a couple hundred speakers and still lacks support.

The first of Ido's changes to Esperanto was removing all diacritics from the alphabet. Ido's alphabet is identical to the Latin alphabet as used in the English language. The 26 letters represent 26 individual sounds. There are also three digraphs, ch, qu, and sh, which are used.

The phonology of Esperanto always used a stress on the penultimate syllable. Ido, however, does not always follow this rule, instead opting to change the stress for verb infinitives to the last syllable. In terms of vocabulary, Ido prefers to retain nouns as gender-neutral rather than defining words such as occupations as gender-specific.

Even though constructed languages are man-made inventions, one could say that they are still subject to evolution and even revolution.

Esperanto: The World's Most Popular Constructed Language, Part 4

Over the last few days we've been looking at Esperanto, the world's most popular conlang. We've seen the formation of the language, its use in the world, and the way it sounds, or its phonology.

Today we'll be concluding our look at Esperanto with the grammar and lexicon, which we feel will bring the whole language together nicely. Of course, the grammar and lexicon of a constructed language can be identical or completely different to those of naturally occurring languages, which can evolve and borrow words from other languages. It's all really up to the creator and the users of the language.

The man behind the language,
Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof.

Zamenhof's dream of Esperanto being an international auxiliary language intended to foster peace meant one thing when it came to grammar, regularity. Esperanto grammar in comparison to other languages is designed to be highly regular, with as few grammatical irregularities as possible.

The main principal utilises suffixes, with certain suffixes dictating specific grammatical elements. For example, words ending in -o are nouns and those that end in -a are adjectives. As a result, it can be very simple for learners and even those who are fluent in the language to easily distinguish word types.

When it comes to the conjugation of verbs, the suffix -i indicates the infinitive, whereas -is indicates the past tense in the indicative mood, -as is the present indicative and -os is the future indicative. There are no individual conjugations according to the subject as the subject is already mentioned. Simple, right?

Speakers of Esperanto have been permitted to borrow words from other languages, given that only the most international of words are used and that they are adjusted to utilise the same rules that govern all word types in Esperanto.

Since the rules that govern the roots of words in Esperanto come from either Greek or Latin origins, Esperanto fails on its goal of being an international language. While many of those who speak a language of Indo-European origins will find the lexicon to be fairly self-explanatory, speakers of other languages will not find the lexical roots so obvious.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Esperanto: The World's Most Popular Constructed Language, Part 3

Over the past two days we've looked at the creation and history, and then the application and usage of Esperanto. Now that we've set the scene, we'll be having a look at how Esperanto is put together.

As a conlang, Esperanto can't really be classified as belonging to any other language families. Instead, Esperanto is classified as an International Auxiliary Language. Though the language was heavily influenced by Indo-European languages, taking on the phonemic properties of Slavic languages and the lexicon of Romance and Germanic languages, Esperanto has drawn heavy criticism for being too Eurocentric.

La Espero, a poem known as the
"hymn of Esperanto".

When speaking Esperanto, the stress is usually on the penultimate syllable, much like Italian and in poetry. The phonology is particularly interesting as the relationship between letters and phonemes is direct, meaning that every letter used in Esperanto has only one phoneme that it could represent. This was particularly important to Esperanto's creator, L. L. Zamenhof, who declared the rule as "one letter, one sound".

The phonology is also very similar to Polish and Belarusian, which is wholly unsurprising given that Zamenhof himself was born in Bialystok, where most of the population spoke Yiddish and were either Poles or Belarusians.

The relation between letters and phonemes is as closely related to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as possible. The language currently features 23 consonants, 5 vowels, 2 semi-vowels, and 6 diphthongs. This is reasonably low given that, depending on the dialect, English speakers can have up to 20 vowel sounds.

Having covered the phonology of Esperanto, tomorrow we'll be continuing our evaluation of Esperanto by looking at the Esperanto grammar and lexicon.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Esperanto: The World's Most Popular Constructed Language, Part 2

Yesterday we began discussing the history of Esperanto, a constructed language or conlang that was created by L. L. Zamenhof. We left off yesterday  mentioning how the US army used Esperanto in their training exercises and drills.

The main reason that the US army made this decision was that Esperanto has no nation of its own, so it would be very difficult for any other nation to take offence at the military practices in the US. It was also useful as it was fairly unlikely that any of the troops taking part in the drills would have learned Esperanto before.

A map of European Esperanto groups in 1905.

It would seem that given its political neutrality, Esperanto would be the ideal language for everybody to learn, wouldn't it? It turns out that the ideal of the language of peace wouldn't be as readily adopted as Zamenhof would have liked.

Though UNESCO recognised Esperanto in 1954, to date no country has recognised it as an official language. Esperanto has an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 speakers, though some estimates reach as high as 2 million. Esperanto also has around 1,000 native speakers. The lion's share of these are children born to parents who met through Esperanto and as result their children were born into an Esperanto-speaking household. Almost all of these children are raised bilingual due to most of the outside world speaking a language other than Esperanto.

Since we've looked at the history and use of Esperanto, tomorrow we'll be continuing our look at the language with an analysis of its linguistic construction.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Esperanto: The World's Most Popular Constructed Language, Part 1

For those of you who don't know about it, Esperanto is a language, but not like you would think of in the traditional sense. Esperanto was the brainchild of L. L. Zamenhof, a linguist and doctor in the 19th century who had the idea of creating a language that could unite the world.

In its simplest form, Esperanto is a tool that was intended to transcend political boundaries, nationalities, and ultimately, foster peace throughout the world. The idea was that if everybody had the same language, one that was easy enough to learn, then people would eventually stop fighting. You certainly couldn't doubt Zamenhof's ambition.

Esperanto has its own flag but not its own country.

Zamenhof went ahead and created his language, which is known as a constructed language or conlang. Though phonemically-inspired by Slavic languages, the lexicon takes inspiration from mainly Romance languages, and to a lesser extent Germanic languages. Esperanto uses the Latin alphabet and the same diacritics as several other Slavic languages.

In Nazi Germany, the language was singled out as being a tool for Jewish conspirators. Since Zamenhof was Jewish, this led to the language not only being mentioned in Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, but also led to Zamenhof's family being targeted.

Fascist Italy was not particularly against Esperanto though, as it shared a lot of phonetic similarities with Italian and was even permitted at the time. However, this was a rare case as Esperanto was viewed by most as the language of spies since Esperanto doesn't hold official language status in any country and could easily be used as a tool to secretly communicate.

The American army even used Esperanto in war games and training exercises in the 50s and 60s, though we'll have more on that tomorrow.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4