Constructed language

• 1. Introduction

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  Constructed language is the name for any language that a person or group deliberately invented, rather than one that grew organically from centuries of human interaction. The question this raises is simple and strange: can you build a language from scratch, the way you build a machine or compose a piece of music? And if you can, will anyone speak it?

  From a Macedonian nobleman in ancient Greece who called roosters "dawn-criers" to a 19th-century eye doctor who dreamed of world peace through shared grammar, the history of invented languages runs parallel to the history of human ambition. Some conlangs, as their creators call them, were designed to unlock secret mystical truths. Others were engineered to eliminate all ambiguity from logic. Some were invented to sell movie tickets. A few have acquired native speakers born into them.

  The word conlang covers an enormous range: fictional languages built for storytelling, philosophical systems meant to organize all human knowledge, and practical auxiliary languages designed for international diplomacy. What unites them is the act of intention. A conlang does not emerge. It is made. Why anyone would want to make one, and what happens when they do, is what this documentary explores.

• 2. Ancient Experiments

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  Plato's dialogue Cratylus contains one of the earliest recorded debates about what language actually is, with a character named Hermogenes arguing that words are not inherently linked to what they refer to. People simply apply "a piece of their own voice," Hermogenes says, "to the thing." That observation sits at the root of every constructed language ever built: if words are arbitrary, you can choose different ones.

  The writer Athenaeus preserves two extraordinary ancient figures who took that idea further. Dionysius of Sicily invented neologisms to replace standard Greek words, coining terms built from existing roots reassembled in new combinations. His contemporary Alexarchus of Macedon, brother of King Cassander and founder of the city of Ouranopolis, went further still. He introduced an entire private vocabulary: a rooster became a "dawn-crier," a barber a "mortal-shaver," and a drachma "worked silver." Alexarchus once wrote a letter to the public authorities in Casandreia in this language. Athenaeus reports a wry verdict: "in my opinion not even the Pythian god could make sense of it."

  At roughly the same time, the Sanskrit grammarian Panini was constructing something more disciplined: a set of formal rules for explaining language, precise enough that his grammar itself is considered a mixture of natural and constructed language. The ancient world was already working on both ends of the spectrum, from private invention to systematic description.

• 3. Mystical Roots

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  A seventh-century Irish text called Auraicept na n-Éces records a legend about a scholar named Fénius Farsaid who traveled to the region of Shinar after the biblical confusion of tongues. He and his colleagues studied the various scattered languages for ten years and extracted the best features of each, forging a new composite tongue called Bérla tóbaide, which he named Goídelc, the Irish language. Scholars identify this as the first time the concept of a constructed language appears in literature.

  Before the idea of construction took hold, the earliest non-natural languages were framed as something closer to revelation. St. Hildegard of Bingen recorded the Lingua Ignota in the 12th century, and it stands as apparently the first entirely artificial language. It was a form of private mystical cant, not a communication tool but a spiritual one. In the 16th century, Balaibalan emerged from Middle Eastern Islamic culture. Kabbalistic thinkers directed their linguistic speculation toward recovering the original language that Adam and Eve had spoken before the fall, lost in the chaos at Babel.

  Dante Alighieri sketched the first Christian project for an ideal language in De vulgari eloquentia, searching for the perfect Italian vernacular suited for literature. Ramon Llull's Ars Magna was something more technical: a perfect language, built on combinatorics applied to a fixed set of concepts, designed to persuade non-believers of the truth of the Christian faith. During the Renaissance, those Lullian and Kabbalistic ideas fed into magical and cryptographic applications. The Rosicrucians and alchemists John Dee among them kept the flame of magical languages burning into the 17th century.

• 4. The Philosophical Languages

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  Francis Lodwick published A Common Writing in 1647, and followed it in 1652 with an ambitious attempt to lay a foundation for a new perfect language. That same year, Sir Thomas Urquhart published Logopandecteision. George Dalgarno's Ars signorum followed in 1661, and John Wilkins produced An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language in 1668. These works arrived in a cluster, each proposing a system of hierarchical classification meant to produce both spoken and written expression from a single logical structure.

  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had a related but more radical vision in his lingua generalis of 1678. He wanted a lexicon of characters on which a user could perform calculations that would automatically yield true propositions. As a side effect of pursuing this idea, he developed binary calculus. The ambition shared across all these projects was staggering: not just to build a new grammar, but to organize all human knowledge into a single coherent system of "characters" or hierarchies. That ambition, pushed to its limit, helped give rise to the Encyclopédie.

  The French encyclopedist D'Alembert eventually subjected the whole enterprise to a critical review in the entry on Charactère, and Leibniz himself conceded that organizing human knowledge unambiguously in a tree diagram is impossible. After the Encyclopédie, philosophical language projects drifted steadily toward what one historian might call the eccentric margins. The project Ro survived into the early 20th century, but most recent engineered languages abandoned universal ambition for specific goals: languages like Lincos for mathematical formalism, Loglan and Lojban for eliminating syntactical ambiguity, and Ithkuil for maximum conciseness.

• 5. The Auxiliary Language Movement

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  Johann Martin Schleyer proposed Volapük in 1879, and within a decade it had spread to 283 clubs across the globe. That growth was remarkable. Its collapse was equally swift. Disagreements between Schleyer and prominent users fractured the community, and by the mid-1890s Volapük had faded, clearing the path for Esperanto.

  L. L. Zamenhof published Esperanto in 1887, and it would become the most successful constructed language in history by any measure of speakers or staying power. Esperanto did not, however, stop others from trying. Leslie Jones created Eurolengo by blending English and Spanish. Interlingua, developed and published by the International Auxiliary Language Association in 1951 alongside its Interlingua-English Dictionary, became the most recent auxiliary language to gather a significant number of speakers. The Association's approach was to treat Interlingua's vocabulary as standardized rather than invented, drawing it from a set of natural languages and preserving a degree of grammatical irregularity on purpose.

  Louis Couturat and Léopold Leau surveyed the field in their 1903 work Histoire de la langue universelle and catalogued 38 distinct proposals for international auxiliary languages. The sheer proliferation suggested that the dream of a universal tongue was widely shared but the details were always disputed. The Hungarian census of 2011 counted 8,397 Esperanto speakers; the same census found just two speakers each of Interlingua and Ido, and one each of Idiom Neutral and Mundolinco. Proficient speakers of any constructed language remain rare, and Esperanto, with between 200 and 2,000 first-language speakers according to Ethnologue, is the clear outlier.

• 6. Languages for Fiction

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  J. R. R. Tolkien's Quenya and Sindarin first reached the public with the publication of The Hobbit in 1937, making them among the earliest artistic languages to reach a mass audience. They were not incidental to his fiction. They were the reason for it. Tolkien described his stories as the mythology he invented to house his languages, reversing the usual relationship between story and setting.

  Marc Okrand created Klingon for the Star Trek franchise in 1985, and it developed a life far beyond the screen. d'Armond Speers, a member of the Klingon Language Institute, attempted to raise his son as bilingual in English and Klingon. Paul Frommer built Na'vi for the film Avatar in 2009. David Peterson created Dothraki and High Valyrian for Game of Thrones in 2011, as well as Trigedasleng for the television series The 100 in 2014. Peterson has since argued publicly that in his view anyone should be able to publish anything using a language he created, and that neither he nor anyone else ought to have the power to prevent it.

  That question of ownership became a legal matter in 2015 when CBS and Paramount Pictures sued the creators of a fan film called Axanar, claiming the Klingon language was part of their intellectual property. The Language Creation Society submitted a brief arguing that Klingon is "a procedure, process, or system for communication" rather than an expression of an idea, placing it outside the protection of section 102(b) of the Copyright Act of 1976. Okrand himself expressed doubt about Paramount's ownership claims. The case was settled without resolving the underlying legal question, and Duolingo has since published courses in High Valyrian and Klingon licensed by the respective rights-holders.

• 7. The Conlanger Community

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  The Conlang Mailing List was founded in 1991 and eventually split off a separate AUXLANG list dedicated to international auxiliary languages. In the early-to-mid 1990s, a handful of constructed language zines circulated as email newsletters and early websites, including Vortpunoj and Model Languages. Academic journals had preceded these: Glossopoeic Quarterly, Taboo Jadoo, and The Journal of Planned Languages all published papers on conlangs from the 1970s through the 1990s.

  Researcher Sarah Higley surveyed the Conlang list and found its demographics were primarily men from North America and western Europe, with smaller numbers from Oceania, Asia, the Middle East, and South America, ranging in age from 13 to over 60. Women's participation grew over time. A 2001 survey by Patrick Jarrett found an average age among respondents of 30.65 years, with an average of 11.83 years since they had first started inventing languages. The Zompist Bulletin Board, active since 2001, and the Conlanger Bulletin Board extended the community further online.

  Discussions on these forums range from the technical to the philosophical: whether particular features of a constructed language have precedents in natural languages, how interesting natural-language features can be adapted for invented ones, and whether making a language is an art or a hobby. A more recent thread on the Zompist Bulletin Board found that many conlangers spend relatively little time on any single language, moving from project to project. About a third, however, spend years developing the same language, a commitment that begins to look less like a hobby and more like a calling.

• 8. Language, Thought, and Change

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  Suzette Haden Elgin created Láadan in 1982 as part of her feminist science fiction series Native Tongue, working from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the disputed idea that the language you speak shapes the way you think. If the hypothesis held, then a language designed differently might allow its speakers to think differently. Elgin's experiment was one of the most explicit attempts to test that theory through fiction and real language construction together.

  George Orwell's Newspeak in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four imagined language construction as a tool of control rather than liberation, designed to narrow the range of expressible thought. Toki Pona, created by Sonja Lang in 2001, pursued a gentler version of the same constraint: radical simplicity as a form of mindfulness. Linguist Steven Pinker has argued against the Sapir-Whorf premise, citing in The Language Instinct the observation that children spontaneously reinvent slang and grammar with each generation, suggesting that concepts like "freedom" will find new words if old ones are suppressed.

  Meanwhile, Esperanto itself demonstrates that a constructed language, once spoken by a real community, stops being purely constructed. Esperanto has evolved considerably since Zamenhof's prescriptive blueprint of 1887, to the point where modern editions of the Fundamenta Krestomatio, a 1903 anthology of early texts in the language, require extensive footnotes explaining the syntactic and lexical differences between early and modern usage. Modern Hebrew offers a parallel case: though developed from existing traditions including Mishnaic Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew, it has changed substantially since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. Linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann argues that what is now called Modern Hebrew is actually a Semito-European hybrid shaped by Yiddish and other languages spoken by early revivalists, a living demonstration that intentional creation and organic change are not opposites.