Conlangs
- Thread starter QarQing
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You would do better to start such a thread with a definition, some examples and your own use of them.
I really like the idea of Toki Pona, with only 137 words. I do suspect that it, like other constructed languages, may have more to do with fun than practical communication.
Toki Pona is a human language I invented in 2001. It was my attempt to understand the meaning of life in 120 words. There are now thousands of speakers and 137 essential words. In 2022, ISO 639-3 adopted the code "tok" for Toki Pona, which it categorized as a world language. Toki Pona is among the most popular conlangs online.
QarQing
Warlord
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Yeah but just like other conlangs, it is not widely used and hasn't evolved into a world language. Technically, no conlang is truly as successful as world languages. And the website you have shown me, it can be deceptive since Ithkuil has 0 speakers while Toki Pona has only 500
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A conlang is a "constructed language", i.e. one that didn't evolve organically such as Latin or English, but one that was constructed for a specific purpose.
Some are created for fun; one of my sister's friends created one that she would use with... her boyfriend? Her younger sister? I can't remember who exactly, but someone close to her who was willing to communicate in it. Some are created for works of fiction, such as Klingon.
I find the most fascinating category to be those that were created with the goal of being an international language. The most famous of these being Esperanto, but there are others as well such as Volapuk (the first to gain a large following) and Ido (a child of Esperanto; "ido" means "offspring" or "child" in Esperanto). Esperanto is still alive today, and to a lesser degree some of the other languages are as well.
I studied Esperanto for some time back around the middle of last decade, and it's a pleasant language to learn. No silent letters like French, no exceptions to rules of conjugation or pronunciation like English, and like German you can combine roots and affixes to get new words, although it doesn't necessarily go to quite the lengths that German does in that department. I certainly was learning it quickly, although how much of that was due to previous efforts at learning French and other languages is up for debate.
Is it practical? Well, not compared to learning Spanish, though I have met a fellow Esperantisto (Esperanto speaker) in real life. But I can see the argument that it may be a good first language for someone to learn as a gateway to learning another language; you probably could become fluent much more quickly than in nearly any other language due to its lack of exceptions to rules. Where I live, I'd estimate 10% or fewer of people become fluent in another language, and aside from "it's really not especially useful to do so day-to-day", I think part of the reason is that it takes many years of study to become fluent, and we don't start instruction until age 12. If we gave some Esperanto lessons for six months to two years before starting Spanish/French/etc., students may well already be fluent in Esperanto by the time they start another language, have confidence they can learn languages, and know the core grammatical concepts. Some studies in England have shown that to be time-effective.
I also appreciate the goal of a universal language that is easy to learn. In the 1800s, English was not already de facto becoming a universal language; French was very much still in the competition, and both French and English were not as global in scope. If you can reduce the time required to learn a language fluently, or at least conversationally, by two-thirds, it stands to reason that more people would learn it, or at least stick with it long enough for it to be useful. It is true that the "easier to learn" effect is likely higher for speakers of European languages, since its creator Zamenhof spoke European languages (a fair number of them as well, including Polish). But I suspect it's not wholly limited to "speakers of Romance, Germanic, and Slavic" languages, because of the reliability of the grammatical and pronunciation rules. It's handy that I can recognize the verb dormas in Esperanto because it's a cognate with French and Spanish, or bildo as "image" because it's a cognate with German, but even if I didn't speak any European languages, it would be a relief to know that I wouldn't run into words such as Worcestershire that are pronounced completely differently than they are spelled, or irregular verbs as I remember painstakingly learning in French.
Some are created for fun; one of my sister's friends created one that she would use with... her boyfriend? Her younger sister? I can't remember who exactly, but someone close to her who was willing to communicate in it. Some are created for works of fiction, such as Klingon.
I find the most fascinating category to be those that were created with the goal of being an international language. The most famous of these being Esperanto, but there are others as well such as Volapuk (the first to gain a large following) and Ido (a child of Esperanto; "ido" means "offspring" or "child" in Esperanto). Esperanto is still alive today, and to a lesser degree some of the other languages are as well.
I studied Esperanto for some time back around the middle of last decade, and it's a pleasant language to learn. No silent letters like French, no exceptions to rules of conjugation or pronunciation like English, and like German you can combine roots and affixes to get new words, although it doesn't necessarily go to quite the lengths that German does in that department. I certainly was learning it quickly, although how much of that was due to previous efforts at learning French and other languages is up for debate.
Is it practical? Well, not compared to learning Spanish, though I have met a fellow Esperantisto (Esperanto speaker) in real life. But I can see the argument that it may be a good first language for someone to learn as a gateway to learning another language; you probably could become fluent much more quickly than in nearly any other language due to its lack of exceptions to rules. Where I live, I'd estimate 10% or fewer of people become fluent in another language, and aside from "it's really not especially useful to do so day-to-day", I think part of the reason is that it takes many years of study to become fluent, and we don't start instruction until age 12. If we gave some Esperanto lessons for six months to two years before starting Spanish/French/etc., students may well already be fluent in Esperanto by the time they start another language, have confidence they can learn languages, and know the core grammatical concepts. Some studies in England have shown that to be time-effective.
I also appreciate the goal of a universal language that is easy to learn. In the 1800s, English was not already de facto becoming a universal language; French was very much still in the competition, and both French and English were not as global in scope. If you can reduce the time required to learn a language fluently, or at least conversationally, by two-thirds, it stands to reason that more people would learn it, or at least stick with it long enough for it to be useful. It is true that the "easier to learn" effect is likely higher for speakers of European languages, since its creator Zamenhof spoke European languages (a fair number of them as well, including Polish). But I suspect it's not wholly limited to "speakers of Romance, Germanic, and Slavic" languages, because of the reliability of the grammatical and pronunciation rules. It's handy that I can recognize the verb dormas in Esperanto because it's a cognate with French and Spanish, or bildo as "image" because it's a cognate with German, but even if I didn't speak any European languages, it would be a relief to know that I wouldn't run into words such as Worcestershire that are pronounced completely differently than they are spelled, or irregular verbs as I remember painstakingly learning in French.
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I realize I didn't really answer "why aren't they widely used"? It somewhat depends on the definition of "widely used"; the worldwide count of Esperanto speakers is, I'd estimate, probably in the tens to hundreds of thousands depending on the level of proficiency being measured. And it was somewhat more than that in its heydey in the early 1900s. But it's true that you almost never find Esperanto on the radio.
Why not? Most people prioritize what appears to be most practical; a chicken-and-egg effect. If 500 million people spoke Esperanto, there would be a lot more incentive to learn it over Spanish, French, Arabic, or Chinese than there is today, when there are perhaps 500,000 who speak it at an A2 or B1 level, and they're spread out all over the planet. Most people would prefer to try to learn a widely spoken language with a home country, even if the chances of success are lower. But as importantly, most school curricula offer those existing national languages; if you want to study Esperanto or another conlang, you pretty much have to to it outside of formal educational channels.
Another factor is that for much of the world, English has become the lingua franca that is being taught everywhere. Even in multilingual nations, you'll learn your native tongue, and English, and a third language of your choice, in many places.
In an alternative timeline where the British Empire was not quite so dominant, and where there was more balance in the relative benefits from learning various national languages, perhaps Esperanto or another constructed language could have been endorsed as a language of trade, and from there become a truly international language.
Finally, there's the aspect of smaller native corpuses. While some may want to study Dothraki just because they love Game of Thrones, national languages have much larger literary vocabularies. Perhaps you love Italian opera, or Japanese manga, or want to read Hugo in the original French. If your have an interest in European history, then even today there are practical benefits to learning Latin, not so much for speaking but for reading historical monuments and documents. No constructed language can compete with these corpuses. If enough momentum were built, that could in theory change. People continued to publish books in Latin for centuries after it was no longer a national language, because that's what could garner the largest audience of book-reading customers. If two billion people spoke Esperanto, I'm sure there would be a healthy stable of Esperanto publishers, including some that only published in Esperanto. But as it is today, it isn't economic to publish your works in Esperanto, and especially only in Esperanto.
Many of these reasons are also applicable for the question of, "why aren't people learning Sorbian?" or other less-mainstream organic languages. In some cases, such as Irish, there's been a resurgence of interest from a community that had largely moved to another language, but for every such case there are many more where the number of speakers is at best stagnant, and often precipitously declining as the younger generation only learns Dutch/German/Chinese instead of Frisian/Sorbian/[insert minority language from China here].
Why not? Most people prioritize what appears to be most practical; a chicken-and-egg effect. If 500 million people spoke Esperanto, there would be a lot more incentive to learn it over Spanish, French, Arabic, or Chinese than there is today, when there are perhaps 500,000 who speak it at an A2 or B1 level, and they're spread out all over the planet. Most people would prefer to try to learn a widely spoken language with a home country, even if the chances of success are lower. But as importantly, most school curricula offer those existing national languages; if you want to study Esperanto or another conlang, you pretty much have to to it outside of formal educational channels.
Another factor is that for much of the world, English has become the lingua franca that is being taught everywhere. Even in multilingual nations, you'll learn your native tongue, and English, and a third language of your choice, in many places.
In an alternative timeline where the British Empire was not quite so dominant, and where there was more balance in the relative benefits from learning various national languages, perhaps Esperanto or another constructed language could have been endorsed as a language of trade, and from there become a truly international language.
Finally, there's the aspect of smaller native corpuses. While some may want to study Dothraki just because they love Game of Thrones, national languages have much larger literary vocabularies. Perhaps you love Italian opera, or Japanese manga, or want to read Hugo in the original French. If your have an interest in European history, then even today there are practical benefits to learning Latin, not so much for speaking but for reading historical monuments and documents. No constructed language can compete with these corpuses. If enough momentum were built, that could in theory change. People continued to publish books in Latin for centuries after it was no longer a national language, because that's what could garner the largest audience of book-reading customers. If two billion people spoke Esperanto, I'm sure there would be a healthy stable of Esperanto publishers, including some that only published in Esperanto. But as it is today, it isn't economic to publish your works in Esperanto, and especially only in Esperanto.
Many of these reasons are also applicable for the question of, "why aren't people learning Sorbian?" or other less-mainstream organic languages. In some cases, such as Irish, there's been a resurgence of interest from a community that had largely moved to another language, but for every such case there are many more where the number of speakers is at best stagnant, and often precipitously declining as the younger generation only learns Dutch/German/Chinese instead of Frisian/Sorbian/[insert minority language from China here].
