Constructed language

An artificial or constructed language, colloquially conlang, is a language whose vocabulary and grammar were specifically devised by humans, rather than having naturally evolved as part of a culture like a natural language. They are usually designed for use in human communication, the same as natural languages. Many are devised to function as an international auxiliary language, but they can also be created for secrecy, use in fiction, or linguistic experimentation.

The term planned language is also used, especially for international auxiliary languages, and by those who may object to the more common term "artificial". Speakers of Esperanto, for example, have said that "Esperanto is an artificial language like an automobile is an artificial horse."

Constructed languages are often divided into a priori languages, in which much of the grammar and vocabulary is created from scratch to serve a particular purpose, and a posteriori languages, where the grammar and vocabulary are derived from one or more natural languages and are intended to resemble them. A posteriori languages can be further divided into naturalistic planned languages which follow the natural languages from which they are patterned closely to minimize learning time, and schematic planned languagess, whose features are deliberately simplified or synthesized from various sources.

Another way of dividing up constructed languages:

• artistic languages (artlangs) - those intended to create aesthetic pleasure
• auxiliary languages (auxlangs) - those intended to be used for international communication
• logical languages (loglangs) - those intended to be an experiment in logic or philosophy

A constructed language can have "native" speakers, if children learn it at a young age from parents who have learned the language. Esperanto has a considerable number of native speakers, variously estimated to be between 200 and 2000. A member of the Klingon Language Institute, d'Armond Speers attempted to raise his son as a native Klingon speaker, but found that at that time the vocabulary of Klingon was not quite large enough to express the large number of objects normally found in the home, such as "table" or "bottle".

Some people create constructed languages as a hobby in their spare time.

Table of contents

1 Intended for general human use 2 Intended for machine assisted automatic translation purposes 3 Languages not intended to be spoken 4 Languages designed for knowledge representation 5 Languages of fictional worlds and peoples 6 Language games 7 External links

Intended for general human use

• Antido
• Basic English
• Esperanto
• Gestuno (sign language)
• Idiom Neutral
• Ido
• Interlingua de IALA
• Lojban (and TLI Loglan)
• Lingua Franca Nova
• Novial
• Occidental (also known as Interlingue, not to be confused with Interlingua)
• Ro
• Romanica
• Slovio
• Solresol
• Sona
• Toki Pona
• Volapük
• Comunleng (in spanish)

Intended for machine assisted automatic translation purposes

• Lojban
• Lincos

Languages not intended to be spoken

• some sign languages like Gestuno language
• hand signal systems used in military, SWAT, construction, sports such as scuba diving, etc..
• Blissymbolics

Languages designed for knowledge representation

• CycL (from Douglas Lenat's Cyc project)
• Loom (from the University of Southern California's Loom project)
• KIF (used by the SUO project)

Languages of fictional worlds and peoples

• Drac, language of alien species in Barry B.Longyear's The Enemy Papers
• D'ni, the language spoken by the subterranean D'ni people in the Myst series of games and novels.
• Klingon, in the Star Trek movie and television series
• Kobaian, from the fictional planet created by French musician Christian Vander and the language sung by his progressive rock band Magma
• Láadan, in Suzette Haden Elgin's science fiction novel Native Tongue and sequels
• Languages of Middle-earth: Sindarin, Quenya, Khuzdûl in the books by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Nadsat, in A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• Newspeak, in Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
• Pravic, in The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
• Syldavian, in some of Hergé's Tintin stories.
• Babel-17, in Babel-17 by Samuel Delany

See Fictional language.

Language games

• Pig latin
• Ubbi dubbi
• Verlan
• Geringoso

See also:

• Language translation
• Knowledge representation
• Language planning
• Literary dialect
• Language academy

External links

• Conlang FAQ
• ConLang Yellow Pages
• The Language Construction Kit
• How to Create a Language by Pablo David Flores. Inspired by the Language Construction Kit; covers some topics overlooked by the Language Construction Kit.
• Blueprints For Babel
• LangMaker.com
• Some internet resources relating to constructed languages. Compiled by Richard Kennaway. There are approximately 310 constructed languages in this list.
• LiveJournal Conlangs community
• (others can be found on Language pages)