International artificial languages: dreaming of a linguistic utopia

Most people have heard at least once in their lives about the most famous constructed languages, such as Esperanto or Klingon.

But what if I say Volapük? Eurolengo? Loglan? Do they ring a bell for you? Probably not. And the list could go on…

The struggle to create new languages from scratch has always been an important part of human history.

From the first “proper” artificial languages in the XII century, much inspired by religious ideals, to the more modern attempts to create a perfect, rational language that would ideally be able to express all human knowledge in a rigorous and unequivocal way (many philosophers in the XVII and XVIII century tried to create a priori languages based on hierarchical classifications), during the last two centuries several conlangs were created with the main purpose of facilitating communication between people who don’t share a common first language.

Why not English, then? So many people can already speak it today, so what’s the point of learning a whole new language from scratch?

Hold on, we’ll get there soon. First, let me tell you how I became so passionate about this unusual topic (if you just want to learn more about artificial languages though, you can skip the next part and read these very informative and well-researched articles: here, here and here).

During my Erasmus year in Spain, I randomly chose to attend a sociolinguistics module (“randomly” because I didn’t even have a clear idea of what sociolinguistics was) at the University of Santiago de Compostela.

This turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life – or at least of my university career. I had one of the most amazing professors I’ve ever met. Through highly interactive and practical classes, this great woman opened up my eyes to some of the most important topics of sociolinguistics. One of them was… can you guess?

In one of our assignments, we had to write some personal thoughts about whether the creation of a perfect, rational language (the a priori language I was talking about) would be possible. I decided that the best way to find out was to try and invent one. I spent a whole night on it and, predictably, the result was a failure, but at least I realised why it couldn’t work, and came to the conclusion that (oversimplifying the concept) a non-perfect human being could never create anything perfect, let alone something as complicated as a whole language!

When I went back to Italy I had to write my thesis and I knew I wanted it to be about International Auxiliary Languages, but none of my university’s professors seemed as enthusiastic as I was, so I had to abandon my project. I kept reading a lot about the topic, but never really worked on it again.

What is so fascinating about it? I think it’s now time to go back to my first question: isn’t English more convenient?

Short answer is yes. It is obviously more convenient. So convenient that, as much as I love the concept and the ideals behind auxlangs, not even I would “waste” time learning one.

At the same time, I think that all the efforts made to invent each one of those languages stem from what is arguably one of the main principles of sociolinguistics: no natural language should be considered more important or useful than others (I particularly like this, because it applies to human beings as well).

Now, this is essential. Many people would argue: “who cares? Languages are just means of communication”. But they aren’t really just means of communication, are they?

Languages are not only made of words. They express centuries of cultures, traditions, lifestyles, ideals, attitudes, history, politics, and so on. Languages contribute to shape (and, at the same time, are shaped by) our worldviews. Our language is a huge part of who we are.

By declaring that English, French, or … (any other language) is or should be the international language, native speakers of that language will be automatically in a privileged position. Not only that: a language will contribute to spread across the world the culture(s) related to it, giving it a dominant position.

The reason why this is not fair (and might be a threat to other “minor” languages and cultures) is obvious.

Avoiding cultural and linguistic dominance, therefore, was one of the main goals of most artificial auxlangs.

Among the most successful was Volapük, created in the late XIX century and largely displaced by Esperanto a few decades later (fun fact: in Esperanto, “volapukaĵo” also means “nonsense”); however, there have been several more auxlangs: Solresol (curiously based on music), Interlingua, Ido are just some examples. Many of them were supposed to be improved versions of Esperanto, which remained, however, the language with the most speakers and enthusiasts – I will always wonder why, as it’s far from being the best constructed one.

The problem with most auxlangs from the XIX-XX century was that many of them (especially the most successful ones) basically betrayed the ideals they were inspired by: though their creators claimed to be seeking equality, most of these languages were actually constructed on the basis of European languages, “excluding” speakers from four other continents.

Another problem is, obviously, the aforementioned reluctance to learn a new language “only” because it would be fairer, since English works pretty well as a lingua franca and is already spoken and understood all over the world.

At this stage, many questions remain open: will it ever be possible to create a neutral (that is, non-Eurocentric or not affected by any other type of imbalance) artificial language that could actually work as a vernacular and be equally easy to learn for speakers of every language of the world? And, even if it happened, could it really be adopted and used as a common language? How long would that take? Won’t people just stick to convenience?

Most of these questions will probably remain unanswered. As you can see, this is a very controversial topic, and talking about an artificial international language nowadays seems more of a utopia than a feasible solution.