A constructed language or conlang is a language for communication between humans (i.e. not with or between computers) which, unlike most languages that naturally emerge from human interaction, is devised by a person or group for a particular purpose. The term constructed language is often shortened to conlang and, as a relatively broad term, it encompasses subcategories including: fictional, artificial, engineered, planned and invented languages. Conlangs may include aspects reminiscent of natural language including phonology, grammar, orthography, and vocabulary. Interlinguistics includes the study of constructed languages.
History
Ancient linguistic experiments Grammatical speculation dates from classical antiquity; for instance, it appears in Plato's Cratylus in Hermogenes's contention that words are not inherently linked to what they refer to; that people apply "a piece of their own voice [...] to the thing".
Athenaeus tells the story of two figures, Dionysius of Sicily and Alexarchus:
Dionysius of Sicily created neologisms like (from and ) for standard Greek ; (from and ) for standard ; and (from ) for standard . Alexarchus of Macedon, the brother of King Cassander of Macedon, was the founder of the city of Ouranopolis. Athenaeus recounts a story told by Heraclides of Lembos that Alexarchus "introduced a peculiar vocabulary, referring to a rooster as a 'dawn-crier', a barber as a 'mortal-shaver', a drachma as 'worked silver', [...] and a herald as an [from ]. [...] He [Alexarchus] once wrote something [...] to the public authorities in Casandreia. [...] As for what this letter says, in my opinion not even the Pythian god could make sense of it."
While the mechanisms of grammar suggested by classical philosophers were designed to explain existing languages (Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit), they were not used to construct new grammars. Roughly contemporary with Plato, in his descriptive grammar of Sanskrit, Pāṇini constructed a set of rules for explaining language, so that the text of his grammar may be considered a mixture of natural and constructed language.
Early constructed languages
A legend recorded in the seventh-century Irish work Auraicept na n-Éces claims that Fénius Farsaid visited Shinar after the confusion of tongues, and he and his scholars studied the various languages for ten years, taking the best features of each to create , which he named the Irish language. This appears to be the first mention of the concept of a constructed language in literature.
The earliest non-natural languages were considered less "constructed" than "super-natural", mystical, or divinely inspired. The Lingua Ignota, recorded in the 12th century by St. Hildegard of Bingen, is an example, and apparently the first entirely artificial language.Joshua Foer, "John Quijada and Ithkuil, the Language He Invented", The New Yorker, 24 December 2012. It is a form of private mystical cant (see also Enochian). An important example from Middle-Eastern culture is Balaibalan, invented in the 16th century. Kabbalistic grammatical speculation was directed at recovering the original language spoken by Adam and Eve in Paradise, lost in the confusion of tongues. The first Christian project for an ideal language is outlined in Dante Alighieri's De vulgari eloquentia, where he searches for the ideal Italian vernacular suited for literature. Ramon Llull's Ars Magna was a project of a perfect language with which the infidels could be convinced of the truth of the Christian faith. It was basically an application of combinatorics on a given set of concepts. During the Renaissance, Lullian and Kabbalistic ideas were drawn upon in a magical context, resulting in cryptographic applications.
Perfecting language Renaissance interest in Ancient Egypt, notably the discovery of the of Horapollo, and first encounters with the Chinese script directed efforts towards a perfect written language. Johannes Trithemius, in and , attempted to show how all languages can be reduced to one. In the 17th century, interest in magical languages was continued by the Rosicrucians and alchemists (like John Dee and his Enochian). Jakob Boehme in 1623 spoke of a "natural language" () of the senses.
Musical languages were often connected with mysticism, like the language of the birds, though not necessarily, like Solresol.
17th and 18th century: advent of philosophical languages The 17th century saw the rise of projects for "philosophical" or "a priori" languages, such as:
Francis Lodwick's A Common Writing (1647) and The Groundwork or Foundation laid (or So Intended) for the Framing of a New Perfect Language and a Universal Common Writing (1652) Sir Thomas Urquhart's Ekskybalauron (1651) and Logopandecteision (1652) George Dalgarno's Ars signorum, 1661 John Wilkins' An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language, 1668
These early taxonomic constructed languages produced systems of hierarchical classification for both spoken and written expression. Leibniz had a similar purpose for his lingua generalis of 1678, aiming at a lexicon of characters where the user could calculate true propositions, developing binary calculus in the process. These projects focused on simplifying grammar, and arranging knowledge into hierarchies, eventually leading to the Enlightenment's Encyclopédie. Many of these 17th–18th century languages were pasigraphies, purely written languages without unique spoken form.Leopold Einstein, "Al la historio de la Provoj de Lingvoj Tutmondaj de Leibnitz ĝis la Nuna Tempo", 1884. Reprinted in Fundamenta Krestomatio, UEA 1992 .
After Leibniz and the encyclopedists unsuccessfully organized knowledge unequivocally in a hierarchy, they worked on a priori languages based on such a classification of concepts. Under the entry Charactère, D'Alembert critically reviewed the projects of philosophical languages of the preceding century. After the Encyclopédie, projects for a priori languages moved more and more to the lunatic fringe. Individual authors, typically unaware of the history of the idea, continued to propose taxonomic philosophical languages until the early 20th century (e.g. Ro), but most recent engineered languages have remained small in scope; some are limited to a specific field, like mathematical formalism or calculus (e.g. Lincos and programming languages), while others are designed for eliminating syntactical ambiguity (e.g., Loglan and Lojban) or maximizing conciseness (e.g., Ithkuil).
19th and 20th centuries: auxiliary languages
Already in the Encyclopédie attention began to focus on a posteriori auxiliary languages. Joachim Faiguet de Villeneuve in the article on Langue wrote a short proposition of a "laconic" or regularized grammar of French. During the 19th century, a bewildering variety of such International Auxiliary Languages (IALs) were proposed, so that Louis Couturat and Léopold Leau in Histoire de la langue universelle (1903) reviewed 38 projects.
The first of these that made any international impact was Volapük, proposed in 1879 by Johann Martin Schleyer; within a decade, 283 Volapükist clubs were counted all over the globe. However, disagreements between Schleyer and some prominent users of the language led to schism, and by the mid-1890s it fell into obscurity, making way for Esperanto, proposed in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof, and its descendants. Interlingua, the most recent auxlang to gain a significant number of speakers, emerged in 1951, when the International Auxiliary Language Association published its Interlingua–English Dictionary and an accompanying grammar. The success of Esperanto did not stop others from trying to construct new auxiliary languages, such as Leslie Jones' Eurolengo, which mixes elements of English and Spanish.
Loglan (1955) and its descendants constitute a pragmatic return to the aims of the a priori languages, tempered by the requirement of usability of an auxiliary language. Thus far, these modern a priori languages have garnered only small groups of speakers.
Robot Interaction Language (2010) is a spoken language that is optimized for communication between machines and humans. The major goals of ROILA are that it should be easily learnable by the human user, and optimized for efficient recognition by computer speech recognition algorithms.
Categorization
By purpose Most constructed languages can be divided by purpose:
Engineered language (engelang), further subdivided into logical language (loglang), philosophical language and experimental language, devised for experimentation in logic, philosophy, or linguistics International auxiliary language (auxlang or IAL), devised for interlinguistic or international communication Artistic language (artlang), devised to create aesthetic pleasure or humorous effect, including sub-categories such as secret languages, joke languages, and mystical languages
The boundaries between these categories are by no means clear,The "Conlang Triangle" by Raymond Brown. Accessed 8 August 2008 and a language could fall into more than one category. A logical language created for aesthetic reasons would also be classifiable as an artistic language. One created with philosophical motives could also be used as an auxiliary language.
Controlled natural languages have been devised to eliminate ambiguity in natural language processing and knowledge representation.Schwitter, Rolf. "Controlled natural languages for knowledge representation." Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Posters. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2010.
A priori and a posteriori An a priori constructed language is one with features not based on an existing language, and an a posteriori language is the opposite. This categorization, however, is not absolute, as many constructed languages may be called a priori when considering some linguistic factors, and at the same time a posteriori when considering other factors.
A priori An a priori language has features that are invented or elaborated to work differently or to allude to different purposes. Some a priori languages are designed to be international auxiliary languages that remove what could be considered an unfair learning advantage for native speakers of a source language that would otherwise exist for a posteriori languages. Others, known as philosophical or taxonomic languages, try to categorize their vocabulary, either to express an underlying philosophy or to make it easier to recognize new vocabulary. Finally, many artistic languages, created for either personal use or for use in a fictional medium, employ consciously constructed grammars and vocabularies, and are best understood as a priori. Examples include:
International auxiliary Balaibalan, attributed to Fazlallah Astarabadi or Muhyi Gulshani (14th century) Solresol by François Sudre (1827) Ro by Edward Foster (1906) Sona by Kenneth Searight (1935) Babm by Rikichi Okamoto (1962) aUI by W. John Weilgart (1962) Mirad (aka Unilingua) by Noubar Agopoff (1966) Kotava by Staren Fetcey (1978)
Experimental Láadan by Suzette Haden Elgin (1982) Ithkuil by John Quijada (2004)
Artistic Quenya and Sindarin by J. R. R. Tolkien for his legendarium (first published with The Hobbit, 1937) Klingon by Marc Okrand for the science-fiction franchise Star Trek (1985) Kēlen by Sylvia Sotomayor (1998) Naʼvi by Paul Frommer for the movie Avatar (2009) Dothraki and Valyrian by David Peterson for the television series Game of Thrones (2011) Kiliki by Madhan Karky for the Baahubali films (2015)
Community Damin (Yangkaal and Lardil people, 19th century or earlier) Eskayan (Eskaya, ) Medefaidrin (Ibibio, 1930s) palawa kani (Palawa, 1990s)
A posteriori