THOUGHTS ON THE AUXLANG COMMUNITY

August 7, 2025 - Published

I've played League of Legends for years, and have been involved in one of their communities. I've watched videos, read comments, and talked to many League players.

And I think the auxlang community... might be worse...?

It is equal parts hilarious and harrowing that a community that's essentially built on the basis of uniting the world is one of the most toxic communities I've ever had the pleasure of meeting, but here we are. I think I need to do some clarification though, because I know for a fact that people from the auxlang community will be reading this.

First of all: of course, there are many lovely people in the auxlang community. I've met a lot of wonderful people there, and part of the reason WHY I got so involved is because someone looked at my amateur conlang project, said, "Wow, that's pretty cool!" and showed it to other people. That's awesome! So if you think I'm referring to you specifically, anonymous reader, please don't unless you've outright harassed me in the past lol

Second, when I refer to the auxlang community, I'm referring to a pretty specific subset of people. There are people INVOLVED with specific auxlangs, and I don't refer to these people. From what I've seen, the Esperanto community is great! The toki pona community, whether or not you consider it an auxlang, is great! However, whenever you get involved with people who are just involved with "the auxlang community" as a whole, then you start running into a certain type of person.

I, like many other people, entered the auxlang community with my optimistic and unoriginal ideas. I had a conlang built on ideas of "improving" natural languages, eventually learned about auxlangs from jan Misali's Conlang Critic series, and had lots of fun exploring and studying different auxlangs. But even then, a lot of the cracks already began to show.

Lots of jan Misali's comments featured a pretty pronounced sense of argumentation. Well, OK, but those are just Youtube comments, they're always like that. Doing research on Reddit, I see really similar comments, even from people who seem to be outside the auxlang community that just dislike the idea of auxlangs in general. Well, OK, but those are just Reddit comments, they're always like that too.

Then, I join a Discord server and see someone who has dedicated their entire message history there, actual entire months of their life, exclusively to insulting toki pona specifically and starting arguments with other members.

...huh?

Then it just keeps happening. I join a server for a growing auxlang to participate in a poll and offer suggestions, and a mod gets on my case for over an hour for choosing the "wrong" option. I see someone get literally bullied into leaving another auxlang server for making what the others see as a competitor to their own language. I see and even get involved with people getting into long, heated arguments multiple times a week on random auxlang subjects, running in circles and circles as they have to prove the same things over and over.

Eventually, I have to ask myself. Is this... normal? Or is it really just the auxlang community? Because I don't like generalizing communities, but it seems painfully omnipresent.

This happened all the way back when Ido split the Esperanto community. It most likely continued with every new notable auxlang that tried to take the reins. But it was only after reading an old article that my feelings solidified.

This is an article dated to 1997, the website now broken, but accessible through the Wayback Machine. Ironically, it was posted in an auxlang server. To me, it was painfully sobering.

This article is almost 30 years old, but the sentiments and thoughts are horrifically similar. It's someone reaching out to me, talking about their experiences, in a different time with different technology, and saying that absolutely nothing has changed. It's worded as a warning, to "save a few future travellers from falling into the same mental quicksand," and I suppose this article I'm writing right now is to forward the same warning to you, just in my own words.

I love auxlangs, and the problems they could solve is still very appealing to me. I also want to keep learning and interacting with languages in general, but despite all that, I can't keep involving myself with the auxlang community. Officially, Dasopya has been rebranded to be half artlang, and I won't be campaigning for it to take over as a world language, just as a neat niche language that similar-minded people might enjoy learning.

I joined a general language-related Discord server, and the difference is night and day. People are nice and polite and interested in both hearing about what I have to say and what I've worked on. They don't get on my case and try to dunk on me for making minor mistakes on linguistic terms, they're respectful and friendly and correct me gently. It legitimately feels like healing from trauma, and that made me realize how bad it was.

So, I say to you all: if you're interested in auxlangs like me, I do not recommend getting involved with the auxlang community. Go choose a single popular language like Esperanto or toki pona and just mingle with the cool people there. Or, better yet, get involved with either the artlang community or general language learning communities.

There are many people in the auxlang community who mostly just want to be miserable and argue all the time, and to be honest, that's probably why I was there too. I could speculate about why the auxlang community has ended up this way, but that doesn't feel right to me and would require another article anyway.

But really, I think it just comes down to the age-old problem that we've never been able to solve as a species:

Trying to get everyone to agree on the same thing.