October 16, 2023 - Published

I think most people have thought about making their own code or language at some point in their lives. While it was a small curiosity for me, it wasn't until recently that I seriously considered making one myself, being motivated by my frustrations with the inconsistencies and inefficiencies of natural languages. What I didn't expect was that this would be a curiosity that led to a bottomless well of research for several months!

The act of creating constructed languages (referred to as conlangs for short) reaches back hundreds of years, and today it's the driving force for many thriving online communities. You probably already know some conlangs -- Klingon, Na'vi, Esperanto, High Valyrian, etc. -- since a good number of popular media required the use of a fantasy foreign language. However, what I was personally interested in a lot more was the idea of an international auxiliary language.

An international auxiliary language, or auxlang for short, is a language designed to be a "universal" language, one to be spoken between people of many nations. English is the current de facto auxlang since it's so widespread, and most people can be expected to speak at least some English. However, not everyone is very happy with how English is designed, even English speakers! While linguistics isn't exactly my field of study, I do happen to major in design (even if game design), so trying to find the "perfect" auxlang has been a FASCINATING journey for me. This is because designing the "perfect" auxlang is inherently impossible (the reasons why should be obvious if you think about it; either way I'll talk about it somewhere here), but it's such a cool design challenge that many many people have tried to tackle over many years. I also love the idea of true international communication, even if it's mostly just a dream...

I mainly want to talk about my favorites, so I won't go over every auxlang there is, but for completion's sake I WILL try to cover the biggest auxlangs. 

You can't talk about auxlangs without talking about Esperanto. While there were ones that were made beforehand (most notably Solresol and Volapük), Esperanto is the most spoken conlang today -- and yes, that includes constructed languages that aren't auxlangs. Esperanto was published in 1887 by a singular dude from Poland who wanted to unite nations and encourage world peace. Since the spread of Esperanto was eventually pushed by governments and taught in schools, most people agree that this was the best chance for an auxlang to truly become a universal language. However, by the wider world it was considered to have been a failure -- Esperanto today isn't a true household name, and English has by far overtaken it as the universal language. By conlang statistics, though, Esperanto blasts every other auxlang out of the water in popularity by almost every metric. It has thousands of speakers, some even NATIVE speakers, which is very unique and impressive for a conlang. How was it designed?

Well, most people have significant problems with how Esperanto was designed, but for the time it was very impressive and continues to set many standards for modern day auxlangs. Esperanto's phonology is very consistent so you'll know exactly how a word is pronounced just by looking at it, something English could only dream of. Just about every word can be modified to a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb through a consistent and logical set of rules. However, there are some issues. It uses letters that aren't typable on a QWERTY keyboard (though there are workarounds), and it has sounds that are unnatural and difficult for certain speakers to make (the ĥ sound stands out to me as an American English speaker), among other things. 

In terms of spreading the language around, there wasn't much better that Esperanto could have done. It's still spoken by a lot of people and continues to be the most popular auxlang today, but most people have accepted the fate of future auxlangs to not be much more than a niche hobby. That being said, there are a few languages we have to talk about before that...

Ido is a dialect of Esperanto. There's some complicated history and drama, but it was essentially made by a council of people in 1907 to improve upon Esperanto's perceived issues. While there's many offshoots of Esperanto (all of them are referred to as Esperantidos, since Ido means "offspring"), this is the most popular one. It's also basically dead! However, it made a big impact -- some phrases from Ido were carried over into Esperanto, and tradition has made it so that all future conlang offshoots are usually referred to as a [language]-ido. What did they change?

Ido has several changes, including vocabulary, but the most quickly noticeable one is that they removed all the diacritical marks, making it typable on a standard QWERTY keyboard. All nouns are ungendered by default, objects don't have to be attached to an accusative suffix, and the funny ĥ sound has been banished. I've seen a lot of Esperanto speakers express interest and approval for Ido's design... but unfortunately it's dead!! This will be a common problem for many auxlangs, most of which won't be listed here. 

  The issue is that even if the perfect auxlang WAS made, making it popular is an entirely separate issue, and doing this is difficult when speakers require speakers to teach/talk with them, which are driven by media, which requires creators, etc. I need to emphasize this point, because no matter how many languages will be on this page, the overwhelmingly large barrier that every auxlang has to cross is... just having people speak it! And that's a lot harder than people might expect.

That being said, I personally like Ido a lot. It's well-designed and rather intuitive. I feel that its connection to Esperanto could make it a very helpful and easy language to learn (making about 90% of Esperanto decipherable, since the two are considered dialects), or be the reason that Ido continues to go relatively unused.

Interlingua is the auxlang on this list that I've done the least amount of research on, but it is necessary to mention. Easily one of the most popular auxlangs, I've usually seen it trail behind Esperanto as a comfy top 3 spot in multiple metrics, like real-world use and number of speakers (though like all other auxlangs, it trails behind considerably). Made in 1951, it focuses strongly on one goal: becoming as immediately decipherable as possible to Romance speakers. This makes it very powerful, since even people who don't know the language can generally understand the majority of it. However, this comes at a cost -- it's a lot harder to learn! Esperanto is built to be logical and that makes it very easy to learn, but having a language mimic natural language means that it also inherits a lot of the confusing inconsistencies. Still, having a readable language like this is very practical, and has been used in some situations like tourist documents. 

While I personally don't plan on learning it, the results speak for themselves. I took an excerpt from The Little Prince and requested feedback from a small sample size, and a large majority said they considered Interlingua to be the most decipherable when compared to Ido and Elefen:

Speaking of which... Elefen! This was the second place winner in my little experiment. The actual name of the language is Lingua Franca Nova, shortened to LFN, but most people (including me) seem to now prefer the name Elefen. This was first published in 1998, making it fairly recent, but it's gained a good amount of steam. 

  Roughly based on real pidgins (hence the name), it has very simple grammar, designed to be easy to learn no matter the speaker, despite having a very Romance-leaning vocabulary. This vocabulary probably works in its favor anyway -- while many auxlangs try to incorporate as many languages as they can, it often leads to a rather intimidating vocabulary that feels unfamiliar to everyone. Even if you don't know a Romance language, most of the words are rather simple to learn, with a phonology that was carefully chosen to exclude difficult letters. 

Elefen is probably my favorite naturalistic auxlang. I personally find it more comprehensible than Interlingua, without the same drawbacks, and it's just plain fun to speak. However, I am absolutely biased as someone who is essentially a Romance speaker, but I appreciate the fact that Elefen's website clearly defines its goals and has good reasoning for its focus on Romance languages, which is a common complaint for auxlangs.

Aaaand here it is my dudes, toki pona! toki pona was another language made by just one person, first published in 2001 but arguably being officiated in 2014. All the auxlangs so far have a pretty common pattern -- combine the Romance languages, maybe sprinkle in some other ones too, then simplify the grammar to be more consistent. toki pona ignores all that for one simple reason: it wasn't meant to be an auxlang! It was created as an artlang, designed to simplify thoughts and create more positive thinking, but it happened to fall into the auxlang spotlight for multiple reasons.

The first and most obvious one is that toki pona only has about 120 words (no exact number since evolving community = some ambiguous word acceptance). This makes it much less intimidating to learn than other languages, since even auxlangs can have thousands of words. Words that aren't in the vocabulary can be created by combining words ("potato" is "kili ma", or "earth vegetable"), and can either be inferred with context or have more words added in for detail. 

  The language also has very simple grammar that makes sense internationally, but there's one more simple reason that toki pona resonates with so many people: it's fun! The words are fun to say, there's official pictograms for every word called sitelen pona, and it's just overall really cute. Despite being really new (or possibly BECAUSE it's really new), toki pona exploded in popularity on the internet and is one of the very few languages that actually rivals Esperanto's online communities in terms of size. Still, it isn't immune from criticism -- the selection of words can be considered generally inefficient (there are like 5 different words for animals, which adds a lot of personality but technically not necessary), and sentence structures can add some ambiguity ("tawa" can mean "go" or the preposition "towards", which could completely change the meaning of a sentence). 

  These don't significantly inhibit the language though, and toki pona is probably my favorite language on this list in general, partly because it was my entry-point into the larger conlang community. I first heard about it from a friend while I was developing my very own conlang, and the two languages happened to have very similar philosophies...

Now, for the last entry I'm including a bit of an interesting one. Mini (I'll often call it Mini Linga for less ambiguity) is a language that was made in 2020. It is nowhere near as popular as any other language on this list, but it came up in my research while looking for minimalistic auxlangs (which no doubt became more popular after the success of toki pona). Its design is also my favorite on this list, taking some of the best parts of both toki pona and Elefen. 

  The vocabulary has been capped off at 1,000 words, with an optional version called Mini Kore which only contains the most important 120 words. Like toki pona, it uses a particle system for sentences (though it has less ambiguity), words are small and simple and don't inflect, and have a lot more universally recognized words. Something I also noticed about Mini is that a LOT of the vocabulary is recognizable from English -- this is a big deal to me for an auxlang since I believe that leveraging English's status as the de facto auxlang is a good way to make its vocabulary more recognizable.

It has some community, but as a VERY new language it needs time to grow, which is partly why I would like to promote it more. I believe it has a good niche that's separate yet similar to toki pona, with a very well-thought out design that should be much more suited for international communication.

So yeah, I think that's about it! There are a lot of conlangs that would be worth discussing, but not any more that I'd be interested in learning about. I've said "favorite" a lot, so how do these languages actually stack up for me? Well, all of them have to be judged by different metrics, so I would summarize my feelings as:

• toki pona is my favorite language here in general, since I enjoy speaking and learning about it very much

• Elefen is my favorite naturalistic auxlang, and is the one I would most support for being a true international auxiliary language, partly due to feasibility and partly due to design

• Mini has my favorite design, and is roughly what I would consider the "perfect" auxlang under my own personal criteria

• Ido is a great language that I like very much and would like to be revived, but I just happen to like the above languages more

Esperanto and Interlingua were mainly added for historical context and comparison. They are good languages, but I'm personally not a huge fan of how they're designed. 

And that's just my opinion! I am entirely learning and discussing this as a hobbyist activity, and have no authority other than having researched all this to the best of my ability. I hope you learned something new here, because I enjoyed writing it very much. I will include a few extra bits of content that I didn't want to weigh down the article with before signing off.

Til rivido! Tu ave un bon dia. mi tawa.

• Vecderg