3 Constructed Languages Worth Dabbling in for New and Old Language Learners

A bit of a side language never hurt anybody and can be a lot of fun.

Photo de Mathieu Stern sur Unsplash

The world of constructed languages (conlangs) is much larger than most people know and has a sub-category for “auxiliary languages” (auxlangs).

Auxlangs are languages created to become a tool to have conversations — as opposed to conlangs like Dothraki or Sindarin, created for fictional purposes.

The creators of auxlangs aim to make them easy to learn.

Auxlangs are a great introduction to the world of language learning.

For new learners, they can drastically increase confidence in their capacity to learn a language and allow them to create connections with people around the world instantly.

For those who have been learning languages for a long time, auxlangs show a different aspect of language learning, add a language to their belt, and/or can be seen as a fun game.

There are dozens of well-thought-out auxlangs but these three feel like a great entrance into this world.

Interlingua

Interlingua was created between 1937 and 1951 by the American International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). Despite its name, it is different from the other two conlangs with a similar name:

• Interlingua de Peano, more commonly known as Latino sine flexione

• Interlingue, also sometimes known as Occidental (its previous name)

Interlingua was created to be extremely simple to understand. If you speak a Romance language, you should be able to understand Interlingua. Proof is, this TikToker makes videos in Interlingua and is easy to understand by the millions of people following him, even though it’s said there are only about 1,500 speakers of it.

There are a few reasons for this.

Interlingua is based on 7 “control” languages: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, and Russian. The two last ones act as “secondary controls.” For some reason, Spanish and Portuguese count as one due to their similarities.

For a word to be part of Interlingua vocabulary, it can follow either of these patterns:

• If it’s part of at least 3 of the 4 primary languages

• If it’s part of two of the primary languages and one of them is German or Russian

As for its grammar, every feature found in all the control languages needs to be kept (such as a distinctive plural form) while every feature lacking in as much as one control language can be forgone (such as gentrification as it’s missing in English).

You may have guessed why it didn’t become an International Auxiliary Language. Like most other auxlangs, it only relies on Western languages despite the existence of countless different languages in other parts of the world.

Considering its “simple” grammar, I won’t dig into it here, but rather direct you to this 1951 paper by the authors of the language where everything is explained. I’ll only hover over a few interesting points:

• Verbs only have one form per tense. (Only the present tense has 4.)

• There is no present continuous (as it doesn’t exist in French).

Questions can be made in one of 4 ways:

• Inversing the subject and verb

• Starting the sentence with a question word

• Adding “Esque” at the start (taken from French)

• Making the intonation rise at the end of the sentence.

If you want to learn the language, I’d advise you to refer to the PDF linked above (or its website version) and refer to its Reddit page where the community is quite active. The Wikipedia page is also quite complete. The official Interlingua website, of course, will also be a great reference to use and even has a dictionary.

Finally, here are a few sentences to test your understanding. Check the end of this piece for their translations. Let me know if you got them!

1. Iste pais es libere.

2. In van io ha tentate convincer le.

3. Io labora in le citate.

4. Que es tu nomine?

5. Solo iste pensata le inquietava.

This language is clearly easy to learn for those who speak Romance languages but that’s not everybody’s case.

To solve this, another auxlang called Interslavic was created in 2004 and follows a similar goal of being understandable for anybody speaking a Slavic language.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a similar version for other language families. The closest would be Manmino for “Asian languages” but it mixes too many language families to be understandable without study.

Toki Pona

Toki Pona is a constructed language, a “conlang,” created in 2001 by Sonja Lang.

This language was created to be as simple as possible, with only 121 words originally. Like any other language, it evolved and 61 words were added to the official dictionary in 2021.

There is no official number of speakers but it is estimated to be around 5,000 people, although this number is probably higher considering how easy it is: an intensive weekend studying it can be enough to hold conversations.

How can you speak with so few words? That’s where it gets interesting.

In Toki Pona, basic words are combined to make more complex ones.

A person is jan and “good” is pona so a “friend” is a “good person”: jan pona.
Alcohol is “strange water” (telo nasa) so a “bar” is a place of strange alcohol: tomo pi telo nasa, with tomo meaning “house/home” and pi meaning “of”.

This also means words can change depending on your perception. Here are a few ways of saying “coffee” with the literal translation between parenthesis:

• telo seli (water hot)

• telo seli pimeja pi lape ala (water hot black of “no sleep”)

• telo seli wawa (water hot strong)

• telo wawa (water strong)

• telo pi lape ala (water of “no sleep”)

But if you hate coffee you could also say telo pimeja jaki (water black yucky).

Toki Pona’s strength is in its flexibility!

Now, if you’re thinking this makes it complicated because of people’s perspective, you’re missing the point. The goal of the language is to make us realize there’s a lot of fluff in what we say.

Do you really need to precise the kind of coffee you just had? Does it matter whether you’re reading a book, a paper, a newspaper, or another kind of document? Nope.

The grammar in Toki Pona is straightforward. Sentences follow a Subject-Verb-Object order. The word “li” indicates that what’s before is the subject. The word “e” shows what’s after is the object.

Here are a few examples with their translations:

• ona li lukin e lipu. → He/she/they is/are looking at a document.

• mi wile ala e kili. → I don’t want the fruit.

• sina ken kama sona e toki pona. → You can learn Toki Pona.

• nimi sina li seme? → What’s your name?

Want to learn more? Head on to this website with a short course about it or rely on the language’s creator’s textbook!

Esperanto

Esperanto is, without a doubt, the most famous auxlang out there. Created in 1887 and now with a community of a few million speakers all around the world, it is the also most active community of all. It even has a yearly conference.

Similarly to Interlingua, it is considered especially easy to learn for speakers of Romance Languages. Contrary to Interlingua, it’s not meant to be intelligible for those who haven’t studied the language.

Esperanto is easier to learn to read because it follows the rule “one letter, one sound” while Interlingua uses its source languages’ orthography which makes its orthography irregular.

Like Interlingua and Toki Pona, it’s a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) language with no gender used. Verbs have one form per tense (even in the present!)

The verb “to work” (labori) therefore conjugates to:

• Mi laboras → I work

• Mi laboris → I worked

• Mi laboros → I will work

• Laboru! → Work! (as an order)

• Li laboru! → Let him work!

Taking the ending you see above, you can now conjugate in any tense any verb you learn in Esperanto.

Words finishing with “a” are adjectives while those finishing with “o” are nouns. Add a “j” to those to form the plural, and/or follow with an “n” to set them in the accusative form (ie. the object of the sentence).

Here are a few example sentences with their literal translation in parenthesis to get a feeling:

• Vi legas libron. → You read/are reading a book.

• Ni ne estas kun la instruisto. → We are not with the teacher.

• Marko skribis al mi belan leteron. → Marc writes me a beautiful letter.

• Ŝi ne venos al la festo morgaŭ. → She will not come to the party tomorrow.

• Ŝi aĉetis novan libron hieraŭ. → She bought a new book yesterday.

There are countless resources for Esperanto online, from this website with 12 short lessons to this website that digs deep into every bit of the language.

Assimil has an Esperanto version. You can even find it on Duolingo — even though I don’t think Duolingo is a good resource.

Final thoughts

As you can see, these languages were made to be easy to speak with most rules existing with this one goal in mind.

Sure, maybe they’re not “official” languages but they exist and their communities are all extremely active and supportive, all around the globe.

They are fun and can drastically increase your self-confidence, something every language learner needs!

So why not try them out? I’m sure you won’t regret it.

And if you want to discover more languages you may have never heard of, check this page with a complete list of all the ones I’ve researched for you!

Cheers for reading!
Mathias

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Translation for the Interlingua :

1. This country is free.
2. In vain have I tried to convince him.
3. I work in the city.
4. What is your name?
5. Only this thought worried him.