Constructing the perfect language
Constructed languages have a surprisingly long history.
The most famous constructed language is probably Esperanto, a language created in nineteenth-century Poland by Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof with the noble aim of facilitating communication across all languages and cultures. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, constructed languages continued to be a part of the popular imagination again due to their position in literature and television, with the literary work of Tolkein and the hugely successful ‘Game of Thrones’ series being two of the most prominent examples of this. As of 2024, there are a combined total of 1.3 million High Valyrian and Klingon learners on Duolingo.
In this month’s translation industry updates, we’ll be thinking about what factors might come into play when constructing a language, and some of the pros and cons of creating a language from scratch.
First of all, it’s worth bearing in mind that constructed languages in many ways offer a world of opportunities in comparison with languages that have emerged with the passage of time. Constructed languages provide a chance to overcome some of the limitations of traditional, organic languages, such as gender bias, references to outdated concepts, or a lack of neologisms that aren’t already drawn from other existing languages.
At the same time, there would also be challenges, such as making sure that any new language does not unfairly advantage any existing language group and its native speakers. Then, there’s the question of encouraging people to identify with a language that essentially emerged from no particular place and belongs to no-one.
Identification with language is a double-edged sword, since on the one hand language identity has often been perceived to be a part of ethnic conflict, and interestingly this is something which another real-life constructed language, Interslavic, has sought to address by creating a neutral language of communication for speakers of existing Slavic languages. At the same time, it’s often more difficult for people to be motivated to learn and speak a language that they don’t feel a personal connection to, which is one of the criticisms that has often been levelled at Esperanto and other constructed languages that followed it.
With all of these advantages and limitations in mind, here are some ideas for how a constructed language of the future might work.
First of all, constructing any language would involve dealing with practical limitations. Any constructed language would have to be compatible with existing systems, which means that it would probably be easiest to adopt the Latin alphabet and to write from left to right, which already confers an advantage on speakers of languages that already use these systems and are familiar with them. Enabling a constructed language to gain traction and establishing the basic rules of the language would also involve writing dictionaries, creating corpuses of text, and maybe even creating an academy to regulate how the language should be used, all of which could be more difficult to do with a language that doesn’t benefit from having centuries worth of context to work from.
There are also grammatical considerations. Arguably, a perfect constructed language would have no gender, no cases, minimal verb tenses, be completely phonetic and have no irregular plurals, but at the same time a language like this is likely to be less interesting than other languages, since it’s often the quirkier aspects of a language that lend it the most character and expressiveness, even if such elements are harder for non-native speakers to learn.
Vocabulary is another important aspect. Every language tends to have particular ‘untranslatable’ words and expressions that are relevant to the culture and the location that the language emerged from. Finding a meaningful way of expressing concepts that arise from a wide range of places could be challenging, yet embracing a broader range of terminology could make the language more interesting and more enriching for all people speaking it.
Then, there are social questions. In some ways, creating an entirely new language could be an incredible opportunity to build in inclusive speech and to help safeguard against some of the unhelpful features inherent in certain languages that have evolved over time, such as defaulting to masculine plural pronouns when referring to a mixed-sex group.
But by that same logic, it would be necessary to future-proof the language and try to anticipate future areas for contention, and that’s difficult to do because it’s not always easy to predict the societal norms of the future, since to a certain extent we can only work with the knowledge that we have now. Anyone who is old enough to remember the nineties will be aware that expressions that might have flown under the radar at the time would be regarded as unacceptable now, but at the same time language surrounding sensitive topics tends to change frequently, which means that it’s hard to know which aspects which elements of our present-day language would be unacceptable in the future, and to plan for that.
Lastly, the final element to consider in a constructed language would be culture. Any language is deeply connected to the culture and civilisation that it emerged from, which would put any constructed language at a natural disadvantage compared to languages that people have grown up speaking. In order to give some life to a constructed language and spread it to a wider audience, it would be necessary to create films, TV series and songs, plus some form of literature and poetry to give posterity to the language and ensure that it’s recorded for future potential speakers.
All of the above would also address the question of passing a constructed language on to the next generation. Many existing languages die for reasons such as emigration or younger people not having the opportunity to learn the language, and despite the fact that language endangerment is a much more widely-acknowledged concept now, we still live in a world where a language dies approximately every forty days. When even languages with history struggle, keeping people interested in a constructed language would potentially be harder still. Yet in a world where more people are learning High Valyrian than Hungarian (according to Duolingo’s figures), it seems fair to say that constructed languages hold some sway over the popular imagination and could continue to do so in the future.
That concludes this month’s translation industry updates, but we’re curious to hear your thoughts too. Do you think that constructed languages are an outdated concept, or do you think they could be a useful tool for future communication? Would you ever learn a constructed language?
Sources
5 of the Most Famous Constructed Languages
Greg Beyer | The Collector
https://www.thecollector.com/most-famous-constructed-languages
The History of Esperanto: A Modern Lingua Franca?
Greg Beyer | The Collector
https://www.thecollector.com/esperanto-history
The complete list of every Duolingo language in 2024
Matt | Duolingo
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