Planned languages
One of things that take many of my time is learning and advocating “planned languages”, often also referred to as “artificial”, “international”, “auxiliary” or even “world languages” - depending who and why speaks of them. Technically, they are rather “planned” and “artificial” - just because they appeared not as a result of language evolution, but were created from scratch with certain purpose.
Such purpose can be idealistic - to provide a common and culturally neutral means of communication for the people of the world; in this case they might be referred to as “international” and “auxiliary”. This idealistic component of their existence is what draws most of adherents and attracts most of the critics at the same time. The turbulent history of Esperanto in XX century is just one of the examples, how difficult is to view only at idealistic side of planned language.
Planned languages were also created for aesthetic reasons. Elfs in “Fellowship of the rings” and Klingons of “Star Trek” fame speak languages created by John R. R. Tolkien and Gene L. Coon, respectively. They are also created as scientific experiments - Ro language was created to implement category system to recognize unknown words. Proto-Indo-European is a an attempt to find a common ancestor of indo-european languages, and technically isreconstruction project rather than truly planned language. There are literally hundreds of planned languages around, and most of them are very niche and rarely spoken by more than handful of enthusiasts. This might let us think that all of them are useless toys of bunch of intellectuals or leftist internationists (I mean those who are in “world languages” camp).
Wide public is just unaware or ignorant about existence of planned languages. Call me a rootless idealist, but I am one of those who really think that planned languages are not only underused - they are underestimated. I believe that their scope is much wider than most of us think and we are just in the beginning of understanding their real capabilities. Some might say that 120+ years of existence of Esperanto, of which 100 is a period of decline, prove that the idea was flawed from the beginning. However, the world has greatly changed over the last century, and new possibilities granted by IT progress give us new areas where planned languages can benefit the humankind.
Now, when the world gets smaller and smaller, when more and more people get online, we are facing more and more intercommunication challenges, for which just one “world language” is not a panacea. It’s also obvious that original idea of a planned language used globally as first alternative to native language is too optimistic. But still, their planned nature makes them really handy instruments for solving communicating problems.
Over the years I came to a conclusion that planned languages could be used as a bridge for learning “natural” languages. While learning a planned language, a person understands a system that can be reused for learning other languages, and receives enough confidence to speak and use other language. Many people dismiss the idea of learning foreign languages as too complex. This is because they don’t have enough confidence. Learning other language (lest it be an “artificial” one) easily and rapidly would help them break the stereotype and move towards learning the language they were afraid of.
In this blog, I will publish more thoughts about this, as well as drawing your attention to other helpful resources on the net dedicated to the same subject.