[strenholme]

As someone who has followed the constructed language and international auxiliary language community for a couple of decades, and as someone with an undergraduate degree in linguistics, I do not see a constructed language catching on with the mainstream public any time soon.

A constructed language is a language that someone sits down and creates; this is different from a natural language which just forms as people communicate with each other. There are many constructed languages: Klingon in Star Trek is an actual constructed language, as is the language the Elves spoke in The Lord of the Rings.

Esperanto, and Interslavic, are examples of International Auxiliary Languages (IAL), languages specially made to be easy to learn to facilitate international communication. We have had those languages for well over a century, and none of them have caught on.

The reason why an IAL has not caught on is because people are motivated to learn a language when it has prestige, not because it’s easier to learn. Right now, for better or for worse, English is that language (with all of its warts: Auxiliary words to carry tense, the rather strange tense/lax vowel distinction, etc.) right now.

I would love to see an IAL to catch on, but there’s a serious marketing issue, especially since a lot of people just don’t have the mind to learn a new language as an adult, no matter how easy the language is to learn.

[asveikau]

I'm curious what you would think of the history of Standard Italian or Modern Hebrew. In both cases, there was no such thing as a native speaker 300 years ago, but they were revived from historical literary sources to coincide with a new political identity or state, and today millions of people count them as their native language.

It seems awfully like the story of a constructed language with high state, political and cultural support, that succeeds and grabs a foothold. Seems like it can work if it captures a particular zeitgeist.

I am sure that stories like this exist elsewhere, these are just 2 cases I happened to have read about and come to mind.

[azernik]

The Israeli case is illustrative for two reasons:

* Most of the people involved had some familiarity with written and liturgical Hebrew already.

* The revival was kicked off with a seed population of self-selected, ideologically-motivated Zionists in-country.

* When that seed of fluent speakers spread it to larger waves of immigration, there was no alternative lingua franca.

Italy was also a case where there was no alternative lingua franca, and it was in fact a dialect which was both mutually-intelligible with extant dialects, and was in fact made official in many Italian states well before unification.

More generally, these both are exactly in line with GP's point: "people are motivated to learn a language when it has prestige". Both languages were absolutely high prestige at the time.

[asveikau]

> and it was in fact a dialect

Based on Tuscan dialect, but my understanding (correct me if I am wrong) is it was not 100% the same as that dialect and drew from historical written forms.

The fact that mutual intelligibility exists with other dialects certainly helps. But the same is attempted here to bridge Slavic languages.

But yes. My two examples are high prestige, emerging at the right time alongside a new national identity. It has better chances than some Slavic language bufs on the internet. Just trying to say that the line between "constructed" language and a real native tongue is sometimes blurry. Failure of these attempts is not inevitable, given the right circumstances.

[azernik]

These were absolutely not constructed. The Italian case was a process of making official a register that had evolved naturally over 700 years; as it had been in continuous use in modern states, updating was not necessary.

In the Hebrew case, the language had been in continuous literary use for thousands of years; the only changes required to make it into a spoken everyday language were to add vocabulary. If that's a constructed language, then French is "constructed" every time the Academie decides on a word to replace an English loanword!

[strenholme]

I don’t see either Hebrew or Italian as constructed languages. Hebrew, as other posters has pointed out, has been a liturgical language (akin to Latin or Coptic) for a long time, and is a direct derivative of a natural language. Italian is also a natural language, derived from the Florentine dialect of the Tuscan language.

I see a constructed language as something created when someone sits down and deliberately makes a language, as did Zamenhof did when he sat down and made the Esperanto language. This has been a number of times; a partial list is at https://ial.fandom.com/wiki/Linguas

Natural languages occur when two or more people together realize they need to communicate, but do not have a common language to do it with. Nicaraguan Sign Language is a notable example of a language just appearing out of the blue in the last 50 years. Idioglossia languages also frequently pop up, seemingly out of the blue. Pidgin languages (where two or more groups of people who speak different languages need to speak to each other) also pop up pretty quickly when communication needs to be done (and if children are exposed to a pidgin language, it then transforms and becomes a creole language because children will fill out all the “gaps” in the language to make it a full bodied language).

[ijzeren_jan]

Modern Hebrew is just one example of the fact that there is no such thing is a binary distinction between natural and constructed languages. The main difference between both extremes is that a natural language is the result of a process of gradual evolution, whereas a a constructed language can be defined as "any language that is based on deliberate invention, modification or selection of the core material by a concrete author or group of authors with a discernible purpose in mind". However, every natural language has invented elements and every constructed language has naturalistic elements. Some languages that are usually considered natural display an exceptionally high level of human intervention, and some of them even have an author. Other examples are Old Church Slavonic, Nynorsk, Bahasa Indonesia, Revived Cornish, Katharevousa Greek, Rumantsch Grischun and Euskara Batua (Standardised Basque). All we can say is that these languages, along with languages like Interslavic, Interlingua, Latino Sine Flexione etc. belong to a gray area between natural and artificial ("semiconstructed languages").

[wolf550e]

Hebrew had over a million speakers even when it wasn't anyone's native language. It was known to Jewish men who studied in a cheder as boys (those who did not continue to higher studies/seminary in a yeshiva), the way I think Arabic is known to Muslims who are not native speakers. Hebrew was used for literature and poetry and for communication between Jewish communities that didn't share a native language. It wasn't reconstructed from literary sources, it was only modernized for everyday use.

[nine_k]

The problem that there were several dialects, each having a significant number of speakers, both in medieval Hebrew and medieval Italian languages, to say nothing of Germanic languages.

It took certain development of compromise standards and getting used to them, when a single state appeared which needed a unifying language: Israel, Italy, Germany.

All these countries still have a number of dialects spoken casually, but at least there is a common standard to use when in doubt.

[azernik]

Because it was used for international communication (e.g. for da Volterra's travel memoir and rabbinical responsa), and so was standardized across a wide geographic area. For example, before the expulsion Ashkenazis would send legal questions to Spain for answers from prestigious rabbis, and the resulting legal rulings would be distributed across the Mediterranean and as far as Iran.

WRT the Italian and German cases, these are not really exceptional; standard French wasn't a common native language in France until a post-revolutionary homogenization campaign, Castilian Spanish still isn't universally a native language in Spain, etc.

Making an existing lingua franca into a more common native tongue is a standard and early step in the formation of a nation-state (in the old-world sense) from Norway to, less successfully, India. None of these phenomena set any useful precedent for the establishment of a conlang as an international language.

[amatic]

Serbo-croatian might go to that list as well, as it was an official language in the former Yugoslavia. French too. Spanish (Castillan). Seems like interslavic might have a chance only in a hypothetical panslavic country.

[gpvos]

According to Wikipedia, Serbo-Croatian was standardized before there was a unified Yugoslav state.

[ijzeren_jan]

There is a critical difference between Esperanto and Interslavic. Esperanto is meant for communication between Esperanto speakers. Interslavic, on the other hand, is meant to be understandable for Slavs who haven't actually learned it. In other words, the success of Interslavic cannot only be judged by the number of people who learnt it. Basically, one speaker is enough to serve an entire audience, one translator is enough to serve all Slavic readers. Creating a community of Interslavic speakers has never been the primary purpose of creating the language.

[andolanra]

The thing Interslavic is doing has also been tried before, but the illustrative example isn't Esperanto (which is an ad-hoc mixture of words taken arbitrarily from existing languages and put into a synthetic grammar) but rather Interlingua, which is a kind of streamlined Romance language. It too is more-or-less comprehensible by people who speak any Romance language, and was intended to be used in much the same way. In fact, to quote the creator of Interlingua writing in Interlingua:

    Le sol facto que importa (ab le puncto de vista de interlingua mesme) es que
    interlingua, gratias a su ambition de reflecter le homogeneitate cultural e ergo
    linguistic del occidente, es capace de render servicios tangibile a iste precise
    momento del historia del mundo. Il es per su contributiones actual e non per le
    promissas de su adherentes que interlingua vole esser judicate.

(Edit: to translate for non-Romance speakers, this means, "The only important fact (from the point of view of Interlingua itself) is that Interlingua, thanks to its goal of reflecting the cultural—and therefore linguistic—homogeneity of the West, is capable of providing tangible services at this precise moment in the history of the world. It is for its actual contributions, and not the promises of its adherents, that Interlingua wishes to be judged.")

It too has met with only limited success: there were some short-lived scientific publications in Interlingua, for example, for the intended audience of all Romance-speaking scientists. Even so, it never attracted much of an audience. That's not to say such a thing could never happen: merely that it's not unreasonable to be pessimistic here.

[barry-cotter]

Please don’t indent quoted text as code. It makes reading on mobile a chore and isn’t great on desktop either. Use

> Le sol facto que importa (ab le puncto de vista de interlingua mesme) es que interlingua, gratias a su ambition de reflecter le homogeneitate cultural e ergo linguistic del occidente, es capace de render servicios tangibile a iste precise momento del historia del mundo. Il es per su contributiones actual e non per le promissas de su adherentes que interlingua vole esser judicate.

[lacampbell]

Instead use markdown which HN doesn't support? :P

Grandparents was easier to read than yours. Turn your phone sideways

[Shorel]

Native Spanish speaker here: I only needed to read the translation for the last three words.

They did quite a good job. :)

But a language also needs an army (or a central bank, or both).

[tasogare]

As a French, the text is also really easy to understand, except for the two words "vole esser". That being said, writing in this language would still require months of learning.

[otto2]

As non-native speaker of Spanish and French, the text is easily understandable, more so than written Portuguese or Italian.

[poloniculmov]

As a romanian, I only had issues with the last 3 words, though I did have a hunch that judicate is something about judgements.

[ozzmotik]

i don't particularly speak any romance language, but that being said, i still more or less had a vague understanding of what was being said. granted, there was a period of my life where I studied several different world languages, back when I was obsessed with linguistics, and even though I don't speak really any of them with any fluency, it would seem that through osmosis i at least gained an appreciation of some fundamental etymological patterns across those languages

[AmericanChopper]

> I do not see a constructed language catching on with the mainstream public any time soon.

Doesn’t Indonesian technically fit the definition of a constructed language?

[9nGQluzmnq3M]

No, it's a standardized dialect of Malay, in the same way that Filipino is a standardized dialect of Tagalog.

[AmericanChopper]

Well it was based off a particular dialect of Malay, but it’s certainly not exactly the same as that dialect, nor the language spoken in Malaysia today. The Interslavic language in the OP is also based on existing languages. It was also implemented the same way you’d imagine a created language would be. A central authority came up with the language, told the people to learn it, and then a couple hundred million of them actually did.

I think it has a remarkable quality, in that the government told everybody to learn a new common language, and that that actually succeeded. That’s the part where created languages usually come to a grinding halt. Whether the language is “created enough” seems open to interpretation to me.

[BurningFrog]

Guess it's an unusual version of the old saying: "A language is a dialect with its own army"

[adrianN]

Esperanto would have had a good chance of becoming a useful language had the League of Nations adopted it as its official language. However the French veto prevented this and essentially killed the movement.

[tomcooks]

There are a lot more problems with Esperanto than the French veto I believe

[adrianN]

More than with the current defacto lingua franca, English?

[sharperguy]

It is not our purpose to build a community of Interslavic speakers and we do not ask anybody to actually learn it; we merely offer suggestions that will enable people to make themselves understandable to (other) Slavs in a language that is essentially their own. Given the character of the Slavic language family, it should be possible to speak or write in such way that ca. 90% of it will be readily understandable for virtually every Slavic speaker. [1]

[1] http://steen.free.fr/interslavic/introduction.html#purpose

[fouc]

I have high hopes for a constructed language to someday become the dominant language. But I think it would need to be heavily modelled along multiple dimensions, serious computational power would need to be brought to bear on it to make it accessible and useful, and it would need to be tested on multiple focus groups with wildly different first languages, etc.

I think there would be huge gains if a language was designed right. It could give us the tools to communicate complex ideas effectively for example, and perhaps make it easier to reduce ambiguity. Numbers 1-10 could be single syllables (or even shorter?) to take advantage of our auditory memory. etc etc

[G4BB3R]

Take a look at Lojban

[cortesoft]

> The reason why an IAL has not caught on is because people are motivated to learn a language when it has prestige, not because it’s easier to learn.

Is this really why people learn a language? I would have thought that people learned a language when they wanted to be able to communicate with people that they couldn't, which also explains why people don't learn these languages (network effect, really)

[danans]

Sounds like they mean prestige of the language, as in people will often learn the most prestigious language they can to avail themselves of the opportunities available only to those who speak that language.

[antocv]

> As someone who has followed the constructed language and international auxiliary language community for a couple of decades, and as someone with an undergraduate degree in linguistics, I do not see a constructed language catching on with the mainstream public any time soon.

But strenholme, all official national languages are constructed. Someone sat down and constructed that language.

[DiogenesKynikos]

And in practice, if one Slavic language comes close to serving as a lingua franca in Eastern Europe, isn't it Russian? If you're going to learn a second language in order to communicate with people, you're going to learn a language with a large existing community - English, Modern Standard Arabic, Standard Chinese (Mandarin), Russian, French (in West Africa), etc.

[kolinko]

Definitely not - among other things - for social/political reasons. Russia has occupied central/eastern countries for four decades and most people prefer to be as far away from it culturally as possible.

Even though my parents' generation was all forced to learn Russian, the current generation doesn't learn it. Even if it would be practical.

Also, Russian may be easy to learn, but it won't be easier to understand than my native Polish to my Czech and Slovakian friends. Interslavic on the other hand would be understood relatively easily.

I just read a chapter from the little prince that's on the page, and I understood it almost perfectly with no training in Interslavic, just with my knowledge of Polish language.

[DiogenesKynikos]

Yes, there's strong anti-Russian feeling in several countries, but Russian is still, by far, the Slavic language with the most second-language speakers.

According to Ethnologue, there are more than 100 million Russian speakers outside of Russia. It is the primary language in Belarus and half of the Ukraine (and is known by most people in the country). Almost 7 million people in Poland know how to speak it.[1]

English is probably becoming more of the lingua franca of Eastern Europe, but still, if any Slavic language were to serve as the lingua franca, it would be Russian. It's the Slavic language with the largest international presence, and in contrast to constructed languages, it actually has a large speaker base and significant cultural heritage.

1. http://www.ethnologue.com/21/language/rus/

[wavefunction]

I think feelings tend to run negative towards the Russian government rather than Russian people. I feel that Russian and American people are more alike than we care to admit at least.

[hourislate]

>but Russian is still, by far, the Slavic language with the most second-language speakers

Only because Russia tried to destroy the language and culture of all the nations it occupied. They forced citizens of other countries to speak Russian and not their native languages. It is only the most spoken by older generations while the younger generations of other countries are being raised in their native language.

Given enough time, the Russian language will only be spoken by Russians.

[DiogenesKynikos]

What a negative comment! The same could be said of English, which is the dominant international language because of British imperialism.

It's also, historically speaking, simply not true that Russia tried to wipe out the languages of the countries it occupied (also, liberated from the Nazis) after WWII. Russian was taught in school as a second language, but there wasn't any plan to wipe out the Polish language, for example.

[tempest345]

> liberated from the Nazis

'Liberated' by invading first you mean. As was done in my country, among others.

[dmurray]

The second-language speakers skew old, though. People under 30 are much more likely to speak English or German. (Not trying to say that English should be the preferred lingua franca here, just that Russian doesn't have the headstart your statistics suggest).

[DiogenesKynikos]

We're talking about Slavic languages. I've said repeatedly that English is the international language, but if it comes down to Russian vs. a constructed Slavic language, Russian is obviously more attractive, given its existing speaker base and culture.

[tom_mellior]

People are arguing against you because what you claim is not as obvious as you claim.

[p1esk]

There are many reasons why this hasn’t happened, but I think you pointed out the main one: English is the language with the largest existing community, so I think most Slavs would rather learn it as the second language, unless there’s a good reason to choose a different one due to some circumstances (eg proximity to a border, widespread business with a certain country, etc).

[eequah9L]

In Czechia, English is definitely the most reasonable L2 to learn, by far. Even for L3 I wouldn't be sure Russian is a better choice than German, which is just super useful around here.

I learned Russian basically for irrational reasons. I'm glad I did, but I can't say it is very useful.

[ijzeren_jan]

The main problem with Russian is that Russia/the USSR have been trying to impose it as a lingua franca in Central and Eastern Europe, and failed. Most people in those countries simply won't accept it. Besides, Russian is a complex language, with lots of elements that are different from other Slavic languages. Most people who haven't learned it won't understand it either.

[decebalus1]

> The main problem with Russian is that Russia/the USSR have been trying to impose it as a lingua franca in Central and Eastern Europe, and failed. Most people in those countries simply won't accept it.

As a native of that area in Europe and having lived through some of the traces of russification I can confirm I have a strong bias against the Russian language. When I was a kid, Russian and French were the foreign languages they taught in school and after '89, everyone agreed it was best to switch Russian with English or German. Nobody there wants to learn Russian or immigrate to a Russian speaking country.

[vbezhenar]

Russian is definitely way to go. Any slavic language is similar to Russian.

[isbvhodnvemrwvn]

If you ignore the politics and that it uses an entirely different alphabet than half of the other slavic countries. I am a native Polish speaker and have trouble reading Russian text even with repeated, limited text (genealogy resources such as birth acts). I definitely don't understand most of casual Russian.

[emptyfile]

> Any slavic language is similar to Russian.

Nope.