I think most people have thought about making their very own language or code at some point in their lives. While it was a small curiosity to me for a long time, it wasn't until relatively recently that I had actually entertained the concept. What I didn't expect was that this would be a curiosity that led to a fascinating bottomless well of research for 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 a few conlangs, even if not by name -- like Klingon (from Star Trek), Na'vi (from Avatar), Esperanto, High Valyrian, etc. -- since a good number of popular media required the use of a fantasy foreign language to make the world more immersive. 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 meant to be a "universal" language, one to be spoken between people of many nations. While auxlangs usually refer to constructed languages, English can be considered the current de facto auxlang since it's so widespread, and most people are 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 (I discuss this in more detail in this article), but it's such a cool design challenge that many many people have tried to tackle over the past decades. In short, designing a language that everyone around the world can learn easily while still being expressive is a very difficult balancing act. Still, I love the idea of true international communication, even if it's mostly just considered a dream. The number of language barriers that could be demolished would be a great service to many people.

We'll go over my research journey by splitting up the languages into categories!

A Posteriori Languages

Languages that are a posteriori (Latin for "from the later") use vocabulary from existing languages. Largely, people consider these to be the most practical for an international auxiliary language, but we'll get to more pros/cons once we go over the other category (a priori languages, Latin for "from the earlier").

This category can be split up into subcategories based on how their vocabulary is sourced!

#1: Eurolangs

Eurolangs are generally defined as conlangs that primarily (or solely) have a vocabulary sourced from European languages, usually biased towards the Romance languages and/or the Germanic languages. Despite not being the first auxlang, Esperanto is the most influential auxlang by far, creating the template for many future ones (comparable to Disney for animated movies and Super Mario Bros. for platformers!). 

Made in 1887 by a singular dude from Poland, the goal was to unite all nations and encourage world peace through a shared language. Even today, estimates for the number of speakers range around 2 million or more (according to Wikipedia), and the amount of existing media from translations, music, literature, etc. are borderline uncountable. There are many local Esperanto groups and conventions that you can still find running in the real world. This is a stark difference to the majority of auxlangs, most of which aren't spoken anymore, or are only shared by a small number of people. How was it designed?

While having a lot of issues from its era and widely being (understandably) criticized for many reasons, Esperanto is still weirdly ahead of its time. Its grammar is extremely regular and can essentially fit on a single piece of paper, every sound is represented with a single letter which is always pronounced the same, and the vocabulary is a large mix of European languages, including Romance, Germanic, Greek, and Slavic languages. Words can be compounded and morphed very easily, allowing a large amount of expression with a smaller number of words, decreasing the requirement for memorization. Many auxlangs can be defined in how they decide to separate themselves from Esperanto's features.

Still, sourcing only from European languages for a worldwide language has its obvious downsides. Esperanto was like this because it was made a long time ago, presumably when the creator couldn't even access resources for learning non-European languages properly. Why would a more modern language choose to be a Eurolang?

If we're polite and assume the reason isn't related to racism, there's a few decent reasons I've seen brought up. Elefen, a language exclusively sourced from Romance languages, claims that the European Union has the most power and interest in adopting/spreading an international auxiliary language. I've also seen languages claim that European-based languages have the most worldwide reach through things like technology and science (e.g. Glosa which only sources Latin and Greek for this very reason), and it is true that European languages are quite spread out worldwide.

However, in the end, European-based auxlangs are generally looked down upon nowadays, outside Esperanto due to its legacy status. Having a worldwide language be based solely on a single continent spells clear bias, and most Eurolangs have become tiring to a lot of auxlangers, even bringing about a derogatory term "Euroclone." While some Eurolangs have made a splash and even gained large followings (notably: Interlingua choosing a naturalistic approach for instant recognizability without learning the language, and Ido beginning the long tradition of people trying to improve Esperanto), you don't really see people make popular Eurolangs anymore, and that's for good reason.

Pros:

• Very recognizable vocabulary (if you're European specifically and/or speak a Romance/Germanic language lol)

• European languages include a lot of near-universal vocabulary present in other languages

• Many people spread out across a lot of countries are at least somewhat familiar with a European language or two

Cons:

• Generally biased against languages far-removed from European languages (in vocab, but sometimes grammar too!)

• Does not fit the ideals of a worldwide language being fair and easy for everyone to learn

• Lots of people want an auxlang specifically to undo the effects of colonialism

Notable Eurolangs: Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, Occidental/Interlingue, Elefen/Lingua Franca Nova, Novial, Glosa/Interglossa

#2: Worldlangs

There is an obvious response to Eurolangs: just make a language with a worldwide vocabulary! To me, this is unarguably the best auxlang solution, being a balance between ideals and practicality. Only one issue: making these is really flippin' hard.

If we're polite and assume that again, it isn't because of racism, Worldlangs have only really been a thing starting from the 21st century, presumably from the difficulty of sourcing all these languages together. Other than just sourcing vocabulary, Worldlangs will also ideally have a culturally neutral grammar, not explicitly favoring any specific family of languages. How do you do that? By gathering and interpreting statistics from every single language in the world, of course. Even then, it is impossible in the end to have perfectly even statistics of everything combined, but people can do their best, despite all the scrutiny.

From my understanding, Pandunia is the first defining Worldlang. It uses the whole Latin alphabet (minus Q and W) without any diacritics/accent marks, using a few letter combinations to access more sounds. This number of sounds allow it to simulate as many common sounds between languages as possible, while using an alphabet that can be easily typed on most people's keyboards! 

Lingwa de Planeta and Globasa have a decently similar feel to it, though Pandunia is infamous for still ongoing development (the creator themselves recently said it's still too soon to even advertise the language despite being out for 20 years according to this suspicious source), while Lingwa de Planeta is largely considered to be a pretty dead language. Globasa, being the newest out of the three, is one of the more active auxlangs and is being pushed rather well!

Still, Globasa has been criticized for various reasons. One downside to Worldlangs in general is that comprehensibility is greatly reduced without study. I can say the Elefen sentence "me labora en la pizeria" and you probably understand it immediately, but "te suki roso pingo" doesn't make sense unless you know at least like 2-3 languages, because most sentences will combine many unrelated languages, despite an attempt at optimizing recognizability between them. 

Pros:

• Vocabulary matches auxlang ideals by being spread out across many languages

• Ideally, not more difficult for one group of people compared to another

Cons:

• Sentences are less easily-recognizable and require more study for everyone

• Usually ignores lesser-spoken languages by necessity

Notable Worldlangs: Pandunia, Lingwa de Planeta, Globasa

#3: Zonelangs

What if we went in the exact opposite direction?

Still technically considered auxlangs by many people, Zonal auxiliary languages are meant to unite a single, smaller area under a common language. This is as opposed to Eurolangs, which do only use languages from one area, but usually also try to push that language onto the entire world.

The logic, of course, is that you can more easily combine related languages into something coherent. Interslavic combines multiple Slavic languages which share a lot of vocabulary and grammar, compared to Globasa which has to somehow put together English, Arabic, and Japanese into the same language. Combining these similar languages while prioritizing what they have in common also means that the end result is often something that speakers of this language can comprehend even without study!

This actually makes Zonelangs an incredibly practical tool that can be implemented in the real world. I've heard that Interslavic and Guosa are actually being used to a degree, but I have done 0 research on this because it happens to be outside my area of interest. Still cool though! There are even some people that think international auxiliary languages should be abandoned entirely in favor of promoting multiple zonlangs to bring different regions together.

Pros:

• A lot more practical to implement in theory than an international auxiliary language

• Very easily understood by speakers of the language group, even without practice

Cons:

• Essentially unusable for an international auxiliary language

• More difficult for outsiders to learn compared to most auxlangs

Notable Zonelangs: Interslavic, Folkspraak, Guosa

A Priori Languages

Languages that are a priori use vocabularies that were created from scratch. These are usually used for fictional languages like Klingon, but there has been a strong interest for a priori auxlangs. This is for one simple reason: having a vocabulary made from scratch is the most culturally neutral option there is!

Of course, this comes with the extremely obvious downside of having the vocabulary be much more difficult to learn. If you're lucky with a Eurolang, you only have to memorize about 10% of the vocabulary. If you know a few languages, you might be able to get away with 50% in a Worldlang. With an a priori language, you are guaranteed to be required to learn 100% of the vocabulary, no matter who you are and what language you speak.

This is the ultimate choice of equality! 

It's also not very popular!

Most a priori languages you find will be nothing more than a historical curiosity. aUI is a fascinating auxlang that nobody speaks, presumably because every word is only 1 letter and it has 31 letters total (not amazing). Solresol is generally considered the first auxlang ever made, but from my understanding it was unfinished when it was published after the creator's death. 

The most active a priori auxlang seems to be Kotava, though this is apparently limited largely to a single forum. I'm also obliged to mention my very own auxlang Dasopya, since by default it is one of the most active a priori auxlangs right now. Kah gets a mention since I've heard many people consider it the best a priori auxlang, despite being not very active.

Generating an a priori vocabulary is not very difficult (you can literally use a word generator), but creating the grammar can be. Creating Dasopya and having to make sure that certain things weren't biased towards a specific group of languages was a constant difficulty. For example, how do you refer to the days of the week? Numbering them could be incompatible with certain cultures since different cultures start with a different day. Despite the amount of sacrifices a priori languages have to make in order to reach a hypothetical "truly neutral" point, it is most likely impossible to make them truly culturally neutral.

Notable a priori languages: Kotava, Dasopya, Kah, Solresol

Minimalistic Languages

Now, minimalistic languages can be either a posteriori or a priori, but I needed to make it a separate section to address the soweli in the room: toki pona! 

toki pona is not an auxlang (it's an artlang, made solely for the love of the game), but there are a LOT of people who want it to be one, even if that discussion is the source of huge controversy. The language exploded in popularity in the past decade, currently being the only constructed language comparable to Esperanto in certain statistics. Of course, this opened up the doors for people to experiment with the concept of a minimalistic auxlang.

Most people agree that a big reason toki pona became so popular was its simplicity. It has only about 140 words, and so few grammar rules that someone fit all of it on one side of a sheet of paper (with the entire vocabulary on the other side, of course). This simplicity maps surprisingly well with auxlang philosophy -- if the language is simple enough, then it'll be easy for anyone to learn it, even if it isn't perfectly neutral!

However, in practice, this is largely up for debate. toki pona has been under heavy criticism for how difficult it is to express complex topics. Personally, I will agree with the experienced users saying it can be done with just 140 words as long as you have the skills, but that doesn't mean it's easy for anyone to do it. Working with such a restrictive set of words is difficult for a lot of people, and while simple grammar rules lower the barrier to entry, its restrictive nature can also be a source of difficulty for people later on.

Minimalist auxlangs like Kokanu and Mini (which were both originally modifications of toki pona) generally approach the issue by making it less minimalistic. Kokanu added several more particles and has a vocabulary size closer to 400. Mini tried to keep the grammar pretty simple, but pushed the vocabulary up to 1,000 words. Based on my informal interviews with experienced Mini users, 1,000 words seems to definitely be enough for any experienced user to discuss any topic with no issue. However, the actual line for the vocabulary size a language needs before it's "usable" is a continuing debate with very little evidence to support any claims (understandably -- the question it's trying to answer is vague too!).

Pros:

• Hypothetically easier to learn than a normal auxlang

• Much less intimidating to aspiring learners

Cons:

• Minimalistic vocabulary + grammar can make certain things harder to express

• Considered unsuitable by many for hypothetical auxlang applications like law and science

Notable minimalistic languages: toki pona, Kokanu, Mini, Dasopya

Whew, rewriting this took way longer than expected!

Of course, after all that, I'm obliged to answer the question: what do I consider to be the conlang closest to being the perfect auxlang? Well, that award goes to Globasa, for having a balance between the most ideal, practical, and well-designed language -- it was made by a linguist after all, who wrote some very extensive documentation on every aspect of the language.

Other than that, I would consider Dasopya to be the most ideal auxlang to me (not a surprise since I made it), and Esperanto to have the best chance at being adopted. People may have issues with it, but its popularity and longevity can't be scoffed at. I will also give honorable mentions to Glosa and Lingwa de Planeta for being languages whose concepts I like very much, but aren't active enough for me to research easily. Either way, I appreciate you all for reading very much. Weda!

• Vecderg