[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.