WHY IT'S SO HARD TO MAKE AN AUXLANG INTERESTING

August 15, 2025 - Published

- last edited August 28, 2025

There is a looming threat for auxlangs, a niche already struggling to survive, with a complaint arising, more and more common:

People just don't find them INTERESTING!

This sounds silly, but it really is an issue if you think about it. Auxlangs are languages meant to spread as much as possible, but there's basically only 2 reasons why someone would learn a language in general. They either NEED to learn the language (which is not really feasible for a growing conlang), or they WANT to learn the language.

In order for people to WANT to learn a language, it usually has to be interesting! However, unfortunately, the goals of an auxlang are almost directly at odds with being interesting.

Now, whether or not something is interesting is obviously pretty subjective, but I think we can generally agree that the more unique and different something is, the more interesting it'll usually be. If I told you, "I have a constructed language that is EXACTLY the same as English in every way, but 5 words are spelled slightly differently!" then you would probably consider that to be an incredibly uninteresting language to learn.

The obvious question for this definition is, "Unique and different compared to what?" and this is where auxlangs immediately fail both answers.

-- TOO SIMILAR TO NATURAL LANGUAGES --

The first thing to compare to is natural languages. Auxlangs obviously have notable differences from natural languages (the 2 most obvious points would be the unnaturally high amount of regularity and notably smaller vocabulary size), but otherwise they'll usually be strongly based on natural languages in many ways.

For example, vocabulary. Auxlangs are usually meant to be as easy to learn as possible in order to reach the biggest audience possible, so this means that most auxlangs take the majority of their vocabulary from natural languages. This will make them easier to learn, but it also makes them a lot less interesting.

Japanese has many possible first person pronouns, all of which come off in specific ways. 私 (watashi) is the "default" one, but comes off as "stiff" when used by men in casual situations. ぼく (boku) comes off as boyish, おれ (ore) comes off as manly, あたし (atashi) is informal and mainly used by younger women. Learning all this was very interesting to me! What about auxlang pronouns?

The first person pronoun in Esperanto is "mi." The first person pronoun in Globasa is "mi." The first person pronoun in Interlingua is "me." The first person pronoun in Elefen is "me."

And like, OK, it is a perfectly fine and logical choice. "Mi" and "me" exist in some form between English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, German, etc., while most other language groups tend to have more variation without much similarity (as far as I know). But as an English speaker, that doesn't make it an interesting choice!

As most auxlangs are based largely on European languages, their grammar also tends to be very familiar to those speakers. Esperanto is Subject-Verb-Object by default, and so is Interlingua, and so is Elefen. However, even worldlangs trying to optimize for number of speakers -- like Globasa and Lingwa de Planeta -- use SVO by default.

So, what you end up with is a lot of languages that can't innovate into something interesting because it makes a lot more sense to choose the logical shared sum of features in existing languages. Unique structures that aren't present in most languages would create more difficulty for learning, and pulling words out of nowhere would also make them harder to learn.

What does this lead to?

-- TOO SIMILAR TO OTHER AUXLANGS --

Before the internet, we had a lot of auxlangs made by Europeans that largely had European features, so all of them became a bit of a European mixing pot where a lot of the sounds and words and structures were really simillar.

Now that we have the internet, we have a ton of data points and can look back on all the previous attempts. Now, our problem is that we've optimized all the flavor out of the languages!

Yes, auxlangs obviously have differences, but to an outsider they're not gonna look very impressive. In Esperanto, saying "I love you" is "Mi amas vin," and in Elefen it's "Me ama tu." In Globasa, a modern worldlang, it's "Mi lubi yu," and in Lingwa de Planeta, it's "Me lubi yu."

Modern auxlangs are SVO because it makes sense with the data points, and most of them just use the Latin alphabet with no accents or extra characters for the same reason. When the most interesting thing about the writing system is usually "What sound does X make?" then you can tell it's pretty dire.

Older auxlangs have very European-style inflection, while newer ones usually have very minimal inflection. This modern style makes sentences come off a lot as just being recognizable words in a predictable sequence with no unique or interesting features (see Globasa sentences like "Mi pley kasete musika in parke").

That might be a bit rude or a bit of an exaggeration, but I say it that way to get across the feeling of fatigue that I've seen a lot of auxlangers express, that most auxlangs are either in the "samey eurolang" camp or the "overly simple creole" camp.

So, how do we get auxlangs to be interesting?

-- SOLUTIONS --

1) Do nothing

Most likely, this issue is localized entirely within the auxlang community. To be honest, it's not even that big of a problem to myself! Auxlangs were probably never going to be popular with the general population through language features alone (do you personally care about whether or not Spanish has an imperfect tense?), so it's a lot more worth it to just continue general efforts of supporting auxlangs and promoting them through the usual conventional means.

2) Make a language with illogical choices

My own attempt at an auxlang is Dasopya, an a priori language, which means that none of the words were designed to be recognizable by speakers of any language. "I love you" is "bay imilu ekyu" -- even if it's less recognizable and would require more effort to learn, I expect its exotic nature to be more interesting to people.

I've also seen others start to branch out for more exotic options in their own auxlangs, whether it's having more than 5 vowels by including diacritics, having multiple writing systems, etc. that might make it look more interesting to onlookers.

3) Find features of interest that don't hurt learnability

Despite what I've said in this article, I don't think that making an auxlang interesting is FULLY at odds with the goals of an auxlang, just MOSTLY at odds.

One feature I added to Dasopya by the recommendation of a Discord member was an informality modifier. This isn't something that really exists in English, but it's something incredibly easy to explain and use. The difference between "daw" and "dawdway" is essentially the difference between "person" and "dude [gender neutral]".

I'm also personally a huge fan of "a" in toki pona, which among other things, is a particle that adds emphasis or emotion. Despite having no direct equivalent in English, I found it surprisingly easy to use (kind of like a vocal exclamation point!) so in Dasopya I included "wa" (expression of excitement) and "yoy" (expression of pointedness) that can be added to any statement to add a bit of flavor.

With enough of these types of features, the language could be considerably interesting in the end!

4) Don't make an auxlang

This has to be mentioned -- toki pona was not designed to be an auxlang, but as a result, it's been INCREDIBLY interesting to many people due to its unique goals, alternate writing system, and tiny vocabulary. Many people argue that it can't be used as a proper auxlang, and maybe it can't, but there's no denying that these features got way more people into the language than many existing auxlangs.

...and if you wanted my opinion, I think the actual solution is that auxlangs just need better "marketing" to seem interesting, but that's an article for another time!