List of constructed languages

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The following list of notable constructed languages is divided into auxiliary, ritual, engineered, and artistic (including fictional) languages, and their respective subgenres.

Auxiliary languages[edit]

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

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") although no knowledge of music is required to learn it.
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 The most popular auxiliary language ever invented, including, possibly, up to two million speakers, the highest ever for a constructed language and the only one to date to have its own native speakers (Approximately 1,000).[1]
Spokil 1887 or 1890 Adolph Nicolas An a priori language by a former Volapük advocate
Mundolinco 1888 J. Braakman The first esperantido
Bolak, "Blue Language" 1899 Léon Bollack Prospered fairly well in its initial years, now almost forgotten
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
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 systematize the international scientific vocabulary . It aims to be immediately comprehensible by Romance language speakers (including to some extent English speakers).
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 neu 1961 Arturo Alfandari A very terse European language
Babm 1962 Rikichi Okamoto Notable for using Latin letters as a syllabary
Arcaicam Esperantom 1969 Manuel Halvelik 'Archaic Esperanto', developed for use in Esperanto literature
Afrihili afh 1970 K. A. Kumi Attobrah A pan-African language
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
Romániço 1991 Anonymous Vocabulary is derived from common Romance roots.
Europanto 1996 Diego Marani A "linguistic jest" by a European diplomat
Unish 1996 Language Research Institute, Sejong University Vocabulary from fifteen representative languages
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
Interslavic 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
Lingwa de planeta 2010 Dmitri Ivanov Worldlang based on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish

Controlled languages[edit]

Controlled natural languages are natural languages that have been altered to make them simpler, easier to use, or more acceptable in certain circumstances, such as for use by people who do not speak the original language well. The following projects are examples of controlled English:

  • Basic English, Special English and Globish seek to limit the language to a given list of common-use words and terms in order to make it simpler to foreign learners or other people who may have difficulties
  • Plain English proposes a more direct, short, clear language by avoiding many idioms, jargon and foreign words
  • Simplified Technical English seeks to largely reduce the complexity and ambiguity of technical texts (such as manuals)
  • E-Prime eliminates the verb to be with the intent of making writing more expressive and accurate.

Visual languages[edit]

Visual languages use symbols or movements in place of the spoken word. Sign languages fall in this category.

Ritual languages[edit]

These are languages (and scripts) in actual use by their communities or congregations.

Engineered languages[edit]

Human-usable[edit]

Knowledge representation[edit]

See also: Ontology language
  • Attempto Controlled English is a controlled natural language that is also a knowledge representation 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 various syntaxes (XML, Turtle, JSON-LD, RDFa) 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 most 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/fictional languages[edit]

Languages used in fiction[edit]

J. R. R. Tolkien[edit]

See also: Languages constructed by J. R. R. Tolkien

Additionally, sketches of various other languages, such as Adûnaic, the Black Speech, Khuzdul, Telerin and Westron appear in his Middle-earth works alongside earlier draughts or imagined archaic forms of Elven languages such as Common Eldarin or Primitive Quendian, Goldogrin, and Ilkorin. Others such as Entish, Rohirric, and six languages of the Avari are mentioned but have only one or two words or phrases noted. For the film adaptation, linguist David Salo was hired to expand on Tolkien's languages where required for dialogue.

Star Wars[edit]

Further information: Languages in Star Wars

Other literature[edit]

Comic books[edit]

Film[edit]

Television[edit]

Music[edit]

Games[edit]

Toys[edit]

Internet-based[edit]

Alternative languages[edit]

Some experimental languages were developed to observe hypotheses of alternative linguistic interactions which could have led to very different modern languages. Two examples include:

Micronational languages[edit]

Personal languages[edit]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Robert Phillipson. English-Only Europe? 2003. p. 172: "several thousand children worldwide are growing up (in over 2000 families) with Esperanto as one of their mother tongues"
  2. ^ Cinema, Telugu. "Welcome to new language 'Kilikili' from Baahubali". SaddaHaq. Retrieved 2017-06-11. 

Further reading[edit]

External links[edit]

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