AUXLANG CRITIQUES I DON'T REALLY LIKE
March 15, 2025 - Published
- last edited March 26, 2025
Auxlangs are a way of bringing people together. However, I've seen an unimaginable amount of disagreement in auxlang communities!
The reasons (and possible solutions) will be discussed at the end, but I did want to highlight some notable critiques I've heard during my time around these communities, even if it means I am essentially making an article to argue against a straw man. This is my for-fun site for a reason!
Anyway, these critiques will all be paraphrased, are of varying popularity, and will often have contradictory sentiments, even from the same person! Unlike some people, I do not abide by the fact that people have to be extremely consistent (we are human, after all), but I do think it's an important point that many things we want in an auxlang are inherently contradictory, even if they don't seem to be.
Let's start!
---
"I think [insert language] looks/sounds ugly."
This is a perfectly valid opinion to have! I just find it funny how often this is raised in discussions that aren't about personal opinion at all.
"It feels too artificial/unnatural."
This is a weirdly common one that feels bizarre the more I look into it. It's an artificial language, why does it need to feel naturalistic? Who should it feel naturalistic to? Arabic is a language that feels really unnatural to me, as an English speaker, but it wouldn't feel unnatural at all to a native Arabic speaker.
How would you even make a language that feels natural to everyone no matter the language they spoke? Even if it were done, I don't see any real benefits of having an auxiliary language that feels natural. This complaint feels a lot more to me like "this doesn't feel like what I'm used to, so I like it less," which is inevitable when making a new language that's meant to appeal to everyone.
Languages across the world differ wildly, and one of the few things that we agree makes language feel "natural" are illogical rules or exceptions, which we also universally agree makes a language harder to learn. Why would you want to add that to an auxlang on purpose?
"I can't understand this sentence without studying the language."
I get that there are auxlangs that are fully intelligible without studying, but expecting this from anything that's not a zonelang is bonkers to me.
If you make any language that's understandable for one group of people without study, it will necessarily require other groups of people to study it. Barring a possibly extremely small number of signs, even sign language can't be universally understood without study!
If you're making a new language, then yes, people will have to study that language to speak it, and assuming anything else will not get you anywhere.
"This language is decipherable, but reaches uncanny valley."
Uncanny valley occurs when something is close enough to being recognizable, but different enough that it feels uncanny. It's understandable to want to avoid this, but as this specific point has caught on, I've realized there's an inherent contradiction.
Many people want a language that's immediately understandable (i.e. very close to their natural language), but also not artificial-feeling (i.e. not too far from their natural language). This lands us right in uncanny valley! If you want to avoid uncanny valley, you have to choose one or the other, and the former would make the world language very biased towards one group of languages.
"Worldlangs with equal representation have forced representation."
That's... the point!
The point of a worldlang is to represent more of the world's languages more fairly. If we weigh, like some languages have done, based on the popularity of specific terms, then it would be heavily biased towards English and Romance languages, because those are the languages that have spread around and dominated many near-universal terms (see: internet, computer, taxi, etc.).
Many of these languages also count Spanish, French, Italian, etc. as separate languages, but "Chinese" as one! How are all these languages meant to get proper representation? The only way is to at least partly ignore the actual popularity of each specific language, otherwise we fall into the same issues that European auxlangs are so often criticized for.
"This language should not have any ambiguity."
I know I argued against naturalism earlier, but that was to make a language easier to speak. Removing ambiguity entirely will DEFINITELY make a language more difficult to speak.
There is a level of ambiguity that I can understand would make a language less functional, but I've run into a surprising number of people who advocate for a language that has 0 ambiguity, and I can't imagine that being easy or enjoyable at all.
Ambiguity is an important tool that's built into every single language. Sometimes this ambiguity is awkward ("read" can be present or past tense in written English), but a lot of the time I think it helps just to keep us sane (if I just want to say "I visited my friend" I don't think I need to encode every single temporal, positional, etc. variable in a language meant to be easy for everyone to speak).
"If it can't translate without any information loss, it's a bad auxlang."
This sounds reasonable for about 2 seconds, then you realize how horrifically incorrect it is.
There is so much richness and nuance in every single language that exists; it is literally impossible to create an auxlang that contains them all. Even if you hypothetically did, the speakers would naturally shift usage of specific words away from the exact nuance that they have -- that's how language works.
Whether it's a conlang or a natlang, whatever auxlang we choose will inherently lead to some information loss when translations are created. Whatever an auxlanger's goal is, this must be kept in mind no matter what the world language is.
---
Honestly I ended up with less points than I expected, but I will most likely add more later if I remember them.
Some points I didn't include because I can see a reasonably strong argument even if I don't agree with it (e.g. "an auxlang should use more sounds to preserve the original spellings of words"), or because they were so silly that I really did not feel the need to include them (e.g. "toki pona is a game, not a language").
Either way, what can we take from this?
I think that auxlangers are far too preoccupied with trying to make every language into their own perfect version. It's very easy to be an armchair critic about these languages, but there are 2 very simple reasons that there are so many disagreements.
The first is that people in the auxlang community rarely actually share the same goal. The second is that auxlangs have the extremely unfortunate implied goal of having to please everyone.
To elaborate on the first point, there's a huge disparity between opinions on what an auxlang should actually be. Some people think it should replace English fully. Some people think it should be an additional language on top. Some people only want zonal auxlangs. Others want it to be the whole world.
Some people only want the global auxlang to replace everyday speech. Others want it to be suitable for writing unambiguously in law. Some people consider it a hobby, for fun. Others consider it a job.
For the most part, these goals are completely and utterly at odds, yet everyone is put under the "auxlang community" umbrella because there is quite literally not enough people for many of these languages to have communities of their own. It creates a perception that there should be more agreement, but there isn't. I have the impression it's like sitting 2 people next to each other because they both love basketball, but they also happen to support completely opposite teams.
As for the second point, I'm sure most people already know this, but you can never ever please everyone.
Generally, the target audience for a truly international auxiliary language is "everyone across the entire world," but that's pretty hard! Even ignoring grammatical structures like what word order certain people prefer, there's a lot of subjective opinions on what seems pretty or seems ugly.
There will most likely be parts of an auxlang that are easier for some people but harder for others. There will be parts that are more appealing to some, and unappealing for others, but if it's the world language, they'll have to speak it anyway.
The only thing we can do is, at some point, to settle.
We're only a few decades into the internet age. We have time to develop a language that more of the auxlang community is happy with. However, at some point, we have to take a language that is "good enough" and run with it, whether it's a eurolang, a worldlang, a minimalistic language, or whatever else we come up with in the coming years.
Even if we have different goals, or opinions, or backgrounds, or years of study, if we as an auxlang community want to have a singular language that everyone speaks, we have to eventually accept between ourselves a language that is considered "good enough."
Because, as it turns out, the goal of universal peace is not achieved by everyone being happy, and we know this.
It's compromise.