Why Auxlangs Haven't Yet Succeeded

September 11, 2025 - Published

It's no secret to auxlangers that no auxlang has been "successful" yet. While everyone may have a different definition of success, auxlangs are a very far way off from the original goal of "have everyone on the planet speak it as a second language," but are also still pretty far from the weaker goal of "have a large number of speakers." Esperanto, which can safely be said to be the most spoken constructed auxlang, has maybe 2 million speakers as the highest estimate. Meanwhile, it's trivial to find a language you've never heard of that blows this number out of the water. For example, I found Kyrgyz in about 20 seconds, and it's estimated to have over 5 million speakers.

There are 2 types of reactions that auxlangers typically have in the face of this information. The first is, "Well duh, there's no chance for auxlangs to succeed when English is the dominant world language." The other is, "Well duh, we just haven't done it correctly yet!" Regardless of your opinion, I feel that both sides don't think much about the actual reasons that auxlangs haven't succeeded yet. Personally, I think it's much simpler than people assume. 

But first, why would an auxlang succeed?

Before we get into the actual reason, I wanted to address the comments I see so often online. "Nobody would learn a constructed language in general, so why try so hard to make it happen?" There's a lot of benefits that people generally agree would happen if an international constructed language were to be adopted over a natural one.

First is that constructed languages can be designed to be much easier to learn than natural languages. There's no real source I could find for this claim (fluency is too difficult to define and test), but natural languages are messy and complex, full of exceptions, strange rules, and sounds. Compare the conjugation in any European language to Esperanto, and you'll instantly see how people learn it so quickly, as you'll often hear anecdotally. 

Second is equality. If you make a language easier to speak, then more people can speak it better, regardless of their background. All those people bullied for the way they speak English? This would be much less of a problem if, instead of English, we just spoke a language that didn't have such strange sounds or rules. Having a neutral language also means that, for example, English-speaking countries wouldn't have an advantage on the world stage over others who only learn it as a second language.

Third is allowing for better international communication. This can be for less serious things (imagine international events where people can easily converse in one language!) or the literal United Nations, which has 6 working languages and requires multiple interpreters to translate between languages in real-time -- and you better hope they don't mess up anything important!

These reasons seem all nice and dandy, but most people just don't seem fond of the idea of learning a constructed auxlang. Why is that?

Time economics

This is a term I'll be using to loosely describe this concept. Time is a resource -- and I'm not talking about the whole "time is money" thing. You literally spend time on certain things; sometimes this is to gain money, but other times it's on stuff like relaxation. Generally, humans are creatures of reason. Not that everyone is logical, but that they gravitate towards certain activities and spend their time on it for a specific reason, usually one that benefits themselves, or sometimes people that they like. If there is something better or more valuable that they can spend time on, they will choose to do that instead.

While the reasons in the previous section are perfectly fine for why an auxlang may benefit society as a whole, it does NOT give a singular person a good enough reason for learning an auxlang. 

Auxlangs are easier than natural languages? Sure, but that's still months of work. toki pona (not considered an auxlang but is still a constructed language), largely considered the simplest spoken language at the moment, has only 120 words but still requires months or years to be considered proficient. It seems easy at first, but any vaguely proficient toki ponist will agree. As far as we know, it is literally impossible to construct a language that would take a trivial amount of time for multiple speakers of unrelated languages to learn. You could hypothetically make a language that would take English speakers only a few hours to learn, for example, but it would take Japanese speakers much longer. Are the other reasons strong enough for spending months on an auxlang?

Well, we could fix language inequality if everyone spoke the auxlang. However, that'd require literally everyone to pick up this language and spend months learning it. That's a lot of work to fix an issue that, in the grand scheme of things, is probably not very major. There are many situations where inequality would persist anyway not due to the language they happened to be speaking, and we know this.

As for the last one, encouraging international communication could potentially be a genuine reason, but it'd require both parties to learn the language, as well as having motivation for communicating with one another. Personally, as someone with multiple international friends, I could very much be benefited. However, is that something most people are interested in?

This the hurdle that auxlangs face, even before we talk about English. You can come up with many reasons why people won't learn them -- they're made artificially, they have no culture, they aren't designed well enough, they don't have enough marketing, etc. However, if it doesn't make sense with time economics, then people simply will not spend time on it, regardless of the other factors. If you're not convinced, let me put it another way.

An analogy

Imagine you reach out to your friend who has a full-time job. You give them a stack of papers and tell them they should memorize every single word on it, estimated to take about 10 hours to finish. You say that if them and 10,000 other people all successfully memorize these words, then you MIGHT reward them all with a crisp $5 bill each (remember -- pretty much all the benefits of an auxlang are hypothetical, not guaranteed). How do you think your friend will react?

Personally, I think you'd be laughed out of the room.

Now, instead of 10 hours, imagine it's 100 hours (which is a very generous estimate compared to natural languages). Instead of 10,000 people, it'd be somewhere over 10 million. Instead of $5, of course, it would be exactly $0. Does the problem seem clear now?

Unless the world's circumstances change wildly in the future, it is literally UNFEASIBLE for auxlangs to succeed at the moment, and to me, it is no surprise that only hobbyists are interested in them  -- which to be clear, is a perfectly fine and valid use for them, in my opinion! The reason English was able to spread was a combination of colonialism (not ethically viable for auxlangs), a large number of immensely popular media like music, movies, and TV shows (not economically viable for auxlangs), and being a general economic powerhouse that rewards people for learning the language (not even viable for most countries!).

People learn English because it not only allows them more opportunities for jobs and prospects (whether locally or in the wider world), but also because it unlocks an immense library of media, much of which has had tons of money poured into it to be the best possible product that other countries literally can't match. There is a reason that English continues to grow while English speakers themselves are infamously monolingual. In other words, other countries would benefit a lot from having a dominant language, but even they can't beat English in terms of time economics and actual economics. If they could, more Americans would actually be fluent in Spanish.

Are auxlangs doomed to fail?

There is a possibility that circumstances change wildly in the near future. Maybe English loses its prestige status and less people want to learn it. Maybe America loses a lot of its economic or political power in favor of another nation more willing to instate an auxlang. Either way, at the current moment, I think it'd be more productive for auxlangers to redefine our definition of "success" and look other ways.

While America is very monolingual, there's a language that sticks out while consistently placing top 5 in the lists of most learned second languages there: Japanese! Compared to the other common top 5 languages you'll see on these lists (Spanish, French, German, Italian, Latin, ASL), Japanese is MUCH harder due to its large differences from English (see the previous article on hours to learn a language!). Despite that, lots of Americans want to learn it anyway, which seems to defy usual auxlanger logic.

Now, ask any of them WHY they're learning Japanese, and 9 times out of 10, the answer will probably be anime! Obviously, I'm not saying that animation sweatshops are the solution to auxlangs, but I do feel that too many auxlangers are entrenched in traditional ideas of "we must make these languages simple and write lots of books for them, or else nobody will learn them," when a lot of the time that's not really the case. Swedish is very easy for English speakers to learn and has many books, but I don't know literally anyone learning it.

If auxlangs can attract a large audience of hobbyist learners by being interesting and cool, then I would consider that a big success. Auxlangs don't need to win the whole world over to be successful. I think just connecting people across nations and cultures with a little language based on hope is a good thing to dream for.

My thoughts on auxlangs have developed a lot over time, so I hope to come to more interesting conclusions soon. While this subject matter's conclusion is something painfully obvious, I've actually disagreed a lot with people's views on the ways they've come to the conclusion, so hopefully this analysis brings interest to some people.

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