List of constructed languages

This list of notable constructed languages is in alphabetical order, and divided into auxiliary, engineered, and artistic (including fictional) languages, and their respective subgenres.

Auxiliary languages

International auxiliary languages are languages constructed to provide communication among all human beings, or a significant portion, without necessarily replacing native languages.

1800s

Language name	ISO	Year of first publication	Creator	Comments
Solresol		1827	François Sudre	Based on pitch levels sounded with their solfege syllables (a "musical language")
Communicationssprache		1839	Joseph Schipfer	Based on French
Universalglot		1868	Jean Pirro	An early a posteriori language, predating even Volapük
Volapük	vo, vol	1879–1880	Johann Martin Schleyer	First to generate international interest in IALs
Esperanto	eo, epo	1887	L. L. Zamenhof	Easily the most popular auxiliary language ever invented, including tens of thousands of speakers and the only one to date with its own native speakers
Spokil		1887 or 1890	Adolph Nicolas	An a priori language by a former Volapük advocate
Mundolinco		1888	J. Braakman	The first esperantido
Bolak		1899	Léon Bollack	Prospered fairly well in its initial years, now almost forgotten

1900s

Language name	ISO	Year of first publication	Creator	Comments
Idiom Neutral		1902	Waldemar Rosenberger	A naturalistic IAL by a former advocate of Volapük
Latino sine Flexione		1903	Giuseppe Peano	"Latin without inflections," it replaced Idiom Neutral in 1908
Ro		1904	Rev. Edward Powell Foster	An a priori language using categories of knowledge
Ido	io, ido	1907	A group of reformist Esperanto speakers	The most successful offspring of Esperanto
Adjuvilo		1910	Claudius Colas	An esperantido some believe was created to cause dissent among Idoists
Occidental	ile	1922	Edgar de Wahl	A sophisticated naturalistic IAL, also known as Interlingue
Novial	nov	1928	Otto Jespersen	Another sophisticated naturalistic IAL by a famous Danish linguist
Basic English		1930	Charles Kay Ogden	A reduced and simplified form of English, proposed as an international auxiliary language
Sona		1935	Kenneth Searight	Best known attempt at universality of vocabulary
Esperanto II		1937	René de Saussure	Last of linguist Saussure's many esperantidos
Mondial		1940s	Dr. Helge Heimer	Naturalistic European language
Glosa	igs	1943	Lancelot Hogben, et al.	Originally called Interglossa, has a strong Greco-Latin vocabulary
Blissymbols	zbl	1949	Charles Bliss	An ideographic writing system, with its own grammar and syntax.
Interlingua	ia, ina	1951	International Auxiliary Language Association	A major effort to develop a common Romance vocabulary
Intal		1956	Erich Weferling	An effort to unite the most common systems of constructed languages
Romanid		1956	Zoltán Magyar	A zonal constructed language based on the Romance languages
Lingua sistemfrater		1957	Pham Xuan Thai	Greco-Latin vocabulary with southeast Asian grammar
Neo		1961	Arturo Alfandari	A very terse European language
Babm		1962	Rikichi Okamoto	Noted for using Latin letters as an abjad
Unilingua		1966	Noubar Agapoff	An a priori language with systematic vocabulary, also known as Mirad
Arcaicam Esperantom		1969	Manuel Halvelik	'Archaic Esperanto', developed for use in Esperanto literature
Afrihili	afh	1970	K. A. Kumi Attobrah	A pan-African language
Nuwaubic		1970s?	Malachi Z. York	The language of a black supremacist religious group
Kotava	avk	1978	Staren Fetcey	A sophisticated a priori IAL
Uropi		1986	Joël Landais	Based on the common Indo-European roots and the common grammatical points of the IE languages
Poliespo		1990s?	Nvwtohiyada Idehesdi Sequoyah	Esperanto grammar with significant Cherokee vocabulary
Europanto		1996	Diego Marani	A "linguistic jest" by a European diplomat
Unish		1996	Language Research Institute, Sejong University	Vocabulary from fifteen representative languages
Noxilo		1997	Mizta Sentaro	a language trying to avoid any regional or ethnic bias
Lingua Franca Nova	lfn	1998	C. George Boeree and others	Romance vocabulary with creole-like grammar
Slovio		1999	Mark Hučko	A constructed language based on the Slavic languages and Esperanto grammar

2000s

Language name	ISO	Year of first publication	Creator	Comments
Slovianski		2006	Ondrej Rečnik, Gabriel Svoboda, Jan van Steenbergen, Igor Polyakov	A naturalistic language based on the Slavic languages
Sambahsa-Mundialect		2007	Olivier Simon	Mixture of simplified Proto-Indo-European and other languages
Angos		2012	Benjamin Wood	Simplified worldlang with a strict grammar

Controlled languages

Controlled languages are natural languages that have in some way been altered to make them simpler, easier to use, or more acceptable to those who do not speak the original language well. Most of these have been based on English.

• Ander-Saxon (described in the article Anglo-Saxon linguistic purism)
• Basic English
• E-Prime
• Globish
• Plain English
• Simplified English
• Special English

Visual languages

Visual languages use symbols or movements in place of the spoken word.

• Blissymbols (zbl)
• Gestuno

Engineered languages

Human-usable

• An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language by John Wilkins
• aUI
• Characteristica universalis
• Ilaksh
• Isotype
• Ithkuil
• Láadan (ldn)
• Loglan by James Cooke Brown
• Logopandecteision
• Lojban (jbo) successor to Loglan by the Logical Language Group
• Toki Pona by Sonja Elen Kisa

Knowledge representation

See also: Ontology language

• Several well known Knowledge Query and Manipulation Languages have been created from extensive research projects, to represent and query knowledge on computers:
  • Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF), a precursor for knowledge representation.
  • Common Logic (CL), an ISO standard derived from KIF.
  • Resource Description Framework (RDF), a language standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) based on the principles of Common Logic, which represents knowledge as a directed graph built from unordered sets of "sentences" (in fact, as relational triples: subject, relation, attribute) using a XML syntax for its interchange format. Each element of the triple can be either a simple value (if its semantic value is not specified outside of the relation using it), or identifiers of objects (such as URIs) that are part of enumeration built from another subset of relational triples. The relations may be open (in which case the attributes are not enumerable) or closed in a finite enumerable set whose elements can be easily represented as objects as well with their own identity participating in many different relations for other parts of the knowledge.
    • UML may be used to describe the sets of relations and rules of inference and processing, and SQL may be used to use them in concrete schemas and compact store formats, but RDF designs its own (semantically more powerful) schema language for handling large sets of knowledge data stored in RDF format.
    • RDF is probably useful only for automated machine processing, but its verbosity and complex (for a human) representation mechanisms and inference rules does not qualify it as a human language except in very limited contexts. It is still a specification with extensive research.
  • Web Ontology Language (OWL), another knowledge representation language standardized by W3C, and derived from Common Logic.
• CycL
• The Distributed Language Translation project used a "binary-coded" version of Esperanto as a pivot language between the source language and its translation.
• Lincos
• Loom
• Universal Networking Language (UNL)

Artistic languages

Languages used in fiction

J. R. R. Tolkien

These are languages created by J. R. R. Tolkien, and are present in his books or derivative works throughout diverse media.

• Common Eldarin
• Khuzdul
• Goldogrin, known as Gnomish
• Quenya
• Sindarin

Other literature

• Atlango from Ryszard Antoniszczak (Richard A Antonius)'s works
• Baronh, language of Abh in Seikai no Monsho (Crest of the Stars) and others, by Morioka Hiroyuki
• Drac, language of the alien species Dracs in Barry B. Longyear's Enemy Mine and The Enemy Papers
• Láadan (ldn), in Suzette Haden Elgin's science fiction novel Native Tongue and sequels
• Lapine, spoken by the rabbits in Watership Down by Richard Adams
• Nadsat slang, in A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• Newspeak, in Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (fictional constructed language)
• Spocanian, in Rolandt Tweehuysen's fictional country Spocania
• Starsza Mowa from Andrzej Sapkowski's Hexer saga
• Zaum, poetic tongue elaborated by Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchonykh, and other Russian Futurists as a "transrational" and "most universal" language "of songs, incantations, and curses".

Comic books

• Bordurian in some of Hergé's The Adventures of Tintin, mostly in The Calculus Affair
• Syldavian, in some of Hergé's The Adventures of Tintin, mostly in King Ottokar's Sceptre

Film and television

• Adspeak in The Year of the Sex Olympics (by Nigel Kneale) is a Newspeak-like impoverished language derived from 60s and 70s British advertising vocabulary.
• Ancient in the Stargate universe (i.e. Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis) is the language of the Ancients, the builders of the Stargates; it is similar in pronunciation to Medieval Latin. The Athosians say prayers in Ancient. (However, when shown onscreen, written Ancient is simply a different character set for English)
• Atlantean created by Marc Okrand for the film Atlantis: The Lost Empire
• The Divine Language is a language invented by director Luc Besson and actress Milla Jovovich for the 1997 film The Fifth Element.
• Dothraki, created by David J. Peterson for the TV series Game of Thrones (based on the A Song of Ice and Fire novel series by George R. R. Martin).
• Enchanta, in the Encantadia and Etheria television series in the Philippines, created by the head writer Suzette Doctolero
• Eunoia, in the television series Earth: Final Conflict, consultant Christian Bök.
• Goa'uld, the galactic lingua franca from Stargate SG-1, supposedly influenced Ancient Egyptian
• Klingon (tlhIngan Hol), in the Star Trek films and television series, created by Marc Okrand
• Krakozhian from The Terminal
• Ku, a fictional African language in the 2005 film The Interpreter
• Nadsat, the fictional language spoken by Alex and his friends in Clockwork Orange
• Na'vi, the fictional language spoken by the Na'vi in Avatar
• Pakuni, the language of the Pakuni from the Land of the Lost television series and film.
• Plukanian, the fictional language of the planet Pluk in film Kin-dza-dza!
• Tenctonese from the Alien Nation film and television series, created by Van Ling and Kenneth Johnson
• Ulam, the language spoken by the prehistoric humans in the film Quest for Fire, created by Anthony Burgess by melting roots of European languages.
• The Valyrian languages, created by David J. Peterson for the TV series Game of Thrones (based on the A Song of Ice and Fire novel series by George R. R. Martin).
• Vulcan language from Star Trek. Further developed by fans as Golic Vulcan.

Unnamed languages

• Riddley Walker, a 1980 novel by Russell Hoban, set in a post-apocalyptic future, is written entirely in a "devolved" form of English.

Music

• Gloatre, the language mostly used among creative activities of Les Légions Noires.
• Gulevache: fictional Romance language of the kingdom of Gulevandia in the bilingual opera Cardoso en Gulevandia by the comedy group Les Luthiers.
• Kajiuran, a language created by Japanese composer Yuki Kajiura.
• Kobaïan (Zeuhl), the language used by 70's French rock group Magma.
• Loxian, created by Roma Ryan, used on Enya's 2005 album Amarantine.
• Mohelmot, a forbidden language used by The Residents on the album The Big Bubble: Part Four of the Mole Trilogy.
• Moss, created by Jackson Moore in 2009, a language with a musical phonology, modeled on pidgins
• Shikatan, a language created by Japanese singer-songwriter Akiko Shikata.
• Vonlenska, (Hopelandic), the non-literal language used by post-rock group Sigur Rós

Games

• D'ni, language spoken by the subterranean D'ni people in Cyan Worlds' Myst series of computer games and novels
• Gargish, used in the Ultima computer game series, by the gargoyle race
• Hymmnos, used by Reyvateils for Song Magic in Ar tonelico. There is also the Carmena Foreluna language, which served as the predecessor to Hymmnos, and Ar Ciela, which is the language used by the planet where the series takes place.
• kiZombie, used by zombies in the Urban Dead MMORPG
• Lashonnu is the language of the Wealdings (the Forest People) in the Gondica role playing game by Anders Blixt
• Tho Fan, in the Xbox game Jade Empire, created by Wolf Wikeley
• Tsolyani, a language developed by M. A. R. Barker in the mid-to-late 1940s in parallel with the development of his legendarium leading to the world of Tékumel as described in the roleplaying game Empire of the Petal Throne, published by TSR in 1975 and later literary tie-ins.
• Zamgrh, spoken by Zombies in the Urban Dead games, and worked out in considerable detail.

Toys

• Furbish

Internet-based

• Dritok, by Don Boozer
• Kēlen, by Sylvia Sotomayor
• Teonaht, by Sally Caves
• Verdurian and several other languages created for the fictional planet of Almea by Mark Rosenfelder

Alternative languages

• Anglish
• Brithenig created by the inventor of the alternate history of Ill Bethisad, Andrew Smith
• Several North Slavic languages, inspired by the existence of West, East and South Slavic languages and the absence of a Northern branch
• Wenedyk, a language of the alternate history of Ill Bethisad created by Jan van Steenbergen

Micronational languages

• Talossan, by R. Ben Madison

Personal languages

• Enochian by Edward Kelley
• Lingua Ignota, by Hildegard of Bingen
• Mänti, invented by Daniel Tammet
• Vendergood (1906), invented by William James Sidis when he was eight years old

Language games

• Binaliktad
• Gibberish
• Jeringonza
• Língua do Pê
• Louchebem
• Opish
• Pig Latin
• Rosarigasino
• Rövarspråket
• Sananmuunnos
• Šatrovački
• Starckdeutsch, Starckteutsch
• Tutnese
• Ubbi dubbi
• Verlan
• Vesre

See also

• Alien language
• Artificial script
• Constructed language
• Engineered language
• International auxiliary language
• Language game
• List of languages
• Voynich Manuscript
• Esperanto

External links

• Language analysis from Linguist List
• Hylian fan language project by Sarinilli