Constructed Languages

Artificial, otherwise also known as constructed, planned, or auxiliary, languages are those languages whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary have been intentionally constructed by people, rather than having developed naturally over an extended period of time. There are many possible reasons for constructing an artificial language. Among some of them are the following: (1) to facilitate international communication, e. g., Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, Volapük; (2) to engage in linguistic experimentation, e. g., Loglan or Lojban; (3) to help create a fictional world, e. g., Klingon in Star Trek,Tolkien’s Quenya and Sindarin in Middle Earth; or Dothraki used in the Game of Thrones.

Status
Efforts to introduce artificial languages into daily life have had very limited success. To date, there is no internationally recognized and universally used artificial language. All of them have a restricted range of use and do not usually have native speakers, although some Esperantists claim that they have successfully taught Esperanto as a first language to their children. For instance, Ethnologue reports that there are 200-2,000 first language speakers of Esperanto.

Structure

Structure and vocabulary

Artificial languages are sometimes divided into two groups.

• The first group, by far the largest, is referred to as a posteriori languages. They are intended for use as auxiliary languages to facilitate communication across language boundaries. These languages use building blocks taken from natural languages. For example, Esperanto draws on several Western European languages, such as Latin, Greek, Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages.
• The second group is called a priori languages. They use invented elements, such as special symbols or numbers, to represent basic concepts. These are then grouped into logical systems based on a particular principle. A posteriori languages are closer to natural languages than a priori languages.

Below is a list of some of the better know a posteriori, or auxiliary, languages.

Writing

• Auxiliary languages that were intended to be used for international communication are written with adapted versions of the Latin alphabet, e.g., Esperanto or Volapük.
• There have also been some attempts to create scripts for fictional languages. The best-known constructed scripts dedicated to fictional languages are J. R. R. Tolkien‘s Sarati, Tengwar and Cirth. There are also a few others, such as the Klingon script (used in Star Trek movies), Aurek-besh (used in Return of the Jedi and other episodes of Star Wars), and D’ni (used in the computer games Myst and Riven).

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in some auxiliary languages is given below.

Difficulty