7 ms·

As someone who has followed the constructed language and international auxiliary language community for a couple of decades, and as someone with an undergraduat

As someone who has followed the constructed language and international auxiliary language community for a couple of decades, and as someone with an undergraduate degree in linguistics, I do not see a constructed language catching on with the mainstream public any time soon. A constructed language is a language that someone sits down and creates; this is different from a natural language which just forms as people communicate with each other. There are many constructed languages: Klingon in Star Trek is an actual constructed language, as is the language the Elves spoke in The Lord of the Rings. Esperanto, and Interslavic, are examples of International Auxiliary Languages (IAL), languages specially made to be easy to learn to facilitate international communication. We have had those languages for well over a century, and none of them have caught on. The reason why an IAL has not caught on is because people are motivated to learn a language when it has prestige, not because it’s easier to learn. Right now, for better or for worse, English is that language (with all of its warts: Auxiliary words to carry tense, the rather strange tense/lax vowel distinction, etc.) right now. I would love to see an IAL to catch on, but there’s a serious marketing issue, especially since a lot of people just don’t have the mind to learn a new language as an adult, no matter how easy the language is to learn.

DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
And in practice, if one Slavic language comes close to serving as a lingua franca in Eastern Europe, isn't it Russian? If you're going to learn a second language in order to communicate with people, you're going to learn a language with a large existing community - English, Modern Standard Arabic, Standard Chinese (Mandarin), Russian, French (in West Africa), etc.
- p1esk 7y ago
  There are many reasons why this hasn’t happened, but I think you pointed out the main one: English is the language with the largest existing community, so I think most Slavs would rather learn it as the second language, unless there’s a good reason to choose a different one due to some circumstances (eg proximity to a border, widespread business with a certain country, etc).
  - eequah9L 7y ago
    In Czechia, English is definitely the most reasonable L2 to learn, by far. Even for L3 I wouldn't be sure Russian is a better choice than German, which is just super useful around here. I learned Russian basically for irrational reasons. I'm glad I did, but I can't say it is very useful.
- ijzeren_jan 7y ago
  The main problem with Russian is that Russia/the USSR have been trying to impose it as a lingua franca in Central and Eastern Europe, and failed. Most people in those countries simply won't accept it. Besides, Russian is a complex language, with lots of elements that are different from other Slavic languages. Most people who haven't learned it won't understand it either.
  - decebalus1 7y ago
    > The main problem with Russian is that Russia/the USSR have been trying to impose it as a lingua franca in Central and Eastern Europe, and failed. Most people in those countries simply won't accept it. As a native of that area in Europe and having lived through some of the traces of russification I can confirm I have a strong bias against the Russian language. When I was a kid, Russian and French were the foreign languages they taught in school and after '89, everyone agreed it was best to switch Russian with English or German. Nobody there wants to learn Russian or immigrate to a Russian speaking country.
- kolinko 7y ago
  Definitely not - among other things - for social/political reasons. Russia has occupied central/eastern countries for four decades and most people prefer to be as far away from it culturally as possible. Even though my parents' generation was all forced to learn Russian, the current generation doesn't learn it. Even if it would be practical. Also, Russian may be easy to learn, but it won't be easier to understand than my native Polish to my Czech and Slovakian friends. Interslavic on the other hand would be understood relatively easily. I just read a chapter from the little prince that's on the page, and I understood it almost perfectly with no training in Interslavic, just with my knowledge of Polish language.
  - DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
    Yes, there's strong anti-Russian feeling in several countries, but Russian is still, by far, the Slavic language with the most second-language speakers. According to Ethnologue, there are more than 100 million Russian speakers outside of Russia. It is the primary language in Belarus and half of the Ukraine (and is known by most people in the country). Almost 7 million people in Poland know how to speak it.[1] English is probably becoming more of the lingua franca of Eastern Europe, but still, if any Slavic language were to serve as the lingua franca, it would be Russian. It's the Slavic language with the largest international presence, and in contrast to constructed languages, it actually has a large speaker base and significant cultural heritage. 1. http://www.ethnologue.com/21/language/rus/ http://www.ethnologue.com/21/language/rus/
    - dmurray 7y ago
      The second-language speakers skew old, though. People under 30 are much more likely to speak English or German. (Not trying to say that English should be the preferred lingua franca here, just that Russian doesn't have the headstart your statistics suggest).
      - DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
        We're talking about Slavic languages. I've said repeatedly that English is the international language, but if it comes down to Russian vs. a constructed Slavic language, Russian is obviously more attractive, given its existing speaker base and culture.
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  Russian is definitely way to go. Any slavic language is similar to Russian.
  - isbvhodnvemrwvn 7y ago
    If you ignore the politics and that it uses an entirely different alphabet than half of the other slavic countries. I am a native Polish speaker and have trouble reading Russian text even with repeated, limited text (genealogy resources such as birth acts). I definitely don't understand most of casual Russian.
  - emptyfile 7y ago
    > Any slavic language is similar to Russian. Nope.
AmericanChopper 7y ago
> I do not see a constructed language catching on with the mainstream public any time soon. Doesn’t Indonesian technically fit the definition of a constructed language?
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
  No, it's a standardized dialect of Malay, in the same way that Filipino is a standardized dialect of Tagalog.
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    Well it was based off a particular dialect of Malay, but it’s certainly not exactly the same as that dialect, nor the language spoken in Malaysia today. The Interslavic language in the OP is also based on existing languages. It was also implemented the same way you’d imagine a created language would be. A central authority came up with the language, told the people to learn it, and then a couple hundred million of them actually did. I think it has a remarkable quality, in that the government told everybody to learn a new common language, and that that actually succeeded. That’s the part where created languages usually come to a grinding halt. Whether the language is “created enough” seems open to interpretation to me.
    - BurningFrog 7y ago
      Guess it's an unusual version of the old saying: "A language is a dialect with its own army"
ijzeren_jan 7y ago
There is a critical difference between Esperanto and Interslavic. Esperanto is meant for communication between Esperanto speakers. Interslavic, on the other hand, is meant to be understandable for Slavs who haven't actually learned it. In other words, the success of Interslavic cannot only be judged by the number of people who learnt it. Basically, one speaker is enough to serve an entire audience, one translator is enough to serve all Slavic readers. Creating a community of Interslavic speakers has never been the primary purpose of creating the language.
- andolanra 7y ago
  The thing Interslavic is doing has also been tried before, but the illustrative example isn't Esperanto (which is an ad-hoc mixture of words taken arbitrarily from existing languages and put into a synthetic grammar) but rather Interlingua, which is a kind of streamlined Romance language. It too is more-or-less comprehensible by people who speak any Romance language, and was intended to be used in much the same way. In fact, to quote the creator of Interlingua writing in Interlingua: Le sol facto que importa (ab le puncto de vista de interlingua mesme) es que interlingua, gratias a su ambition de reflecter le homogeneitate cultural e ergo linguistic del occidente, es capace de render servicios tangibile a iste precise momento del historia del mundo. Il es per su contributiones actual e non per le promissas de su adherentes que interlingua vole esser judicate. (Edit: to translate for non-Romance speakers, this means, "The only important fact (from the point of view of Interlingua itself) is that Interlingua, thanks to its goal of reflecting the cultural—and therefore linguistic—homogeneity of the West, is capable of providing tangible services at this precise moment in the history of the world. It is for its actual contributions, and not the promises of its adherents, that Interlingua wishes to be judged.") It too has met with only limited success: there were some short-lived scientific publications in Interlingua, for example, for the intended audience of all Romance-speaking scientists. Even so, it never attracted much of an audience. That's not to say such a thing could never happen: merely that it's not unreasonable to be pessimistic here.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    Please don’t indent quoted text as code. It makes reading on mobile a chore and isn’t great on desktop either. Use > Le sol facto que importa (ab le puncto de vista de interlingua mesme) es que interlingua, gratias a su ambition de reflecter le homogeneitate cultural e ergo linguistic del occidente, es capace de render servicios tangibile a iste precise momento del historia del mundo. Il es per su contributiones actual e non per le promissas de su adherentes que interlingua vole esser judicate.
asveikau 7y ago
I'm curious what you would think of the history of Standard Italian or Modern Hebrew. In both cases, there was no such thing as a native speaker 300 years ago, but they were revived from historical literary sources to coincide with a new political identity or state, and today millions of people count them as their native language. It seems awfully like the story of a constructed language with high state, political and cultural support, that succeeds and grabs a foothold. Seems like it can work if it captures a particular zeitgeist. I am sure that stories like this exist elsewhere, these are just 2 cases I happened to have read about and come to mind.
- amatic 7y ago
  Serbo-croatian might go to that list as well, as it was an official language in the former Yugoslavia. French too. Spanish (Castillan). Seems like interslavic might have a chance only in a hypothetical panslavic country.
  - gpvos 7y ago
    According to Wikipedia, Serbo-Croatian was standardized before there was a unified Yugoslav state.
- wolf550e 7y ago
  Hebrew had over a million speakers even when it wasn't anyone's native language. It was known to Jewish men who studied in a cheder as boys (those who did not continue to higher studies/seminary in a yeshiva), the way I think Arabic is known to Muslims who are not native speakers. Hebrew was used for literature and poetry and for communication between Jewish communities that didn't share a native language. It wasn't reconstructed from literary sources, it was only modernized for everyday use.
  - nine_k 7y ago
    The problem that there were several dialects, each having a significant number of speakers, both in medieval Hebrew and medieval Italian languages, to say nothing of Germanic languages. It took certain development of compromise standards and getting used to them, when a single state appeared which needed a unifying language: Israel, Italy, Germany. All these countries still have a number of dialects spoken casually, but at least there is a common standard to use when in doubt.
fouc 7y ago
I have high hopes for a constructed language to someday become the dominant language. But I think it would need to be heavily modelled along multiple dimensions, serious computational power would need to be brought to bear on it to make it accessible and useful, and it would need to be tested on multiple focus groups with wildly different first languages, etc. I think there would be huge gains if a language was designed right. It could give us the tools to communicate complex ideas effectively for example, and perhaps make it easier to reduce ambiguity. Numbers 1-10 could be single syllables (or even shorter?) to take advantage of our auditory memory. etc etc
- G4BB3R 7y ago
  Take a look at Lojban
cortesoft 7y ago
> The reason why an IAL has not caught on is because people are motivated to learn a language when it has prestige, not because it’s easier to learn. Is this really why people learn a language? I would have thought that people learned a language when they wanted to be able to communicate with people that they couldn't, which also explains why people don't learn these languages (network effect, really)
- danans 7y ago
  Sounds like they mean prestige of the language, as in people will often learn the most prestigious language they can to avail themselves of the opportunities available only to those who speak that language.
adrianN 7y ago
Esperanto would have had a good chance of becoming a useful language had the League of Nations adopted it as its official language. However the French veto prevented this and essentially killed the movement.
- tomcooks 7y ago
  There are a lot more problems with Esperanto than the French veto I believe
  - adrianN 7y ago
    More than with the current defacto lingua franca, English?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
antocv 7y ago
> As someone who has followed the constructed language and international auxiliary language community for a couple of decades, and as someone with an undergraduate degree in linguistics, I do not see a constructed language catching on with the mainstream public any time soon. But strenholme, all official national languages are constructed. Someone sat down and constructed that language.
sharperguy 7y ago
It is not our purpose to build a community of Interslavic speakers and we do not ask anybody to actually learn it; we merely offer suggestions that will enable people to make themselves understandable to (other) Slavs in a language that is essentially their own. Given the character of the Slavic language family, it should be possible to speak or write in such way that ca. 90% of it will be readily understandable for virtually every Slavic speaker. [1] [1] http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/introduction.html#purpose http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/introduction.html#purpose

DiogenesKynikos 7y ago

And in practice, if one Slavic language comes close to serving as a lingua franca in Eastern Europe, isn't it Russian? If you're going to learn a second language in order to communicate with people, you're going to learn a language with a large existing community - English, Modern Standard Arabic, Standard Chinese (Mandarin), Russian, French (in West Africa), etc.

p1esk 7y ago
There are many reasons why this hasn’t happened, but I think you pointed out the main one: English is the language with the largest existing community, so I think most Slavs would rather learn it as the second language, unless there’s a good reason to choose a different one due to some circumstances (eg proximity to a border, widespread business with a certain country, etc).
- eequah9L 7y ago
  In Czechia, English is definitely the most reasonable L2 to learn, by far. Even for L3 I wouldn't be sure Russian is a better choice than German, which is just super useful around here. I learned Russian basically for irrational reasons. I'm glad I did, but I can't say it is very useful.
ijzeren_jan 7y ago
The main problem with Russian is that Russia/the USSR have been trying to impose it as a lingua franca in Central and Eastern Europe, and failed. Most people in those countries simply won't accept it. Besides, Russian is a complex language, with lots of elements that are different from other Slavic languages. Most people who haven't learned it won't understand it either.
- decebalus1 7y ago
  > The main problem with Russian is that Russia/the USSR have been trying to impose it as a lingua franca in Central and Eastern Europe, and failed. Most people in those countries simply won't accept it. As a native of that area in Europe and having lived through some of the traces of russification I can confirm I have a strong bias against the Russian language. When I was a kid, Russian and French were the foreign languages they taught in school and after '89, everyone agreed it was best to switch Russian with English or German. Nobody there wants to learn Russian or immigrate to a Russian speaking country.
kolinko 7y ago
Definitely not - among other things - for social/political reasons. Russia has occupied central/eastern countries for four decades and most people prefer to be as far away from it culturally as possible. Even though my parents' generation was all forced to learn Russian, the current generation doesn't learn it. Even if it would be practical. Also, Russian may be easy to learn, but it won't be easier to understand than my native Polish to my Czech and Slovakian friends. Interslavic on the other hand would be understood relatively easily. I just read a chapter from the little prince that's on the page, and I understood it almost perfectly with no training in Interslavic, just with my knowledge of Polish language.
- DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
  Yes, there's strong anti-Russian feeling in several countries, but Russian is still, by far, the Slavic language with the most second-language speakers. According to Ethnologue, there are more than 100 million Russian speakers outside of Russia. It is the primary language in Belarus and half of the Ukraine (and is known by most people in the country). Almost 7 million people in Poland know how to speak it.[1] English is probably becoming more of the lingua franca of Eastern Europe, but still, if any Slavic language were to serve as the lingua franca, it would be Russian. It's the Slavic language with the largest international presence, and in contrast to constructed languages, it actually has a large speaker base and significant cultural heritage. 1. http://www.ethnologue.com/21/language/rus/ http://www.ethnologue.com/21/language/rus/
  - dmurray 7y ago
    The second-language speakers skew old, though. People under 30 are much more likely to speak English or German. (Not trying to say that English should be the preferred lingua franca here, just that Russian doesn't have the headstart your statistics suggest).
    - DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
      We're talking about Slavic languages. I've said repeatedly that English is the international language, but if it comes down to Russian vs. a constructed Slavic language, Russian is obviously more attractive, given its existing speaker base and culture.
vbezhenar 7y ago
Russian is definitely way to go. Any slavic language is similar to Russian.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 7y ago
  If you ignore the politics and that it uses an entirely different alphabet than half of the other slavic countries. I am a native Polish speaker and have trouble reading Russian text even with repeated, limited text (genealogy resources such as birth acts). I definitely don't understand most of casual Russian.
- emptyfile 7y ago
  > Any slavic language is similar to Russian. Nope.

AmericanChopper 7y ago

> I do not see a constructed language catching on with the mainstream public any time soon. Doesn’t Indonesian technically fit the definition of a constructed language?

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
No, it's a standardized dialect of Malay, in the same way that Filipino is a standardized dialect of Tagalog.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  Well it was based off a particular dialect of Malay, but it’s certainly not exactly the same as that dialect, nor the language spoken in Malaysia today. The Interslavic language in the OP is also based on existing languages. It was also implemented the same way you’d imagine a created language would be. A central authority came up with the language, told the people to learn it, and then a couple hundred million of them actually did. I think it has a remarkable quality, in that the government told everybody to learn a new common language, and that that actually succeeded. That’s the part where created languages usually come to a grinding halt. Whether the language is “created enough” seems open to interpretation to me.
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    Guess it's an unusual version of the old saying: "A language is a dialect with its own army"

ijzeren_jan 7y ago

There is a critical difference between Esperanto and Interslavic. Esperanto is meant for communication between Esperanto speakers. Interslavic, on the other hand, is meant to be understandable for Slavs who haven't actually learned it. In other words, the success of Interslavic cannot only be judged by the number of people who learnt it. Basically, one speaker is enough to serve an entire audience, one translator is enough to serve all Slavic readers. Creating a community of Interslavic speakers has never been the primary purpose of creating the language.

andolanra 7y ago
The thing Interslavic is doing has also been tried before, but the illustrative example isn't Esperanto (which is an ad-hoc mixture of words taken arbitrarily from existing languages and put into a synthetic grammar) but rather Interlingua, which is a kind of streamlined Romance language. It too is more-or-less comprehensible by people who speak any Romance language, and was intended to be used in much the same way. In fact, to quote the creator of Interlingua writing in Interlingua: Le sol facto que importa (ab le puncto de vista de interlingua mesme) es que interlingua, gratias a su ambition de reflecter le homogeneitate cultural e ergo linguistic del occidente, es capace de render servicios tangibile a iste precise momento del historia del mundo. Il es per su contributiones actual e non per le promissas de su adherentes que interlingua vole esser judicate. (Edit: to translate for non-Romance speakers, this means, "The only important fact (from the point of view of Interlingua itself) is that Interlingua, thanks to its goal of reflecting the cultural—and therefore linguistic—homogeneity of the West, is capable of providing tangible services at this precise moment in the history of the world. It is for its actual contributions, and not the promises of its adherents, that Interlingua wishes to be judged.") It too has met with only limited success: there were some short-lived scientific publications in Interlingua, for example, for the intended audience of all Romance-speaking scientists. Even so, it never attracted much of an audience. That's not to say such a thing could never happen: merely that it's not unreasonable to be pessimistic here.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  Please don’t indent quoted text as code. It makes reading on mobile a chore and isn’t great on desktop either. Use > Le sol facto que importa (ab le puncto de vista de interlingua mesme) es que interlingua, gratias a su ambition de reflecter le homogeneitate cultural e ergo linguistic del occidente, es capace de render servicios tangibile a iste precise momento del historia del mundo. Il es per su contributiones actual e non per le promissas de su adherentes que interlingua vole esser judicate.

asveikau 7y ago

I'm curious what you would think of the history of Standard Italian or Modern Hebrew. In both cases, there was no such thing as a native speaker 300 years ago, but they were revived from historical literary sources to coincide with a new political identity or state, and today millions of people count them as their native language. It seems awfully like the story of a constructed language with high state, political and cultural support, that succeeds and grabs a foothold. Seems like it can work if it captures a particular zeitgeist. I am sure that stories like this exist elsewhere, these are just 2 cases I happened to have read about and come to mind.

amatic 7y ago
Serbo-croatian might go to that list as well, as it was an official language in the former Yugoslavia. French too. Spanish (Castillan). Seems like interslavic might have a chance only in a hypothetical panslavic country.
- gpvos 7y ago
  According to Wikipedia, Serbo-Croatian was standardized before there was a unified Yugoslav state.
wolf550e 7y ago
Hebrew had over a million speakers even when it wasn't anyone's native language. It was known to Jewish men who studied in a cheder as boys (those who did not continue to higher studies/seminary in a yeshiva), the way I think Arabic is known to Muslims who are not native speakers. Hebrew was used for literature and poetry and for communication between Jewish communities that didn't share a native language. It wasn't reconstructed from literary sources, it was only modernized for everyday use.
- nine_k 7y ago
  The problem that there were several dialects, each having a significant number of speakers, both in medieval Hebrew and medieval Italian languages, to say nothing of Germanic languages. It took certain development of compromise standards and getting used to them, when a single state appeared which needed a unifying language: Israel, Italy, Germany. All these countries still have a number of dialects spoken casually, but at least there is a common standard to use when in doubt.

fouc 7y ago

I have high hopes for a constructed language to someday become the dominant language. But I think it would need to be heavily modelled along multiple dimensions, serious computational power would need to be brought to bear on it to make it accessible and useful, and it would need to be tested on multiple focus groups with wildly different first languages, etc. I think there would be huge gains if a language was designed right. It could give us the tools to communicate complex ideas effectively for example, and perhaps make it easier to reduce ambiguity. Numbers 1-10 could be single syllables (or even shorter?) to take advantage of our auditory memory. etc etc

G4BB3R 7y ago
Take a look at Lojban

cortesoft 7y ago

> The reason why an IAL has not caught on is because people are motivated to learn a language when it has prestige, not because it’s easier to learn. Is this really why people learn a language? I would have thought that people learned a language when they wanted to be able to communicate with people that they couldn't, which also explains why people don't learn these languages (network effect, really)

danans 7y ago
Sounds like they mean prestige of the language, as in people will often learn the most prestigious language they can to avail themselves of the opportunities available only to those who speak that language.

adrianN 7y ago

Esperanto would have had a good chance of becoming a useful language had the League of Nations adopted it as its official language. However the French veto prevented this and essentially killed the movement.

tomcooks 7y ago
There are a lot more problems with Esperanto than the French veto I believe
- adrianN 7y ago
  More than with the current defacto lingua franca, English?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

antocv 7y ago

> As someone who has followed the constructed language and international auxiliary language community for a couple of decades, and as someone with an undergraduate degree in linguistics, I do not see a constructed language catching on with the mainstream public any time soon. But strenholme, all official national languages are constructed. Someone sat down and constructed that language.

sharperguy 7y ago

It is not our purpose to build a community of Interslavic speakers and we do not ask anybody to actually learn it; we merely offer suggestions that will enable people to make themselves understandable to (other) Slavs in a language that is essentially their own. Given the character of the Slavic language family, it should be possible to speak or write in such way that ca. 90% of it will be readily understandable for virtually every Slavic speaker. [1] [1] http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/introduction.html#purpose http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/introduction.html#purpose