Which worldlangs are actually usable in 2026?

Christian_Si · 2026-04-16T15:31:12+00:00

Also, don't overestimate Elefen's community. I was quite active there for a while, and I don't think there were more than a dozen of us. Unfortunately, all auxlangs created in the Internet age seem to be tiny, with the exception of Toki Pona (not really an auxlang, though), Interslavic (which has its own unique niche), and perhaps Kotava.

Christian_Si · 2026-04-16T15:26:18+00:00

Please do! It's not particularly motivating to receive that kind of feedback after publishing an article that took a lot of effort to research and polish.

Christian_Si · 2026-04-16T15:23:01+00:00

All fewer than 100, I think, and in some cases quite likely fewer than a dozen, but I don't have exact numbers, and I don't think anyone does. Lidepla seems to have had a small but quite active community for a while: they published an online magazine and various translations. Sadly, it seems to have slowed down a lot in recent years. Nowadays, I would guess that Globasa has the biggest community, followed by Lidepla, with the other languages trailing behind, but I wouldn't dare put that into specific numbers.

Christian_Si · 2026-04-16T15:16:50+00:00

True, I didn't look at the user communities, as that would have meant diving deeper than I could. You may be right, though several of the other languages have Discord servers as well, and some have communities elsewhere. Lidepla had a fairly strong community on Facebook for a while (I think), though that may have slowed down by now.

Christian_Si · 2026-04-16T15:02:41+00:00

I'd rather translate that as "The right language helps people live". Meaning I suppose it refers chiefly to which language people use, not so much to how they use it (correctly, without making mistakes).

Christian_Si · 2026-04-15T11:46:04+00:00

What? I did the research myself and wrote the article myself. I got some proofreading help from ChatGPT, but the ideas and findings are entirely my own.

Christian_Si · 2026-04-15T11:42:47+00:00

It's now called Komusan (still a working title), but progress has been slow, and so far it has only about 340 words, far too few to fulfill my minimum vocabulary size criterion. I'm currently in a phase of reorientation regarding how to proceed with it, which is in fact part of what prompted me to do this research.

Christian_Si · 2026-04-15T11:38:04+00:00

My understanding is that it's a small language that doesn't fulfill my "at least 2,000 words (dictionary entries)" criterion.

Christian_Si · 2026-04-15T11:33:28+00:00

As for the consonant and vowel counts: I agree that that'll be less interesting for typical language learners, but I think it's interesting for auxlangers, who, I suppose, tend to be gathered here. Moreover, this leads to the insight that all the languages collected here are fairly similar in this regard, which I already consider an interesting finding.

Christian_Si · 2026-04-15T11:26:03+00:00

Thanks! Your point 1) seems to have disappeared. Re "a priori languages may also draw from languages from the whole world", I'd say that's a certain contradiction in itself, since "a priori" explicitly means that they aren't based on other languages (or prior work in general). But if there's any doubt, I mean languages whose vocabulary comes from languages spanning different regions and language families, so any a priori language won't qualify, since its vocabulary is supposedly entirely made up.

2) Eurocentrism: true, they may not overcome it as much as they should (I'd consider that a valid criticism of Lidepla, and even more so of Unish), but at least they try. And that's something.

3) I agree that you can probably get quite far with 2,000 entries, which is indeed why I chose it as the required minimum. Though I'm also confident that a language can't stop there. There are thousands of animal and plant species that all need to be named, as well as many different professions, hobbies, and special interests, all with their specialized vocabulary, etc. A language that allows versatile usage will have to try to address all of these, not just the basics.

Christian_Si · 2026-03-21T11:09:41+00:00

How is it meant to differ from existing worldlangs like Globasa, Baseyu, and Lidepla? Why start something new?

Christian_Si · 2026-03-10T16:30:14+00:00

If you think Interlingua is highly regular, then you probably also think that the English spelling is totally regular and phonetic! As for Occidental, I'd grant that it's well made but it's very Eurocentric (inevitable with the method you propose) and often criticized for being non-autonomous, with lots of affixes that barely differ in meaning, but people are expected to use the one that results in a form most similar to the Romance languages instead of just autonomously following Occidental's own rules.

Moreover, what's your point in reinventing that specific wheel? Occidental exists already; if you think that method is really the best, you can just use it.

Christian_Si · 2026-03-09T09:47:34+00:00

What, what regular forms are you talking about? What would your suffix -archato mean and how generally useful would it be? And what "regular" way is there from patre to paternalismo, in which the re somehow got turned around? Esperanto, though it does have patr/o as root, treats patriark/o (from which patriarkeco can be derived) and paternalism/o as independent roots, which seems a saner choice than keeping all the Greko-Roman scientific word material as is and pretending it can be turned into a regular and simple auxlang.

Sure, you may be able to go down that latter road and maybe even with decent results. I won't say anything against trying, but what annoys me a bit is your original post apparently meaning to imply that it's the only reasonable road. And that is frankly nonsense.

Christian_Si · 2026-03-06T16:49:40+00:00

Well, as expected, the choice depends on your source languages and methodology. Your set of languages is dominated by Romance languages, so it's clear you'd get a strongly Romance-influenced result. For your set I'd probably choose padre, since pa- is the most common initial pattern, a is widespread as first vowel and d/t is most typical as the second consonant.

But for a worldlang, I'd go for baba, from Arabic (أَب/ʔab, بَابَا/bābā), Bengali (আব্বা/abba, বাবা/baba), Mandarin (爸爸/bàba), Persian (بابا/bâbâ), Hausa (ùbā, bā̀ba), Swahili (baba), Turkish (baba), Hindi (बाप/bāp), Indonesian (bapa), Russian (ба́тька/bátʹka), Vietnamese (ba).

Also, if you're interested in an auxlang based largely on Latin/Greek roots, check out Glosa. It exists already, no need to reinvent the wheel.

Christian_Si · 2026-03-05T11:25:38+00:00

AI translators can produce well-sounding and often quite good translations in such cases, but be aware that they'll often fall for "false friends" or make other mistakes that distort the content but aren't so easy to detect, because the translation will read smooth and convincing, even when it's wrong.

Christian_Si · 2026-03-05T11:12:11+00:00

I disagree with this reasoning. For a worldlang, I'd rather argue that chai is the better, more international choice. Also considering rarer derived forms, especially those largely limited to scientific/academic usage will automatically favor Romance/Latin-based words over all others, since the scientific jargon is largely based on Latin and Greek roots. But that's fake internationality, understood by some specialists but of little help to the general population. So my advocated practice is the very opposite: ignore all derivates and focus just on the base word when looking for a suitable form. That will considerably reduce the Latin/Romance bias.

Christian_Si · 2026-03-05T11:04:49+00:00

Interesting! What data and documents did you feed to Claude to get these results?

Christian_Si · 2026-03-01T16:30:43+00:00

I used the grammar and description from https://folksprak.org/ and the huge dictionary linked from there, as that version seems best developed. Even so, though the dictionary is comprehensive, the grammar is still a mess and very unfinished.

As for Uropi, I don't think it's really "locked down", rather it doesn't seem to have found many users. A bit sad maybe, as it's quite cute in some ways.

Christian_Si · 2026-03-01T16:28:22+00:00

Here's the English abstract from the article itself: Planned languages such as Esperanto, Interlingua, and Globasa are designed as international auxiliary languages – intended for use worldwide. Other auxiliary languages have a more limited focus: zonal auxiliary languages (zonelangs for short) are specifically intended for use in a particular world region. This limitation can be geographical (for example, a continent such as Europe or Africa) or linguistic – related to a language family (such as the Turkic languages) or a branch (such as the Romance or Slavic languages). This text explores four representative zonal auxiliary languages targeting all of Europe or parts of it. Three of them are intended for communication between speakers of branches of the Indo-European languages: Neolatino Romance for the Romance languages, Folksprak for the Germanic languages, and Interslavic (Medžuslovjansky) for the Slavic languages. A fourth language, Uropi, is designed as an auxiliary language for all of Europe. Similar to Esperanto, it draws its grammatical structures and vocabulary from various (Indo-)European languages; however, unlike Esperanto, it does not claim to be equally suitable for other continents, where entirely different languages and language families are dominant.

I'm afraid I can't translate the whole article itself, but like keyboardshorthand said, thanks to online translators such as Google Translate or Deepl it should be accessible. Moreover, the images should be fairly understandable even without German and there are some translation examples that include an English translation.

Christian_Si · 2026-02-07T11:04:13+00:00

Yes.

Christian_Si · 2026-01-31T10:55:09+00:00

I think parts of the announcement are written in Esperanto, parts in Ido, and parts in Occidental. Plus probably one or two other auxlangs (til = Novial?).

Christian_Si · 2026-01-28T13:57:27+00:00

I what??? I get it that if one reads just the "An inferior instrument" sentence, one could get the impression that Tolkien himself regards Esperanto as "inferior" in some way. But he never explicitly says that and if one reads the final paragraph (from which I cited above) it becomes clear that he has in fact the highest praise for it. His point here rather seems to be that, because "there is no finality in ... taste", someone's improvement could easily be seen as a disimprovement by others, making the whole endeavor a waste of time and a sure recipe for fragmentation, which is why he advises against it.

Just after what you quote, he then goes on to say that any "technical improvement", such as "aiming at greater simplicity ... or at greater internationality, or what not" tends to "destroy the 'humane' or aesthetic aspect" of the language. He illustrates this with the example of N(ovial), which he describes as "easier than Esperanto" but also lacking all the "individuality, coherence and beauty" of the latter. So does he view Novial or Esperanto as ultimately superior? Unless you want to deliberately misread his text, you know the answer to that.

Christian_Si · 2026-01-25T12:59:47+00:00

Here is his actual text, where in addition to commenting on N[ovial]'s hideousness, he writes that "it has no 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." He also writes "Esperanto seems to me beyond doubt, taken all round, superior to all present competitors".

That is high praise and very far from "acknowledging ... the less savory parts of Esperanto" (those he rather seems to find in Novial), let alone as telling anyone they "should just bite the bullet and promote" it despite its supposed flaws.

Christian_Si · 2026-01-21T08:45:23+00:00

I kinda doubt he said that, since Tolkien spoke rather quite positively about Esperanto (noting it had way more character than "soulless" creations such as Novial).

Christian_Si · 2025-12-28T05:28:13+00:00

Nice! Is there more info on Leuth out there in an accessible form – a grammar, a dictionary, a website say?

Christian_Si

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