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A Guide to International Auxiliary Languages
There have been many attempts at creating international auxiliary languages to unite the peoples of the world, the most famous of them all by far is Esperanto. But how does one even create such a language? And how does one make it effective? This will be a comprehensive guide on how to create an international auxiliary language, starting with a quick explanation of abbreviations that I will use in this essay. Next I will talk about the goals of creating constructed languages in general, then the specific goals of international auxiliary languages, followed by phonemic inventory, phonotactics, vocabulary, morphosyntax (grammar) and orthography. Lastly, I will go over some examples and counterexamples of good approaches to conlanging and specifically international auxiliary languages.
Definitions
conlang - constructed language conlanging - creating a conlang auxlang - auxiliary language IAL - international auxiliary language artlang - language constructed for artistic purposes /.../ - broad IPA transscription [...] - narrow IPA transcription italics - I'm talking about this word or phrase, not using it semantically.
Goals of Conlanging
The only way in which a constructed language can be objectively bad is if it doesn’t achieve the goals it was designed towards. If you want to create a conlang, the very first and most fundamentally important step is to establish what it's goals are and to never lose track of them. To determine the goals, I recommend you to ask yourself these questions: Who is this language for? It is very important to determine what the material conditions of the speaker population look like. What sort of vocabulary makes sense, what loanwords to they have? On which (if any) media to they write their language? If they chisel on stone to write, an angular orthography makes sense. If they use brushes on leaves or paper, flowing orthography makes more sense. In which direction do they write? If they primarily write on treebark, long and thin orthography that's written downward first instead of sidewards first makes the most sense. You want to think about these things well because they will of course always adapt to their conditions. More abstract things are also important to ask yourself. Do I want my language to be isolating, analytic, agglutinative or synthetic? Do I want to base my language upon already existing languages or language families? If you do, that's completely valid, it is your language afterall. The question that's the most important to keep in mind as you work on you language is whether or not you mean it to be a naturalistic language. Naturalistic languages are languages that could feasibly exist in the real world and could be spoken by a real nation on our planet. There is over 7.000 languages and many more dialects, sociolects, pidgins and extinct languages, so practically anything you do can be considered naturalistic. But generally, naturalistic languages are considered to be somewhat complicated, but not overly so. They are generally not hyper-isolating nor polysynthetic. They generally have some phonotactic restrictions, not too little. They generally do not have under 4 vowels and not over 30 consonants. They generally do not have over 64 cases. If you have only some of these features, you're going to be fine, especially if you conform to your other goals, but if you implement most or all of these extremes, it's not really a naturalistic language anymore. Only because some language has a couple of these features, that doesn't mean that it is still naturalistic to merge them all into a single language. You can't assume that everything is naturalistic just because you got those features from real languages. If you do not want a naturalistic language, disregard all of this, though.
Goals of International Auxiliary Languages
If you want to create an international auxlang (I will call it just IAL from now on), the rules kind of change a bit because they are very specific types of conlangs. Generally, an IAL aims to be a language that can be used by speakers of either multiple, most, or all nations of the world to communicate with each other. That's easy enough, but what makes an IAL good? Here is where the difficulty comes in. An IAL should be easy to learn, speak and write for most or all of it's intended users, but it should also have enough features so that people can express themselves like they're used to in their mothertongue. It's structures must be boring in order to be easy to learn but they should also be elegant and interesting in order to be fun to learn. So, obviously, one must come at the sacrifice of another. The difficulty of IAL's is to balance these opposites in a way that works. You cannot have that many grammatical structures and quirks in order for some speakers to express themselves, because that becomes difficult and unwieldy for all other speakers. And you cannot ultra-minimalist grammar because that is unwieldy und hard to learn aswell and for other reasons. That and the fact that there are just too many languages and dialects is why IAL's are so difficult to get right. Remember these goals: - make your phonology compatible (or compatible with some concessions) with all major world languages - make your phonemes easy to produce and to hear - make the grammar as plain and uninventive as possible - make the grammar easy to learn and elegant to use - make sure to equally represent all nations in your vocabulary For the rest of the guide I will be talking specifically about IAL's that aim to be global, as an auxlang for specifically germanic, slavic or romance language speakers would be very limited in scope, therefore easy to achieve, but also, the remaining guide applies to these smaller auxlangs aswell.
Phonemic Inventory
Phonemes are any sounds in a given language that distinguish meaning. Take for example gold vs. cold. These words only differ in the first sound, one being /g/, the other being /k/. This is called a minimal pair and it means that /g/ and /k/ are different phonemes. Now that we know what phonemes are, we can look at the phonemic inventory of our IAL. We want to have the most common, easiest to learn and fewest sounds possible in order to make our language as internationally compatible as possible. It is advisable for anyone who wants to conlang to become somewhat well versed in the IPA. In my essay about clearing up misconceptions about language, I already spoke about how I dislike the IPA because of its eurocentrism, but there's no way around the fact that it has become the definite standard for phonetic transcription. As much as I dislike the IPA, I will be using it for my essays and guides.
Vowels
First, let's look at vowels because they're easier to get right. The most common vowel phonemes are /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/. This is the classic five-vowel system. Many IAL's have used it, including Lingwa de planeta, Novial or Ido. These vowels are represented in most common languages and are relatively easy to learn. In my opinion, the five-vowel system is well balanced between simplicity and variety. If vowel inventories were food, the five vowel system would be water.
Diphthongs
Diphthongs are a different story. I would personally advise against implementing diphthongs, as they can be hard to learn how to pronounce and some of them are pretty rare outside of germanic languages. If you really want diphthongs, you could do /ai/ or /ei/ but I think five vowels are enough.
Consonants
Now we get to the hard part, consonants. The most common consonant phonemes are /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/ and /n/. These should probably be in any IAL, except for /p/ because it is not in Arabic, one of the most widely spoken languages. Also /p/ can be harder to learn than phonemes like /m/ for example. A common feature of IAL's in the past has been to add a rhotic sound /r/ and just tell speakers to pronounce it the way the rhotic in their mother tongue is pronounced. Problem is that not all languages even have a rhotic, like some indigenous Turtle Island languages, Standard Chinese, Cantonese, Hokkien and many others. If you think that the compromise that past IAL's have made is valid, then go for it, but I am not a fan. Especially because, first of all, speakers can then sometimes tell what your native language is based on how you pronounce the rhotic, second of all, many speakers would have to learn how to make rhotic sounds (they aren’t that easy to learn), and, like, which one do they choose when there's no standard? Third, it may hinder understanding between speakers from different nations if they pronounce their rhotic sounds very differently. I don't think this is in the spirit of an internationalist project. Some IAL's opt for consonants such as the dental fricative / / and / / ("th" in English). Do not do this. These sounds are incredibly rare outside of English and even languages that do have one of these, like Arabic, don't have both of them and speakers need to hear the difference in voicedness, which would be hard enough on its own, but actually, learning how to pronounce these dental fricatives in the first place is very hard aswell. Do not make this mistake. This brings up a further point. Things you might take for granted as an English speaker are just simply not a thing in other languages. Distinction between voiced and unvoiced consonants for example. It can be very hard for other people to hear and to produce the difference between the words bull and pull. On the other hand, there are features that you as an English speaker might not think about (because it's not really a part of English) such as a phonemic distinction between aspiration, tone, nasality, vowel length, creakedness, emphaticness, pharyngealization. I would recommend not to add these features in an IAL, though, as they're hard to learn and to hear for speakers who aren’t familiar with them. I would recommend consonants that are easy to learn and somewhat frequent across languages. You'll have to do your own research, but a good example is the voiceless bilabial fricative / /. It's one of the easiest sounds to produce, simply by blowing air through both of your lips as if you were blowing out a candle. It is also a phoneme in widely spoken languages such as Spanish, Japanese, Turkish and Korean and in some dialects of English, Italian and Bengali. That's why / / would be an acceptable candidate for a phoneme in your consonant inventory.
Phoneme Clusters
It is important to check, once you have assembled your consonant inventory, if some of your phonemes clash with each other. For example, the phoneme I just mentioned / / and another common phoneme /f/ sound very similar and that might be very difficult for some speakers. You should avoid clusters - avoid too many phonemes that have a similar place and/or manner of articulation. I would advise you not to go beyond 5 vowels and 15 consonants including affricates and diphthongs.
Phonotactics
Phonotactics determine which sounds can go where. English has very loose phonotactic rules in terms of syllable structure. A syllable is basically just a vowel surrounded by beginning consonants (the onset) and end consonants (the coda of a syllable). English for example allows arguably too many sounds in one syllable. One example of this is the word strengths /str.../, which is one syllable with 8 phonemes (CCCVC(C)CC). This would be too complex for an IAL. Do not go beyond CCVCC. (Remember that this is the maximum allowed length of a syllable, not the only allowed syllable length). Depending on which phonemes you chose in your inventory, you might make to put mild restrictions on some of them. A lot of european speakers will have trouble pronouncing / / (as in king) at the onset of a syllable. In this instance, I would limit the usage of this phoneme to the coda of any syllable. But of course, you have to look at your phonemic inventory and decide on a case by case basis, and you will likely have to make some concessions because too restrictive phonotactics aren’t a good idea either. First because it limits your vocabulary, secondly because some speakers might find it weird not to be able to say something that they are used to saying in their native language.
Morphosyntax
This is basically a fancy way of saying grammar. I don't say grammar because it would, linguistically, only refer to syntax, not to morphology. But morphology is very important when it comes to analyzing languages.
Morphology
A morpheme is the smallest building block of a languages that itself carries any meaning. A letter or a sound are smaller building block but they don't inherently mean anything semantic. As an example, let's look at the english word unfathomable. If we break down this word into it's smallest meaning-carrying parts, we get: un-, which means not, fathom, which is the nucleus of the word and carries the most meaning, and -able, which turns the verb into an adverb and expresses the ability to perform that original verb. In IAL's and constructed languages as a whole, how many morphemes are allowed in a word is important to think about. There's a spectrum, from isolating to synthetic, which categorizes languages based on how many morphemes are allowed inside of one word. Isolating means that one morpheme equals one word. If English was more isolating, it would maybe not be unfathomable but rather not fathom possible or something like that. Agglutinative languages tend to sort of glue a lot of morphemes together to make them into a new word, slightly more than in English. Synthetic language structures are very unfamiliar to English speaker, however. Synthetic languages not only glue morphemes together but every added morpheme changes the entire word in a way that makes it impossible to just take the morpheme away again. Morphology doesn’t just affect adverbs like unfathomable but also nouns, verbs, adjectives and so on. You are making an IAL, so I recommend you to strike a balance between isolating and agglutinative. In my opinion, it is easier for speakers of agglutinative languages to adapt to more isolating ones, and harder for speakers of isolating languages to learn agglutinative languages. It is hard in both cases for speakers to learn synthetic languages, so I would advise against making you IAL synthetic. Synthetic languages are rare and complicated to learn, they are also very hard to design for someone who doesn’t speak one of them natively. I have tried and failed to construct synthetic languages, because I gradually slipped further and further into agglutinativity.
Grammar
Grammar, syntax, is harder to design because there is just so much of it. Luckily, IAL's ought to be simple and elegant and, most importantly, boring, so designing grammar is difficult because of quality instead of quantity. A general rule I need you to follow is to avoid irregularities, as they just tend to lengthen the time that's needed to learn the language. So, no irregular verb conjugation, no irregular noun plurals and so on.
Word classes
We first need to take a look at what types of words we even want to add or omit. The most important word class is in my opinion verbs. You for sure want to have verbs, as virtually every language has them and they are very useful. You should also have nouns and interjections for similar reasons. Adjectives and Adverbs are important aswell, although you can choose to omit one of them in favor of another, but you should at least have one of them. Determiners are a big thing too, though their specifics I will discuss later. Now that we know which word classes to add and which to omit, we can look at the specifics of each.
Nouns
English has a distinction between count and non-count nouns. For example, you cannot say many golds, you can only day much gold. You cannot say much cows, you can only say many cows. This is incredibly hard to for people unfamiliar with the concept to understand, so I would not add this feature. If you really want to you can add it but then at least make it so that every noun is both countable and non-countable, like fire for example (much fire (non-count) refers to a big fire, whereas many fires (count) refers to an array of different fire sources. Like I said, this distinction can be difficult, though, so be careful. I generally do not find the grammatical distinction between proper and common nouns to be important at all, so just omit it. You need to have a way to refer to multiples of any nouns, but there is more ways of doing that than just a plural -s suffix: you can have a prefix, an infix or a whole different word to mark the number of a noun.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary is a very fun part of making languages. It is less technical than all that phonetics and grammar stuff. There are some pitfalls here too, though. First off all, you must keep all your phonotactics in check and make sure you conform to them when creating new words. Second of all, you must do the same with your grammar. But honestly, when you realize that one or two words don't fit in then you can just change them. This is a constructed language afterall. There is two approaches to making the vocabulary: the loanword approach or the your own words approach. What I mean is that you can choose to coin your own original words or you can loan words from already existing languages (just remember to apadt them to your phonology and phonotactics). Both have upsides and downsides. Loanwords can be helpful when you want to adopt scientific terms or established names for proper nouns into your IAL. Also, borrowing words can be a fun easter egg reward for learners of your language. Imagine learning an IAL and coming across a word that sounds like a word from your native language and means the same aswell. I feel like that's kind of motivating. The downside of loanwords is that it is practically impossible to keep count from which languages you borrowed which word so that you don’t play favorites. If you are going to be borrowing only from english, or french, then that's not only unfair to everyone else but also not very internationalist, in that case it is better to coin your own words. My recommendation is that you should borrow words that are incredibly international already like the word helium for example, and endonyms for nations. It is advisable to exclusively use endonyms for nations and nationalities in order not to alienate your language learners. All proper nouns like place names or personal names should be endonymic and borrowed, in my opinion, and the test should be coined independently. However, if you do want to borrow more than that, that's valid, just remember your goal of internationality. The fun part about coining words is that you can be as creativenas you want (especially because IAL grammar doesn’t or shouldn't allow you to be very creative). You can use onomatopeia to come up with a word and use that word to come up with new words, like, nam could mean to eat (because it kind of sounds like you're chomping on something) and then eating a lot could be namnam. You can put words together to make new words, you can merge them, you can split a word into two pieces and put another in the middle, you can put common suffixes or prefixes before or after a word to create a new one. This is how you create most of your vocabulary. This derivational approach is especially good for verbs, nouns and adjectives. You can also put your phonemic inventory and phonotactics rules into a conlang wordcreator and it will output you every possible combination if this is what you want.
Word Formation
If we look at how word come to be in natural languages, we can take away some lessons on how to create some of the words in IAL's, since a naturalistic vocabulary can be helpful for learners, especially because vocabulary is always the longest grind when learning any language. There is a couple of word formation processes that linguists have compiled over the years bit you don’t have to know them all by heart. I mean, that's why this guide exists afterall. List of word formation processes: