"At some point in the next century the number
of invented languages
will probably overtake the number of surviving natural languages."
- Cullen Murphy in Atlantic Monthly (October, 1995)
Top 10 Model Languages
Interrelated Model Languages
Barsoomian (Burroughs, Edgar Rice) -
fictional language - 1900s
Brithenig (Smith, Andrew) - diachronic fictional language - 1996
Dunia (Robertson, Ed) - international auxiliary language - 1996
Eaiea (Koestner, Bruce) - philosophical language - 1990s
Novial 97 (NOVIAL-L) - international auxiliary language - 1997
Solresol: Langue Musicale Universelle (Sudre, Jean Francois) - international auxiliary language - circa 1830
Curious about model languages? Here
are the ones you should study first.
Indicates a link to a sample text written in the language (The Babel Text).
(Attobrah, K. A. Kumi) - international auxiliary language
Attobrah designed Afrihili to be an auxiliary language for the continent of Africa, with a phonology, vocabulary and grammar all derived from African languages. The grammar will be especially unusual to speakers of European languages. Unfortunately, little information is available about Afrihili.
(Breton, Tom) - logical language- 1990s
This language attempts to be as true to its name as possible, containing primarily nouns. Created by Tom Breton, AllNoun does use four operators however as part of its grammar. Breton has primarily specified the grammar of the language (which resembles a simple programming language and in fact has been modified by Breton for use as such); he uses English primarily to illustrate the noun vocabulary. Very atypical, AllNoun is good inspiration for a fictional language for aliens.
(Foulk, Ruby Olive) - international auxiliary language
This is a simplification of American English, with phonetic spelling and simplified grammar. Plurals of nouns and pronouns are regular (e.g., man, mans), comparison of adjectives and adverbs is regular (e.g., good, gooder, goodest), adjectives are formed from nouns by adding -i (e.g., sun, suni; America, Americai) and verbs are regular.
(Bell, David) - fictional diachronic language - 1990s
Originally inspired by Tolkien's Elvish languages (Quenya and Sindarin), Amman-Iar has grown into something quite different, with a unique flavor of its own. The phonology is very reminiscent of Tolkien, but the grammar is unique. Amman-Iar is one of the few model languages on the WWW with a detailed fictional history of word derivation. This site is constantly changing, and worth re-visiting.
- fictional languages - 1990s
Ancallon is a continent created for an RPG (role-playing game) campaign. The eight main languages of Ancallon are each described in just a paragraph or two; some are based on natural languages (English, Welsh, Irish), while the others are invented (Konamoata is patterned on Hawaiian, and Banrok provides the obligatory ergative language).
(Berkhout, Carl T.) - fictional language - 1996
Not every model language has to be large and complex. Anglo-Saxon Computerese is the hundred or so terms you would need to be able to talk about computers in Anglo-Saxon (Old English). Most terms are compounds of real Anglo-Saxon words: for instance, the word for "computer" is circolwyrde.
(Burroughs, Edgar Rice) - fictional language - 1900s
The language of Edgar Rice Burrough's Martian series (A Princess Of Mars, The Gods Of Mars, Warlord Of Mars, etc.) added greatly to the verisimilitude of Barsoom and inspired many model language designers.
Basic Anglo-Saxon English (Henning,
Jeffrey) - fictional language - 1995
An unimaginative derivative of Basic English, replacing all words not of Anglo-Saxon origin.
(Ogden, C.K.) - international auxiliary language - 1930
Basic English (Basic is an acronym for "British American Scientific International Commercial") was designed as a subset of English. Any Basic English text is also a valid English text, but Basic English has just 850 core words (not counting inflectional forms); extensions to the lexicon are permitted for specific subject domains. The Bible and other texts have been translated into Basic English. For a time, Ogden hoped Basic English would be used for teaching English as a second language, but because Basic English permits the full complexity of English grammar, this was not practical.
(Tolkien, J.R.R) - fictional language
In Middle Earth, the Black Speech is the language of Sauron, most famously used for the inscription on the One Ring (Ash nazg durbatulu^k, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulu^k agh burzum-ishi krimpatul; "One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the Darkness bind them"). Although Tolkien published little about the language, the Black Speech shows Tolkien's usual genius for matching the sound of a language with the personality of its speakers. This link is to an analysis of the language prepared by Anthony Appleyard.
(Smith, Andrew) - diachronic fictional language - 1996
One of the best of the fictional languages on the web. Brithenig is the language of an alternate history, being the Romance language that might have evolved if Latin speakers had displaced Celtic speakers in Britain. Brithenig has undergone sound changes similar to those of Welsh, and has borrowed from Old Celtic and from Old, Middle and Modern English.
(Miller, Timothy) - fictional language - 1990s
This is an unofficial language for the Cardassians, a race of aliens that are key to the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine series.
Cho-ba (Leigh, Thomas)
(Miller, Herman) - fictional language
Miller has invented quite a few languages spoken by the furry aliens of Mizar, including Cispa, for which he has published on the Web a font for the Cispa alphabet, a short grammar and a dictionary.
- international auxiliary language - 1996
A creative language for the Internet, with all words based on just 220 roots. It even has a variant, Microyak, with just 50 words.
CycL (Cowan, John) - logical language - 1996
- stealth language
This language was used by the Lardil tribe, of Mornington Island off the coast of Australia. It was used as an initiation language for men and was an unusual variant (or speaking style or slang) of the "everyday" Lardil language. Damin is fascinating and well worth learning about.
- fictional language - 1990s
This small language was invented for AmberMUSH, a MUD, to be the language of Chaosian demons (Dhemonh'ka means "demon language"). The orthography, pronunciation and vocabulary of Dhemonh'ka was inspired by Klingon.
- personal language - 1990s
DiLingo is a silly English slang with just a few words.
(Parrish, Adam) - fictional language - 1991+
Doraya is the language of an imaginary world consisting of the regions of Mofeva, Doryn and Rooken. The most fascinating part of the language is the relative roles of nouns and verbs. Verbs are invariable, while nouns take special modifiers to indicate tense. The subject typically is modified for tense, and the direct object may be modified for tense as well. A sample sentence: so silidae e silinae sorn, 'until future-you and future-me are together', "Until I see you again."
Dunia (Robertson, Ed) -
international auxiliary language - 1996
Dunia is unique in the scope of its vocabulary, with different parts of speech typically drawn from a single language. Most verbs are from Spanish, most common nouns are from English, most scientific nouns are from Latin, most adjectives are from Hindi/Urdu, most simple adverbs are from Russian, and so forth.
ehmay ghee chah
(Hankes, Elmer J.) - international auxiliary language - 1992
Not much about ehmay ghee chah is available online, but a $17 book is available.
(Koestner, Bruce) - philosophical language - 1990s
Eaiea uses groups of notes to form words. Unlike Solresol, this language uses all twelve notes of the musical chromatic scale.
Elet Anta (Fisher, John) - personal language - 1997
(Miller, Herman) - personal language - 1996
Unlike other of Herman Miller's languages, Eklektu 96 is not a language of furry aliens, but instead has a vocabulary containing an eclectic mix of the world's languages, though the emphasis to date has been on European languages.
Enochian (Dee, John) [link broken when last checked]
(Schutrick, Carrie) - personal language - 1996
This is just a sketch of the language, but it is promising: Erone has an attractive lexicon, and I look forward to more to come.
(Zamenhof, Ludwig Lazarus) - international auxiliary language
Esperanto is the most successful model language ever, with perhaps a million speakers in the world (estimates vary from 100,000 to 15 million), concentrated in Europe but also with pockets of speakers in Japan and China. Esperanto has more books, periodicals and radio broadcasts using it than any other auxiliary language. It is a classic and required study for anyone serious about model languages. It has spawned more offspring than any other model language, with reform projects including Ido and Sen:esepera.
Esperanto sen Fleksio
(Harrison, Rick) - international auxiliary language - 1996
A reform of Esperanto that eliminates flexions.
Essential World English (Hogben) - international auxiliary language
- fictional international language - 1997
The secret organization Eternia has created the international language, Etwu, an extremely regularized language based on French and English.
(Hunt, Philip) - international auxiliary language - 1990s
Hunt is designing Eurolang to be the language of the European Union, and he has some aggressive goals for ease of learning. Unlike Esperanto, Eurolang has more freely borrowed words from English.
(Jones, Leslie) - international auxiliary language- 1972
About the only thing interesting about Eurolengo is that the author claims the primary sources of vocabulary are English and Spanish. Otherwise it is just another Euroclone. Yawn.
(Miller, Timothy) - fictional language - 1990s
Ferengi is another language that Timothy Miller has invented for a Star Trek race of aliens. Perhaps he hopes to become the next Marc Okrand (inventor of Klingon, and only model language inventor to be making a significant amount of money from his invention). Miller has detailed the grammar and lexicon of Ferengi, as well as the alphabet.
Jeffrey) - fictional language - 1996
Fith is a language for an imaginary alien race. Since many model languages for aliens use grammars that follow the universal grammar of humans, I wanted to invent a language that specifically violated linguistic universals and could never be spoken by a human in actual practice. Humans can translate Fithian texts that have been written down, but due to the nature of the grammar - where words can be spoken long before their semantic role, if any, is apparent - no human could learn to translate Fith in real time. The grammar is based on the principals of a LIFO-stack (Last In First Out) data structure. Fith is also unusual in that each word has both a spoken component and a hand signal (one of 12 hand signals, each often signaling a different word).
Fjinnjikulla (Donnarumma, Tommaso) - 1990s
(CONLANG members) - international auxiliary language -
Folkspraak is an international auxiliary language intended as a pan-Germanic language, easily learned by speakers of English, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Afrikaans, Frisian and other Germanic languages. Folkspraak is an attempt to distill the Germanic languages. Folkspraak is primarily an exercise in collaborative invention, as it is being designed jointly by participants on the CONLANG mailing list. If you would like to work with others to design a model language, definitely check it out. (See Tutonish.)
(Pham Xuan Thai) - international auxiliary language -
Frater is a Euroclone from Asia, with a Classical (Greek and Latin) vocabulary, but with the roots somewhat modified to better suit the palate of Chinese, Japanese and other Asian-language speakers. To make it easier for Asian speakers, the language has only five vowels and thirteen consonants (bdfgjklmnprst) but permits more consonant clusters than might be expected given Chinese and Japanese phonotactics.
(Bartlett, Paul) - international auxiliary language - 1996
A planned reform of Frater.
Fuchisch [link broken when last checked]
(Miller, Herman, et al) - professional fictional language
The language of the gargoyles in the Ultima 6 and 7 computer games. The language is more developed than you would expect for a game, and it features an interesting "phonabet" (an alphabetic writing system structured to have its symbols show the phonetic features of its sounds).
Glaugnea (Helsem, Michael)
(Hogben, Lancelot,1943; Ashby, Wendy and Clark, Ross, 1981) -
international auxiliary language
Hogben published a draft form of the language, which he called Interglossa, in 1943, with Ashby and Clark preparing a modified version, called Glosa, in 1981. The language is generally criticized by model language enthusiasts, because it has basically not specified a grammar, relying instead upon English grammar. The vocabulary is Classical (Greek and Latin) and contains about a thousand words.
(Carter, Jim) - logical language - 1991
Jim Carter has prepared his own logical language, inspired by Loglan and Lojban. He feels he has simplified the deep structures in Loglan enough to make them 100 times easier to learn.
Beaufront, Louis or Couturat, Louis) - international auxiliary
language - 1907
With a name meaning "derived from" in Esperanto, Ido is a modification of Esperanto.
(Hildegarde of Bingen) - stealth language
Dating back to the 1100s, Lingua Ignota ("Unknown Language") is considered to be the first model language ever invented (or the first that we have record of).
Ilish (Henning, Jeffrey) - fictional
language - 1996
Ilish is the language family of the il, a species of sentient sea creatures of Fithia (see Fith), which communicate by sending electrical shocks to one another. Ilish is unusual in that it has no nouns, but instead uses thousands of pronouns.
(Smith, Jeff) - fictional language - 1996
Jeff Smith is inventing a pseudo-Germanic fictional language, inspired largely by Old English. He has specified some declensions and has created a small lexicon.
(Higley, Gregory) - fictional language - 1990s
Inda is ergative and features an interesting grammar, with adjectives treated as verbs (as in Japanese). The pronunciation system is also interesting, with consonants undergoing assimilation in different positions. Higley plans to provide more background about the fictional Indarans and their culture, and of course how that has affected their language.
(Hogben, Lancelot) - international auxiliary language -
(International Auxiliary Language Association) - international
auxiliary language - 1951
Developed by an organization that was originally founded in New York in 1924 to choose one model language to support as an auxiliary, the International Auxiliary Language Association eventually created its own language, with a grammar derived from the Romance languages and a vocabulary drawn from western European languages. Not to be confused with Latino Sine Flexione, originally called Interlingua.
Intermythic English (Henning,
Jeffrey) - superset language - 1996
This failed experiment involved adding a few hundred words to English based on many mythologies, as a slang or simple code (e.g., Nar from Narcissus for the first-person pronoun, Centaur for "ride a horse" or "equestrian"). Thank the gods there's no Babel Text for it
Jafo (Leigh, Thomas)
(Harrison, Rick, et al) - international auxiliary language
An international language meant to correct the European bias of most of its competitors, by drawing primarily on Asian languages.
(Miller, Herman) - fictional language - 1996
Jirit is the language of the Mizarian mice people. Only about 22 words of vocabulary are listed here, but the language is interesting for its agglutinative morphology, which makes its grammar very straightforward.
J2 (Campbell, James) - fictional language - 1992
(Pike, Kenneth L.) - artificial training language - 1957
Kalaba-X is nothing more than a formalized grammatical description [verb (modifier) object (modifier) subject (modifier)], yet Pike makes excellent use of it to teach some of the challenges of translation, as he translates material to and from Kalaba-X. This is a must-read for anyone designing the grammar of a model language; this article is one of a series of four articles posted at this site (I, II, III, IV).
Kinya (Gavioli, Maurizio)
(Raphael Singing Wolf) - stealth language
Wolf created Kiromi for the amusement of himself and his friends and as an enjoyable way of learning more about linguistics. It has the most informal definitions I have encountered in a model language, with words such as batra (defined as "drums, poundable instruments of rhythm") and bejke (defined as "belch, burp, suddenly emit").
(Okrand, Marc) - fictional language
The most popular fictional language today, with more speakers and more enthusiasts than even Tolkien's Quenya. Okrand invented the Klingon language for Star Trek, and there are many commercial products available to help with learning the language, including a dictionary, audio tapes and a multimedia software tutor.
(Elgin, Suzette Haden) - professional fictional language, international
Elgin, noted author of The Gentle Art Of Verbal Self Defence series of books, created LáAdan as an experiment to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Specifically, she felt that English and most natural languages were better suited for expressing the views of men than women. She designed LáAdan to enable women to better give voice to their viewpoints, and the lexicon of LáAdan, more than any other model language, has many unique concepts that are expressed in LáAdan in one word but cannot be easily expressed in natural languages. Elgin included LáAdan in her Native Tongue science-fiction trilogy. Unfortunately, little of the language has been documented on the Internet.
Latino Moderne (LM) (Stark, David)
- international auxiliary language - 1994
Latino Moderne is based on IALA Interlingua. The vocabulary for LM is the same as that of Interlingua, but Stark has rejected Interlingua's grammar, which he views as oversimplified and hard to use in practice, especially in regards to pronouns. The grammar of LM is instead a distillation of that of ancient Latin and the modern Romance languages. Learning Latino Moderne can serve as a good foundation for later study of Classical Latin or a modern Romance language.
Latino Sine Flexione
[LSF, formerly Interlingua] (Peano, Giuseppe) - international
auxiliary language - 1931
Peano felt that - while the Latin vocabulary is known to many people through its descendant languages and scientific borrowings - its inflexional system and syntax were too complex. By stripping Latin of its "ponderous burden of inflexions", Peano hoped to design the ideal auxiliary language. Latino Sine Flexione (LSF)'s vocabulary consists of all Latin words (including Latin borrowings of Greek terms) and the growing collection of common "international" words. Peano originally called the language Latino sine Flexione ("Latin without inflections") then changed the name to Interlingua. Since the IALA's Interlingua is now more well known, the language is usually referred to by its original name.
Lesko (Knight, Shawn C.)
Lingua Ignota de Hildegardis
(Brown, James Cooke) - logical language
Brown designed Loglan (short for "Logical Language") to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis through use of a language that followed the concepts and structures of symbolic logic, while striving for a thoroughly unambiguous grammar. Brown's original language has served as the foundation for at least two other logical languages, -gua!spi and Lojban.
Logulo (Knight, Shawn C.)
- logical language - 1996
Designed by others as a continuation of Loglan, Lojban (its name is a contraction for "Logical Language" in Lojban) is the most professional and thought-provoking of the modern logical languages, with a fascinating methodology for deriving its root words from Arabic, Chinese, English, Hindi, Russian and Spanish. Extensive information is available on-line.
Mavod (Annis, William)
Martian (Smith, Helene)
- international auxiliary language - 1996
Mundo-Lingue (Lott, Julius) - international auxiliary language
(Burgess, Anthony) - professional fictional language, superset
Nadsat is the language (slang, actually) used by gangs of violent English teenagers in the now-classic book and movie A Clockwork Orange. This English slang serves a serious purpose in the book, which is to help keep the violence of the protagonist (who rapes, murders and steals) from becoming unbearable to the reader. Nadsat is the best slang ever invented, with over 300 words, many of them cleverly derived from Russian (e.g, Russian nadsat, "-teen").
Nanigani (Tai, Kai-hsu) - fictional language
(Alfandari, Arturo) - international auxiliary language
An international language that for a time seemed like it might supplant Interlingua, but instead went gently into that good night.
(Jespersen, Otto) - international
auxiliary language - 1928
Novial (an acronym for New International Auxiliary Language) was designed primarily from two other languages, Ido and Occidental.
(NOVIAL-L) - international auxiliary language - 1997
A promising modernization of Novial by an open committee of Internet participants (NOVIAL-L). The design goal is to improve the regularity and recognizability of Novial, while expanding the lexicon to include terms for post-1928 concepts.
(von Wahl, Edgar) - international auxiliary language -
An international language using a Romance vocabulary, intended almost solely for Western speakers. The language is so naturalistic that Don Harlow says, "a linguist unfamiliar with it might be forgiven for assuming it to be a minor Romance dialect that had grown up after the collapse of Rome." Inspired by Mundo-Lingue, Occidental itself served as an inspiration for Novial.
(Miller, Herman) - fictional language - 1990s
Olaetyan, spoken on planets in the Kolagian sector, has an interesting phonology and a detailed lexicon, but no grammar is described. The vocabulary has enough unique words to make you want to learn more about the culture of the speakers (unusual musical instruments, game pieces, extraterrestrial creatures and mythological beings). How do you play the game of xayadophon, anyway?
Old Tongue (Jordan, Robert) - professional fictional language
Penta (Harrison, Rick) - personal
Nvwtohiyada Idehesdi, formerly known as Billy Joe Waldon) - international
A bizarre combination of Esperanto and Cherokee.
(Henning, Jeffrey and others) - international auxiliary language
Designed to be the easiest international auxiliary to learn to articulate, Polylang has just 12 sounds, the five vowels a, e, i, o, u and the seven consonants m, n, r, p, t, k, s; all syllables follow the consonant-vowel pattern (with optional initial consonant), as in motosike ("motorcycle"). The vocabulary is designed for maximum international recognizability, where possible given the limited phonology, with words like anima ("animal"), motore ("motor") and poreko ("pig, pork"). The vocabulary is eclectic and anyone is free to coin new words (based on borrowings), so this is your chance to easily contribute to a model language!
(Tolkien, J.R.R.) - professional fictional language
Quenya is the chief of Tolkien's Elvish languages, used mainly in The Lord of The Rings and The Silmarillion. The beauty of Quenya has inspired many to take up the hobby of model languages. Unfortunately, it was never a primary goal of Tolkien's to finish the design of Quenya, and his death left the vocabulary and grammar incomplete. This incompleteness has dampened the fires of enthusiasm for many who would have liked to have learned the language. At present there exists no single authoritative reference to the meta-history (the history of the creation of the fictional history) of Quenya. This gap will be filled eventually, when some unknown among us rises to the challenge of analyzing the editorial efforts of Tolkien's son, who has prepared a series of volumes relating the history of Tolkien's invention of Middle Earth.
Radilu (Collins, Chris) - personal language - 1995
Rev. and Mrs. Edward Powell) - philosophical language -
Like Solresol, Ro is a pasigraphy (an a priori philosophical language), with a vocabulary derived not from natural languages but from a classification structure. You can roughly guess the sense of a word by recognizing its initial letters; for instance, in Ro, bo- is the category of "sense-affecting matter", and color words (falling under this category) begin with bofo-: bofoc means "red", bofod means "orange" and bofof means "yellow". Unfortunately, if you make a typo in Ro, you've probably just spelled another word, and your spell checker is not going to catch the mistike
- fictional language - 1990s
Another unofficial Star Trek language. Phrase-generating software is available.
Jeffrey) - philosophical language - 1996
Roxhai is a philosophical language, with its vocabulary automatically structured, as with Ro. For instance: r'o means "sentiment and moral power"; ro'yo, "religious affection"; roc'o, "supernatural being or region"; roca'yo, "Christian supernatural being or region"; and rocac'o, "God". The core vocabulary of Roxhai is based on nouns, with verbs, adjectives and adverbs derived from these. Roxhai was inspired by Solresol, Ro and Esperanto, and is still being refined.
Rhozhendi (Leigh, Thomas)
(Henning, Jeffrey) - international auxiliary
language - 1995
I designed Sen:esepera to reform Esperanto to make it easier to pronounce. Where Esperanto has 23 consonants, Sen:esepera has only the 14 most commonly used consonants; where Esperanto permits complex consonant clusters (e.g., spr), Sen:esepera only permits clusters using nasals. Sen:esepera is also noteworthy for its kinship terms, capable of concisely expressing thousands of familial relationships.
Simpenga (Henning, Jeffrey)
- international auxiliary language - 1995-1996
Simpenga, pronounced /sim-PEN-ga/, is a contraction of Simpela Engelisa, "Simple English." The language is just a phonetically simpler version of Basic English. Yawn.
A simplified English, with about a 500-word vocabulary. Unlike Basic English, SIMPLE does not aim to be a grammatical subset of English, but attempts to simplify the rules. The SIMPLE language is not so simple, for it does not formally specify its grammar (which appears to consist of some arguable but complex subset of English), it idiomatically forms new words that have to be learned (a'other, there-for), it ignores the issues of polysemy, and it permits a full range of verbal idioms (verb-preposition pairs: give up, put up, go in, etc.).
Solresol: Langue Musicale Universelle
(Sudre, Jean Francois) - international
auxiliary language - circa 1830
The cleverest philosophical language, the earliest model language to be successful and the most likely to be learned by Julie Andrews. Solresol is based on the musical scale and has just seven syllables: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si. Additional site.
Sona - international language
(Dutton, Reginald J.G.) - international auxiliary language,
shorthand - 1943
This language was invented as a shorthand system, as well as a language, and emphasizes extremely short words.
A simplified Latin.
Streich (Donnarumma, Tommaso) - fictional language
(Russell, Barnett) - international auxiliary language -
Suma is an a priori language, but is unusual for the category in that its vocabulary does not use a systematic classification system. The language allows only CV (consonant+vowel) syllables, for easy-to-pronounce words.
Syai (Lilburn, Brian) - fictional language
languages - fictional languages
There are four Taeisan languages: Drgn, Iniel, Ohs and Petrocea.
(Madison, R. Ben) - fictional language - 1980s
Madison has invented the imaginary country of Talossa (which claims part of Milwaukee as its sovereign territory). Talossan is a Gallo-Romance language, inspired by French, Provencal and Occitan, and very naturalistic (with quite a few irregularities). Little of the language is available on the Internet, but Madison does sell three books about Talossan: two dictionaries and a grammar. With over 20,000 words, it is the most detailed fictional language ever invented. A principle weakness of the language is that it has no fictional derivation from Latin, with forms having been invented arbitrarily rather than regularly. Additional site.
- professional fictional language
This mythometaphorical language was inspired by the "Darmok" episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
(Javant Biaruja) - stealth language - 1969
This language was originally intended only for use by the author in writing his journal, but he has since made the language public.
Tceqli (Rmay) - 1996
Tenctonese - fictional language
(Elzinga, Dirk) - personal language - 1990s
A unique personal language, professionally designed and presented; highly regarded among the Internet community of language modelers.
(Pearson, Matthew) - personal language - 1993-
Another unique personal language, presented by a professional linguist as if written by a fieldworker studying the language. The web site is not yet complete, but you can purchase the entire grammar for a small fee from the author.
(Andrei Burago) - fictional language - 1996
This is an unusual language, with two very interesting features: first, a unique morphology for cases, and second, unusual formation of noun/verb pairs. Cases are marked on the end of preceding words (so, Vagu gat is "A cat sitting", where -u marks the case of gat, "sit"); this is well suited for forming compound words, e.g., tanosharasvanak is tan ("house") o-shar ("of selling", genitive) a-svanak ("drugs"), "pharmacy". Finally, verbs are formed from nouns by transposing the initial and final consonants: e.g., tran, "speech", becomes nrat, "to speak".
Tsolyani (Abd-el-Rahman Barker, Muhammad) - fictional language
(Molee, Elias) - international auxiliary language - 1902
Molee designed Tutonish as an "Anglo-German union tongue" and actually intended for it to be not just an international auxiliary language but the new mother tongue of the Germanic-speaking peoples, supplanting their native languages. Tutonish has a phonetic spelling, a simplified grammar and a vocabulary drawn primarily from German and English. (See Folkspraak for a modern, ongoing effort at designing a pan-Germanic language.)
Uni - international auxiliary language
- international auxiliary language
A Euroclone with a vocabulary based extensively on Spanish. Contrast with Eurolengo.
Universala Lingva Kodo [link broken when last checked]
Voksigid (Gilson, Bruce, et al) - logical language - 1980s
(Schleyer, Johann Martin) - international auxiliary language
With a name meaning "world speech", Volapük became something of a fad in the late nineteenth century and was the second international auxiliary language to win thousands of adherents (after Solresol); it was the precursor to Esperanto in popularity. It has a vocabulary based primarily on English and German roots that have been somewhat simplified for ease of pronunciation and morphological analysis. Its grammar was difficult enough that enthusiasts were rarely able to actually learn to speak the language. The language was successfully reformed in the 1930s (Modern Volapük, sample texts, other site). If Esperanto is the GUI (Graphical User Interface) of auxiliary languages, than Volapük is the DOS of the field. The language is primarily of interest now for historical reasons, and there is little information available about it on the Internet.
(Harrison, Rick) - international auxiliary language - 1990s
Harrison is approaching the design of Vorlin very professionally, and you can read his opinions about the requirements of an international language in an excellent essay on his web site. Harrison is the editor of the Journal Of Planned Languages and has prepared a detailed bibliography of model languages. He is arguably the foremost scholar of model languages working on the Internet today. Vorlin is most noted for its use of words with three letters for its base vocabulary. The language has changed significantly over the years and still has far to go, as Harrison restructures its vocabulary. This site is worth checking out periodically.
YASTLAN. Yet Another (Unofficial) Star Trek LANguage.
Wilkin's Analytical Language
Xaîni - fictional language
yf rgalin (Shoulson, Mark) - 1996
Y-irril (Marshall, Jeremy) - personal language - 1995
Zegzolt (Keskitalo, Toni) - personal language - 1995
(Harrison, Rick) - personal language - 1990s
Zengo is a language that allows Harrison to indulge his interest in words with five letters. The small vocabulary contains an eclectic mix of such words from different languages. Zengo was formerly called Penta (until Intel made him change the name :-).
(Miller, Herman) - fictional language - 1990s
Zireenka is the language of another one of Miller's furry aliens, the Zireen, who dwell on the planet Reeshai, in the general direction of Ursa Major. This site has a playful introduction to the language, a very short vocabulary and sample sound files. Zireenka is a tonal language.
Prepared by Jeffrey Henning
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Keywords: constructed languages; international auxiliary languages; artificial languages; international languages; interlanguages; model languages; invented languages; planned languages.