In the Land of Invented Languages

where they experiment with sounds and invent their own words. When my son was two years old, he started saying, “Goaji, goaji, goaji,” with a strange Hindi sort of intonation, to represent “talking going on.” (He would say it when he heard a foreign language—though he never heard Hindi—or when people were talking around him without paying attention to him.) I don’t know why he settled on goaji except that it just felt right to him. This doesn’t mean he is any more likely to grow up to be a language inventor than he is to continue his passion for coloring into adulthood, but the raw urge to create is there, as it is in everyone. As with painting, or music, or acting, only in some does that urge take root and blossom into a lifelong passion.

The language inventors of previous eras spent a lot of energy trying to convince others of the practical justifications for doing what they did. They had rational reasons for making their languages. But the artistic drive has always been there. In a recent book on Hildegard von Bingen’s twelfth-century language, the medievalist Sarah Higley (herself an accomplished conlanger and science fiction author working under the pen name Sally Caves) argues that the purpose of Hildegard’s language was personal expression, that she “looked upon her invention as a purer way than even Latin, Greek, or Hebrew to dignify and describe her world.” It wasn’t, as some scholars have argued, a secret code for her nuns to use or the spontaneous product of a religious trance. It was the first published conlang.

You can see the art in the way John Weilgart, the creator of aUI, felt so sure that “ah” was the sound of space and “j” was the sound of evenness. Or in the way Johann Schleyer stubbornly clung to his beloved umlaut when the Volapuk reformers argued that it hurt their international chances. It was there for Wilkins in his quest to make sense of the universe and order it accordingly, and for Suzette Elgin when she filled Laadan with her favorite natural-language features. It is even there in Esperanto, which Tolkien once praised for intuitively capturing the right balance between engineering and aesthetics. He criticized one of its competitors for looking too much like a “factory product,” for seeming “made of spare parts” and being without the “gleam of the individuality, coherence and beauty, which appear in the great natural idioms, and which do appear to a considerable degree (probably as high a degree as is possible in an artificial idiom) in Esperanto—a proof of the genius of the original author.”

The artistry is obvious to the Esperantists, who tell stories, write poetry, and make jokes in what only they can fully appreciate as a quintessentially Esperanto way. It is there for the Lojbanists, one-upping each other by composing tongue twisters, riddles, and plays on words that work only in Lojban. It is there for the Klingon speakers, who put up with an awful lot of abuse in order to do what they love.

I finally ran out of time to study for my Klingon test. I went into the test feeling confident but weary. I was ready to go home. I needed to get back into the world and reassert my coolness.

First I had to endure the institute’s business meeting, where at least thirty minutes was devoted to a discussion of whether the journal HolQeD should continue to be published in a print version in addition to the electronic version. (Pros: “It’s neat to be archived at the Library of Congress.” “There’s one on display at the Museum of Peace in Uzbekistan.” Cons: “It costs too much.” “It’s redundant.”) “Who cares?” I grumbled under my breath from the back of the room, where I was flipping through my flash cards one last time.

Finally, the room cleared, leaving me, Louise, and a couple of other, more advanced test-takers. I dug in as soon as the test was laid in front of me, knowing my fragile web of mnemonics wouldn’t last very long. I filled it out quickly. I couldn’t remember the word for “sergeant” (bu') or the translation for ngungu' (identify), but otherwise I breezed through. I handed it in and went out to wait in the lobby with the rest of the qep’a' attendees while it was being graded.

I got a score of 93 points, well above passing. Everyone congratulated me and remarked on how well I did. My mood lifted. I felt proud. I looked around and saw, near the reception desk, a group of glossy-toothed “mundanes” checking in to the hotel. They appeared to be in town for a sales meeting, or maybe just the wedding of an old fraternity brother. They looked at us, immediately noticing, of course, a costumed member of our group. One of these so-called normal people walked right up to him and, without asking for permission, took out his cell phone to take a picture, saying to no one in particular, and certainly not to the Klingon in question, “If I don’t get a picture of this, no one will believe me.” The Klingon stood up tall and posed like a true warrior. At that moment, I knew whose side I was on. The world of Klingon may be based in fiction, but living in it takes real guts.

Louise didn’t pass the test. “Oh, well,” she said with a shrug and a smile. “I will try again next year.” And I was there the next year, at a highway hotel outside of Philadelphia, when she did pass the test. I bought her a drink, and we toasted to perseverance.

The List of Languages

What follows is a list of five hundred invented languages in chronological order. Why five hundred? Why not all of them? For one thing, no one knows how many there are. Any claim to completeness in a list would surely be undone by the discovery of yet another self-published book or pamphlet in a library storage room somewhere. Another problem is determining what should count as an invented language. Should a few lines of made-up gibberish in a novel earn a place on the list? What about a sketch of an idea with none of the detail filled in?

When I started assembling this list, I had the ambitious intention to be as complete as possible, to include every project that anyone anywhere had any evidence for, but this soon proved impractical. The story I was trying to tell got lost in a swamp of data. I wanted the list to be big enough to impress, to make you exclaim, “I had no idea there were so many!” But I also wanted it to be manageable enough to serve as a sort of mini-history, where just by looking at the dates and the names of the languages, you could spot some general trends and get a sense of the connections between the ideas and the times.

I culled my list from the more than nine hundred languages covered in Aleksandr Dulichenko’s Mezhdunarodnye vspomogatel’nye iazyki (International Auxiliary Languages, 1990). This massive piece of research includes all of the projects covered by previous overviews, such as Histoire de la langue universelle by Louis Couturat and Leopold Leau (1903), Bibliografio de internacia lingvo by Petr Stojan (1929), Historio de la mondolingvo by Ernest Drezen (1931), and Precis d’interlinguistique generale et speciale by Marcel Monnerot- Dumaine (1960), in addition to others mentioned in various sources. Dulichenko’s work is about as complete as you can get. It’s in Russian, and it’s not easy to get ahold of, but you can find it at some major universities and the Library of Congress.

In deciding what to include in my own list, I didn’t set any strict criteria. I just used my judgment and aimed for a list that would tell the story without distorting the facts. I left out a lot of works titled Pasigraphie, but put in enough to show that pasigraphies (universal writing systems) were big in the early nineteenth century, and still popped up occasionally after that. Although many languages from the early twentieth century got left out on account of having boring names (how many variations on “Lingua International” do you need to get the picture?), there are enough in there, proportionally, to highlight the explosion in the number of projects during this era. Languages with strange or interesting names got in, as did those whose authors exposed their desire for personal glory by naming their projects after themselves (see, for example, Isly’s Linguum Islianum of 1901, Ostaszewski’s Ost of 1926, and Anderson’s Ande of 1960). I left out quite a few projects that were just reforms or improvements of other projects, but put in enough to show how widespread the “reform and improve” disease is among language inventors.

I included any work that I myself had seen in a library but had not seen in anyone else’s list of invented languages (for example, A Universal Language by James Ruggles [1829] and Walter Cuthbertson’s Standard World Language for International Use [1919]). I avoided works that involved too much uncertainty about dating or authorship—unless there was something intriguing about them (who was this Prince Immanuel of Jerusalem, the creator of Universal [1914?]?). Languages with weird names got in, as did languages from underrepresented countries such as Ghana (El-Afrihili, 1970), India (Koine Romai, 1973;