What are artificially planned languages?

By CRAIG ALAN VOLKER

If you are a science fiction fan, you may have heard fictional aliens speaking what the films want to portray as non-human languages.
One recent example was Na’vi, spoken by the characters playing aliens in the movie Avatar. The creator of the language was Paul Frommer, an American linguist hired to make a language that had no resemblance to any real language, but that would sound soft enough to help make audiences feel sympathetic towards the alien heroine and her people.
The artificial language he created had an unusual grammar and 1000 words, enough for the dialogue in the movie. The movie proved to be such a success that fans asked for vocabulary lists and grammars, so he went on and developed the language more. It now has over 2000 words.
A science fiction language that is more well-known is the language of the fictional Klingons in the Star Trek series of TV shows and movies. It was also the product of a group of linguists hired to make a language so that the aliens in the series would seem more alien.
With the worldwide popularity of the Star Trek series and its many fans, a number of people have taken the time to learn the language, some becoming fluent enough to use it for everyday communication between themselves. One man in the USA even used it at home, with the result that his son grew up as a native Klingon speaker.
While these and other planned languages have been made by authors and film script writers to give non-human characters a tok ples, most widely spoken planned languages have a very different purpose: as a common universal language for people everywhere. The two most widely used of these are Esperanto and Basic English.
Esperanto was invented by Dr LL Zamenhof in the late 1800s. Zamenhof’s home was in a very multilingual area of Russian Poland, where people of different religious and ethnic backgrounds lived and often clashed.
Looking at the discrimination and lack of understanding between people who could not speak each other’s languages, he thought if there were a neutral and easy-to-learn language, people would communicate better and start to understand and appreciate their differences. He called this language “Esperanto”, meaning “one who hopes”.
Zamenhof spent many years developing his language. He used words from different European languages and made a grammar in which there are no irregularities. The lack of the kind of grammatical irregularity that we have in English (such as regular “he talked”, “he painted”, but irregular “he spoke” and “he ran”) makes the language easy to learn.
There is also a systematic use of suffixes and prefixes to make new words, so that learning or inventing new vocabulary does not mean memorising long lists of words and phrases as in English.
For example, the word for “auxiliary language” is “helplingvo” (“help” = “helping” and “lingvo” = “language”). Parts of speech are all indicated by endings. For example, all verbs end in “-i”, while all nouns end in “-o”, so “vidi” (“see”) with an “-o” ending becomes “vision”. These regularities mean that people can learn Esperanto much faster than most natural languages.
Today perhaps as many as two million people around the world have taken the time to learn Esperanto, and many books and journals have been published in it. Members of the Esperanto movement feel that it could be a neutral language for the whole world much like Tok Pisin is a neutral and easily learned language for communication between hundreds of different language groups in PNG.
Still, two million speakers of a language is not a large number compared with English, currently the most widely spoken language in the world. But there are many things about English that make it difficult for second language speakers to use.
Seeing this, an English linguist, Charles Ogden, devised a simplified form of English in the 1920s that he called Basic English. This system uses a limited vocabulary of 850 core words plus around 1000 more “auxiliary words”.
These are expanded with regular English endings (such as “quick” + “-ly” = “quickly” and “quick” + “-er” = “quicker”). Saying that English nouns are easy to learn, but the English verb system is not, he drastically limited the number of verbs and developed a system of paraphrasing using verbs and simple verbs such as “be” and “do”.
His system was promoted by the British prime minister Winston Churchill and was especially popular after World War II.
For us in Papua New Guinea, it is easy to see why planned international languages like Esperanto and Basic English are appealing. We have the example of Tok Pisin, which is grammatically simple and easy to learn, allowing people from hundreds of languages to communicate with each other.
It would be immensely practical if everyone in the world learned one designated language besides their own to use with people from other countries or language backgrounds. While English is starting to fill that role in many ways, it is still not universally spoken and still not officially recognised as the one international language.
It is also easy for Papua New Guineans to understand why people writing movie scripts or novels feel a need for their fictional characters to have their own tok ples. After all, we see how in the real world around us, each group of humans seems to mark their identity their own language.
These two linguistic instincts, communicating across language barriers and using our own language as a mark of identity, might be best exemplified in Melanesia, but they are instincts that are shared by people everywhere.
Because of this, we can assume that we have not seen the end of artificially planned languages, either in fiction or as intended international auxiliary languages.

•  Professor Volker is a linguist living in New Ireland, and an Adjunct Professor in The Cairns Institute, James Cook University in Australia. He welcomes your language questions for this monthly discussion at [email protected]. Or continue the discussion on the Facebook Language Toktok page.