WHY DAGAPYA ISN'T AN AUXLANG

October 4, 2026 - Published

After touting around Dasopya as the next big auxlang, I suddenly rebranded it as Dagapya and refused to call it an auxlang. It's still designed to be able to function as an auxlang, but I didn't want it to be part of the branding. Why is that? There are a lot of reasons, but I'll try to keep it simple.

First is the practical. I felt that the popularity of auxlangs were declining with the general public, so I thought that an artlang would be more palatable. I also noticed that Esperanto was widely labeled as "a failure" while toki pona was "a wild success," despite having a comparable number of speakers. This is a result solely from branding -- anything labeled as a world language with anything less than 8 billion speakers dooms itself by expectation.

Second, and probably more important to me, is emotional. This is not a critique of the auxlang community, even if I do have problems with it -- but I don't think the attitudes of auxlangers align with what I would personally like for my language and its community.

Ultimately, the idea of a universal language is still very appealing to me, but auxlangers tend to go about it in a very specific way. To auxlangers, there will only really be one "winner," so they will flip through a dozen auxlangs for features. They'll compare it to their ideals for what an auxlang should be, and label it good or bad based on that. Then, depending on how it goes, they'll wait a few years before learning it.

However, I'm an impatient person. I want people to speak Dagapya NOW because they LIKE it.

I want people to use Dagapya to speak with other people. I want people to play around with compounds and make puns and wordplay.

I want people to make translations of memes and songs they like. I want people to make original characters that speak the language.

I want people to make unique scripts designed specifically for Dagapya's phonology. I want people to figure out the words that work best with number code.

I want people to see their identity in Dagapya. I want tokiponists to find that "daw" describes them better than "jan" ever could. I want furries to decide that "gyaw" is the furriest sound they can make.

I want people to find use in Dagapya. I want it to be an easy way to hide notes from prying eyes, or to save a few letters on a shopping list.

I do NOT want someone's decision to learn the language to be based on whether it'll be adopted by the European Union. I am NOT interested in people's opinions about how well Dagapya could be used to write a legal document.

I am AGAINST the idea of people taking Dagapya, putting it up against other languages, and pitching it as an opponent to either defeat or be defeated by other languages.

I want a community who's joined together by the love of the language itself, a community that has a heart.

If that community ever happens to grow more than a dozen people, or a million people, or even enough to cover the whole world...

...that's simply a happy bonus to me!