IN DEFENSE OF A MINIMALISTIC AUXLANG
May 5, 2026 - Published
-- INTRO --
An auxlang is defined as "a language meant for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common first language ... primarily a second language and often a constructed language."
There are many philosophies for how an auxlang should be constructed, and I don't have the hubris to say that my opinions are the best or the most correct. However, personally, I feel that a minimalistic language is the best choice for an international auxiliary language, as you may have guessed from my other articles and projects.
That being said, the term "minimalistic language" is relatively loose. Being the most popular minimalistic conlang, toki pona set the standard with its ~137 words and grammar so simple that both can fit on a single piece of paper. However, it's also incredibly controversial in the auxlang community.
While many people push for its use as an auxlang, there are many arguments against it, and even my own opinion of it as an auxlang has waned despite initially supporting it as an auxlang myself. The one you'll hear most often is that it's too small to be able to talk about things. I don't fully agree this, but it is true that it's very hard to talk about anything possible with only 137 words.
Anyway, I bring this up because a lot of people equate "minimalistic language" to "having about 137 words," which really isn't the case. Mini was a minimalistic auxlang with ~1,000 words, and the experienced speakers I asked told me that it was definitely enough for any conversation or translation they did.
Personally, I would consider a language with 1,000-3,000 root words to still be minimalistic. For reference, that would even include Globasa's vocabulary as being minimalistic. While this might not be a common opinion, this number of words would still be much smaller than any existing natural language's vocabulary, and it could honestly be expanded to 5,000 words or more with that in mind.
Either way, with that longer-than-usual intro out of the way, I can finally get to my arguments, which I would say are relatively simple.
-- LEARNABILITY --
Pretty much every auxlanger agrees that, to a degree, an auxlang should be built around simplicity to make it easy to learn. This is because in order to be effective, an auxlang has to be learned by a large number of people -- otherwise, it can't quite be international.
While there are a lot of obstacles to potentially reach that goal, making a language easy to learn would definitely help remove some friction. I expect a lot of people in the western world would not be excited to learn a language as difficult to learn as Mandarin Chinese, for example.
As far as I know, there isn't a ton of data on whether a simpler language is easier or faster to learn (that would have very difficult metrics to gauge, after all). However, I don't think it would be unreasonable to say that a language with 1,000 words would be faster to learn than a language with 10,000 words, or that a language with many grammar rules and exceptions would take longer to learn than a language with less grammar rules and exceptions.
In other words, features that define minimalistic languages would lend well to being easier to learn, which most people seem to agree would be good for auxlangs.
-- EXPRESSIVENESS --
A common concern I hear from people is that minimalistic languages remove the ability to have enough expression for communication. Sometimes, this is "not enough expression required" -- I'll reiterate again that there is no strict definition of a minimalistic language, and similarly, there is no strict definition of what's enough to express what's required.
From our point of view as English speakers, there are a lot of words that we might consider to be necessary for expression. However, a lot of basic, "necessary" words in our language like "the" and "is" literally don't exist in some languages. Of course, those languages function perfectly fine without those words.
This is on top of the info (albeit obviously not empirical data) from Mini users that the language was enough for communication. If 1,000 words would be considered enough, I expect 2,000 or 3,000 to be definitely enough.
Sometimes, what people mean is "not enough expression desired" -- in other words, they would prefer that the language would be able to express more with more vocabulary. Arguing against this is a bit more difficult because I think there's a mutual understanding that these words aren't required, so arguing against preference is difficult.
However, I do think there's enough reason for the tradeoff. First of all, again, more words means less learnability. If we want a language that the whole world speaks, then prioritizing learnability over individual preferences makes more sense. Second, I really want to emphasize just how difficult it would actually be to fulfill something like this.
Languages have a LOT of words, and they don't always have perfect overlaps with other languages. Usually when people talk about words like these, they want words with extra nuance, like the difference between "sad" and "melancholy." However, not every language has the word "melancholy." Every single person who speaks a language that does not have the word "melancholy" will have to learn that word and its exact definition from scratch, with no equivalent in their own language.
That doesn't sound like a big deal, but multiply that for every single word in every single language that someone feels attachment to. Let's say English has 10 words like that, to round down. Considering there are over 7,000 languages on Earth, with 56% of those not endangered, that would leave us with about 4,000 languages x 10 words, with a total of 40,000 extra, completely unnecessary words in our hypothetical auxlang. Do you really want to require every speaker to learn all of those?
For example, there are over 15 different ways to say the word "I" in Japanese, which depend on your gender, the context it's being spoken, who you are speaking to, how you want to be perceived, etc. These are not easy or quick things to learn!
While learning new words that don't exist in your language is something very cool and enjoyable for general language learning, having more than a few of those words detracts heavily from the goals of an auxlang.
-- COEXISTENCE --
Since those are the main 2 arguments I wanted to get across, I wanted to put out one more which is more of speculation.
Personally, I care a lot about coexistence of languages, and strongly oppose linguistic imperialism. Unfortunately, as the goal of auxlangs is to spread the language across the world, it isn't unlikely that if an auxlang took off, it would be put into the situation of overtaking and replacing other languages. English, for example, is overtaking a lot of languages, even ones where it's out of pure practicality rather than literal imperialism.
While not guaranteed to counter this possibility, I personally imagine that a minimalistic language would be a good way of ensuring that a person's native language would be preserved. Since it would be aimed more towards speaking with a minimal viable vocabulary, it would be a lot more difficult to actually replace a language when it can't express all the same nuances.
With coexistence taken into account, that to me is the best way to fulfill the "auxiliary" part of an international auxiliary language.
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In having these thoughts put to paper, I do recognize that my arguments aren't as strong as I might like, but I hope that it helps explain a lot of my thought processes when it comes to creating and supporting specific auxlangs. In the end, most arguments for auxlangs are at least in part due to preference, and my opinions are no different.