MY THOUGHTS ON THE INTERNATIONAL AUXLANG

October 21, 2024 - Published

Every auxlanger dreams of the day their language overtaking English as the international auxiliary language, but by now, pretty much everyone has agreed that it's entirely unrealistic.

English has spread more than literally any other single language in history, with the most recorded speakers before English creoles are even counted, which can often be rather mutually intelligible.

Despite this, people still have VERY strong opinions on how these hypothetical languages should and shouldn't function. I would post this article on my main website, but there are people who will stalk and harass people for liking Toki Pona (and yes, I am talking from personal experience)!

So, we have to start from the really unnecessary disclaimer that this article is entirely my opinion about an entirely hypothetical situation, which really doesn't matter in real life and is 100% just a hobbyist talking about something they enjoy. If this article upsets you in any way, I encourage you to step away and think about why you're getting mad at a random person pretending to be a red panda on the internet. All good? Good.

-- SUMMARY --

An international auxiliary language (which I will be calling "IAL" or "auxlang") is defined as a secondary language that would allow people of different nations to communicate with each other if they don't share a first language. The de-facto IAL is English, but the term usually refers to constructed languages for the purpose of replacing English.

There are a lot of things that people insert into this definition that isn't actually there. I'll go over these in more detail, but for the people who don't want to sit through the entire thing, I will summarize all my thoughts here.

My highest priority for an auxlang is for it to be easy to learn, through its grammar and phonology. This is very much for selfish reasons -- I don't want to go through any unnecessary difficulty to learn a language just to communicate with people, but I know this is a high priority for other people too.

An auxlang that everyone speaks must be something that everyone CAN speak. If your language has difficult sounds or complicated grammar, people will be discouraged from learning it. Children will most likely have to learn it as a second language, and so will people who have very busy lives. It cannot be a difficult language.

I would also prefer the language to be culturally neutral, whether it's a worldlang or a priori. As I will argue later, this is actually a point that I find less necessary than others.

Finally, I prefer the language to be relatively minimalistic, with 2,000 words or less. This is not a big priority either, but would help reduce the amount of time people need to dedicate to the language.

In no order, my preferred contenders for The International Auxiliary Language are: Globasa, Mini-Linga, Elefen, Toki Pona, Esperanto, and when I finish it, my own language Dasopya.

-- MINIMALISM --

After Toki Pona took off as one of the most popular conlangs, there's been a lot of hot debate in the auxlang community. With less than 150 words and grammar that leaves sentences intentionally vague, this artlang should have no place in the auxlang space.

However, it has a lot of perks. Words are easy to say. The grammar can be learned in an afternoon. The low vocabulary size makes it very easy to memorize.

Some people say that ambiguity makes it unfit to be an auxlang, but I would actually argue that an auxlang necessarily must have ambiguity. Natural languages always have ambiguity built in, because language is generally not meant to be completely unambiguous (otherwise, programming wouldn't be so frustrating!).

For example, the English word "button" can mean, among other things, 1) a small plastic disc used to fasten clothes, 2) an object that can be pushed, usually to activate something, or 3) a circular badge worn to display some sort of design.

To speakers of other languages, it might be ridiculous that these are all the same word, and yet the word "button" never brings about any confusion. Similarly, the Toki Pona word "nena" refers specifically to types of bumps, whether it's a nose, button, or hill.

I also strongly disagree with the strangely large number of people that feel an auxlang must be able to find use in legal and official documentation. This is something that Toki Pona would not be a good fit for, but neither is English -- there's a reason the term "legalese" exists, and it's because legal English is essentially a different language that can't be understood even by native English speakers.

The only requirement for an auxlang to be an auxlang is for people to be able to communicate with other people, and this is something Toki Pona can do perfectly fine.

That being said, I don't think Toki Pona is the most ideal auxlang, but I think that its premise creates a lot of potential -- it holds a special achievement of getting thousands of people interested in constructed languages again, which few conlangs have done in the past hundreds of years, and the truest mark of failure in an auxlang is to have no speakers, no matter how "good" it is.

This potential was taken in by Mini-Linga, a language based on Toki Pona dedicated fully to being an auxlang. Its grammar is less ambiguous, and it has 1,000 words, which is still small for a language but enough to communicate most things. I'm also taking a large amount of inspiration from both languages for my own auxlang, Dasopya.

However, there is an issue with Mini-Linga that many poeple don't like very much, which is the ever-present "eurocentrism."

-- EUROPE --

Recently, there's been a large push against "eurolangs," with claims of them being "eurocentric." Now, eurocentrism is a specific issue I won't be going into in this article, but before we go into the obvious cons of having a European-based auxlang, let's go over some of the less-discussed pros.

First of all, if you were to choose one language family to base an auxlang off of, it would be European -- more specifically, probably Romance. Out of the top 10 most spoken languages in the world, 8 of them are Indo-European. 3 of those are Romance languages, while English (the most spoken language in the world by a significant margin) also inherits a lot of vocabulary and grammar from Romance languages despite being a Germanic language.

These languages are also all across the world, widely spoken across different continents, unlike most of the other languages on the list. For example, French is an official language in parts of Europe, North America, Africa, and arguably South America. Meanwhile, despite being the second most spoken language, Mandarin Chinese is not an official language outside of Asia at all.

Why would you only base it off one language family in the first place? Well, it comes with some benefits, the main one being that the language will be a much faster learning process for people that already speak a language within that language family. While it could be considered an unfair advantage, it gives the language that initial push of adoption that could make it more easily adopted later on.

This is essentially the logic that Elefen was built on, with the added bonus of having grammar/phonology meant to be as simple as possible for anyone to learn, even if they're not a eurolang speaker.

If Elefen was, for example, modified to have 50% Mandarin vocabulary, that wouldn't benefit either side that much since you would turn a sentence fully understandable by millions of speakers (since a constructed language can be designed to be mutually intelligible by multiple Romance languages) into one that isn't comprehensible by either side.

Then, of course, there are the downsides.

An undeniable part of the reason WHY Romance languages (along with English) are so widespread is the horrific history of colonialism. While a constructed language wouldn't be a direct part of that, wouldn't it be kind of messed up to piggyback on that history in exchange for ignoring the existence of other languages?

However, I think this point is a bit overblown. While I obviously don't condone colonialism, I feel it's wrong to conflate the two as fully related.

If someone in Mexico speaks Spanish, are they reinforcing the Spanish conquest of the 1500s, and therefore in the wrong? If someone learns French in school, does that make them supporters of the crusades in the 1200s? I think that's a bit ridiculous to say, but when the argument is as vague as "but colonialism!" I don't have much to interpret.

Of course, this is FAR from my area of expertise, so anyone is absolutely allowed to say I'm wrong; I just feel that this specific argument is a bit weak. There is a different version that I agree with a lot more.

If we look at the actual reasons that we want to replace English in the first place, then it can become more clear.

-- WHY REPLACE ENGLISH? --

There are 2 reasons that I feel are the strongest reasons to replace English as the world-wide language.

First is cultural power. It is unarguable that English media is the most powerful and widespread media in this day and age. While there are obviously a lot of big powerhouses in non-English media (see how big the Japanese game/animation industries are), English media is allowed to spread more easily than any other language.

For example, I can't say I know anything about the last election in Germany, but I've heard complaints from many Europeans about how they get bombarded about every US election because the news just takes over every social media.

Extend this to everything as small as English advertisements to things as big as blockbuster movies, and now English-speaking countries have a massive advantage in cultural power, which can extend easily into other things like wealth.

The second is speaking ability. The reason I keep emphasizing auxlangs being easy to learn is because inevitably there forms a "class" difference in how "correctly" one can speak a language.

I don't want to go through the pains of researching this specific subject for proof; if you were in America around in the 2010s, you KNOW how widespread and accepted it was to make fun of Chinese/Japanese people for how they pronounce English. This is not even mentioning other forms of discrimination, like how people instinctively consider dialects like AAVE to be a "lesser" form of English.

This is something that affects many people's lives, and it's why I think it's so important to keep many people in mind when forming a language's grammar and phonology.

I do still think that some European-based auxlangs can circumvent these issues, so I'm not against them in theory, but I'm still firmly on the side against them if possible. Since auxlangs are still a hypothetical concept unlikely to succeed, it makes more sense to support every ideal possible, and I think a world-wide language should not be based mainly on a single continent.

-- LAST NOTES --

With all that being said, I'd like to go into a bit more detail on each of my picks!

Globasa is my favorite contender for The International Auxiliary Language. It had a ton of care put into the design, vocabulary, and has a good amount of force behind the current community, though we'll see how far they're able to take it. It's a worldlang that isn't minimalistic but does a lot with less words (it currently has about 2,500 roots). My only real complaint is that it isn't incredibly appealing in speech or text, which is entirely subjective.

Mini-Linga has my favorite design, but largely has European-based vocabulary. I'm currently working on Dasopya to be my ideal minimalistic auxlang, which works very similarly to Mini without European-based vocabulary, but also has some inspiration from Globasa, Toki Pona, and Esperanto.

I still think that Toki Pona has some potential in the auxlang space as a sort of pidgin, and I would love to see it being used as such. In more complex situations it can be surprisingly difficult (but not impossible!) to use due to its minimalism.

Elefen is what I would consider to be the ideal way to design a euro-auxlang, being very regular with simple grammar. Esperanto grew a lot on me and I've been able to recognize how well it was designed, but it still retains very clear issues like its many uncommon sounds.

Most auxlangs I've lost interest in are just due to their difficulty or exceptions. Naturalistic languages like Interlingua and Occidental are very neat, but will probably not find much use outside Europe. I think Kotava is super cool, but it's very difficult for me to learn.