Constructed languages

Constructed languages or "Conlangs", using an English acronym. Linguists have often 'invented' new languages for various purposes. This article gives an introductory description of the more common ones.

Among popular contructed languages, Esperanto is the only one having its roots in the 19th century. Its designer, Lazaro Ludoviko Zamenhof was a Warsaw based Ophtalmologist of Jewish descent. You can read about the origin or Esperanto, its supporters and opponents on the Wikipage. The page also contains the basic elements of pronunciation and grammar.

Derived from Esperanto is 'Ido'. Novial and Interlingua are two alternatives. One could place most constructed languages on an axis from purely synthetic ones, focusing on an easy to learn grammar without exceptions towards a more natural sounding one, constructed to have a maximum lexical similartiy to the 'source languages' it has used. Esperanto (EO) is a pure synthetic language with a strict logic for deriving new words from existing root words using suffixes. A similar logic exists for deriving related pronouns. This makes it easy to learn the language, but very hard to understand anything without prior knowledge.

On the opposite end of the scale, you find Interlingua (IA), which is rather easy to understand for speakers of at least one of its source languages and quite self-evident for bilingual speakers of two of the source languages. Since it is not synthetic, Interlingua requires some more time to learn to speak it. Interlingua uses the Latin alphabet without any diacritical marks. Though you may find Interlingua speakers in all countries, there are more in Europe (also in the countries with a Slavic or Germanic national language). The de-facto use of English as an international lingua franca has limited the need for Interlingua and as such it has become the prefered toy language for a few language professors. The most reknown one is probably Carlos Valcárcel Riveiro (also known as @orlophe_interlingua on instagram and Tik Tok), a Galician Professor of French at the University of Vigo.

The development of Interlingua started before WW-I with the work of Peano, when the project was called 'Latino sin flexione'. The project has always been aimed to be a means of communication among scientists of different European nations. Note that by that time, English was not yet the intenational lingua franca it has become since the implosion of the former Sovjet Union.

Around the beginning of the 21st century, neolatino was developed. It is essentially a form of Latin without inflection for the nouns and without much irregularity in the conjugation of verbs. The vocabulary is exclusively limited to romance languages. Though neolatino can be understood quite well by romance language speakers, it is not as easy as interlingua, which has its grammar essentially based on English.

In following video entirely in neolatino, the difference with interlingua is clarified. Romance language speakers can check in how far they understand neolatino.

More synthetic than Esperanto is Toki Pona, a 21st century invention (2006) of the Canadian linguist Sonja Lang. The root vocabulary is very small, but prefixes and suffixes allow thousands of derived words.

Focusing on clarity of expression is Ithkuil (2004). It is a cross-over between an a priori philosophical and a logical language. It tries to minimize the vagueness and semantic ambiguity in natural human languages. Beware that Ithkuil uses a symbolic script. 

None of these new constructed languages gained any comparable notoriety and their number of speakers is limited to a few hundreds.

And then there are also the a priori artistic languages:

J.R.R Tolkin, author of 'Lord of the Rings, invented Elvish for the Elves, who dwelled the Middle Earth. There were even two variants: Quenya and Sindarin. As far as I know, the Elvish languages never got used beyond the film setting. 

High Valyrian is a fictional constructed language used in 'Game of Thrones'.

The below graph is a video of David Peterson. He invented Valyrian and helped to implement the High Valyrian course on Duolingo. (Fragment of Duocon 2020)

Klingon is another fictional constructed language used in the SF series 'Star Trek'.

Duolingo

Duolingo offers Esperanto from English and Spanish, but beta courses also exist from Portuguese and French. In 2023 Duolingo stopped the development of the Esperanto courses from French, Spanish and Portuguese. Only the course from English is further supported. Nevertheless, one can still start the Duolingo Eperanto courses from French, Spanish and Portuguese using the Duolingo Website with following links.

Démarrer le cours d'espéranto à partir du français

Iniciar el curso de esperanto desde el español

Começar o curso de esperanto desde o português

I have no information whether it is still possible to enroll on these courses using the app.

Duolingo also offers following conlang courses:

• High Valyrian from English
• Klingon from English.
  
  

Forum

After Duolingo dropped its forum, several alternatives were created. The best reputed one with a wide reach is the DuoMe forum. It contains this section on conlangs. Reading is possible without registering.