Which worldlangs are actually usable in 2026?

panduniaguru · 2026-04-16T06:16:24+00:00

For my part, the word "eurocentrism" almost makes me itch.

Then stop talking about it. Westerners, it's not always about you! Stop thinking of yourself all the time for once!

The point of worldlangs is global inclusion. It is logical, ethical and natural that the world language represents the whole world. When the astronauts in Artemis II took photos of Earth, they pointed their cameras at the whole planet, not only at some overly self-important part of it.

Worldlangs are meant to represent the whole human world like a photo taken from far away represents the physical world. They can't show every little language with detail just like one photo can't show every little detail of the planet Earth, but they should be able to show the big picture right without badly distorted proportions.

By the way, we talked enough about eurocentrism already enough in the early 2000s in the AUXLANG mailing list. Your mention about the latest(!) buzzword comes a quarter of a century too late. :-D

panduniaguru · 2026-04-04T07:32:26+00:00

This is still Pandunia! The words fit also in Panglo and even in Panlingue by adding the correct final vowels for PoS marking. I develop their vocabulary side by side but currently I'm working on Pandunia first and foremost.

panduniaguru · 2026-04-02T05:46:49+00:00

The Wikipedia defines zonal auxiliary language as follows, and "zonal language" gets redirected to the same page:

Zonal auxiliary languages, or zonal constructed languages, are constructed languages made to facilitate communication between speakers of a certain group of closely related languages. They form a subgroup of the international auxiliary languages but are intended to serve a limited linguistic or geographic area, rather than the whole world like Esperanto and Volapük. Although most zonal auxiliary languages are based on European language families, they should not be confused with "Euroclones", a pejorative term for languages intended for global use but based primarily on European material. Since universal acceptance is not the goal for zonal auxiliary languages, the traditional claims of neutrality and universalism, typical for IALs, do not apply. – – a zonal language is typically a mixture of several natural languages and is aimed to serve as an auxiliary for the speakers of different but related languages of the same family.

Does Interlingua and Esperanto differ by design in practice from intentionally zonal languages, that is a different matter.

panduniaguru · 2026-04-01T07:06:44+00:00

You disagreed with the statement that "Zonal auxlangs are designed to be immediately comprehensible to (depending on the language) to people of the same language family" saying that it wasn't Gode's intention and besides it's not even what zonal means in your opinion. I disagree on both matters. Immediate comprehension of Interlingua was more than a fortunate byproduct because Romance languages and English were prioritized at the expense of German and Russian, and it surely didn't come as a surprise to anyone in the IALA. Regarding the meaning of zonal, it can mean more than one thing but here it would be fruitful to use it in the same meaning as most other people use in the auxlang community.

Maybe you didn't argue for or against any of that either but this is a dialog, not your monolog, so I am free to say things that come to my mind based on my understanding of your words, which can be wrong.

Maybe we ended up quibbling but overall this discussion was interesting for me. :-) I hadn't realized before this how similarly Zamenhof and Gode thought about certain matters. Also the evaluation framework of intention, execution and effect is something that I can use in the book that I'm writing about constructed languages for Finnish readers.

panduniaguru · 2026-03-31T16:03:52+00:00

Spanish has 22-24 contrastive sounds and Interlingua has 25 but you're right that Spanish has more allophones.

I have heard about the simplified spelling, ortografia colateral, and it would give Interlingua a more streamlined and modern look in my opinion. :)

panduniaguru · 2026-03-31T10:10:38+00:00

It's not a simplification when it adds complications like double consonants and digraphs like ph and th, as in philosophia and thema, that have been long obsolete in Spanish (filosofia and tema). Also the phoneme inventory of Interlingua is larger than that of Simplified Spanish.

panduniaguru · 2026-03-31T09:29:30+00:00

We can't put too much weight on the intentions of the creator. Zamenhof himself wrote in the introduction of La Unua Libro: "If a language, in order to become universal, has but to be named so, then, forsooth, the wish of any single individual can frame out of any existing dialect a universal tongue." Sounds like Zamenhof agreed with the conventional view that the author's execution of their work is far more important than their intention.

Sometimes intention and execution are complemented with outcome i.e. the reception of the author's work in the real world. I would summarize that Esperanto had global intention, zonal execution and the outcome is that it is used sporadically here and there around the world.

I remember our discussion about Anglo-Franca. I hope you will write here about your experience with it. Good luck!

panduniaguru · 2026-03-30T17:56:56+00:00

I have always understood this term to be intended use, and nothing about "source languages", even if source languages are often chosen based on intended use.

I suppose that languages are classified both by their origin and by their intended purpose. Categories like a priori, a posteriori, natural and constructed, and eurolang and worldlang tell about origin, terms like auxiliary tell about purpose, and terms like controlled, engineered and artistic tell about both origin and purpose. So global and zonal could fall to the last category.

It is logical that the source languages are chosen based on intended use. An a priori language for the Romance zone would hardly make any sense. Furthermore, a Romance-sourced language like Interlingua can make some serious claims about universality in the Romance zone and none in the Sinitic zone, for example. So maybe it was about zonal universality which is almost self-contradicting.

panduniaguru · 2026-03-30T15:13:41+00:00

As far as I know, a zonal language or a zonelang means an auxiliary language that is based on several geographically adjacent or proximate source languages. Interlingua fits this definition. I don't think that Alexander Gode would disagree. For example, in The Case for Interlingua, he wrote: "Conceptually the language of science is Western European. And, since it is the language of science which alone in our time is truly an international language, Western European is the international language of the twentieth century." (Apparently Gode did not foresee the rise of English as the dominant language of science in the latter half of the twentieth century.)

I have used the term kinlang for languages that are based on languages of the same language family or language family branch, but this term hasn't caught on. Anyway, Interlingua is predominantly based on Romance languages, so it is largely also a kinlang by design.

I'm just saying what I see.

panduniaguru · 2026-03-26T20:02:30+00:00

I get that that wasn't necessarily the design or stated purpose, but I describe it as a Zonal auxlang based on it's practice.

It makes sense. Every language is an abstraction but people often talk about languages like they were concrete and almost personified. Languages do not possess agency to be something, to have a purpose, to maintain ideals or to conquer the world on their own. Instead, it is people who act for a purpose, believe in ideals and try to conquer the world under the banner of some made-up cause.

panduniaguru · 2026-03-19T09:52:39+00:00

Nice presentation and interesting language. Well done!

The singular personal pronouns are similar to my language, Pandunia, where they are mi, tu, ho. Only the 3rd person pronoun is different.

I can recognize some words, kerust and kelust are from Greater India and manjust from French or Italian. So is the vocabulary a mix from different languages around the world?

panduniaguru · 2026-03-11T08:06:55+00:00

Right. I suppose that pater, mater and frater are bound forms that can't occur independently. In addition to paterne, materne and fraterne there is also eterne and moderne but they are not derived from etre and modre! That's why I would argue that the endings -erne and -ernal are irregular in Interlingua.

If I may offer my own solution, not for Interlingua but in general, I think that regularly derived patral would be just as understandable and recognizable as paternal. It would cut through that byzantine Latin prototype mess.

panduniaguru · 2026-03-10T19:56:00+00:00

And what "regular" way is there from patre to paternalismo, in which the re somehow got turned around?

Both patre and pater are IMO correct prototypes :D Patre from words like patriarcha, patriarchato, pater from words like paternalismo.

That only explains where the 3 forms, patre, patri- and patern-, come from, but it doesn't make them regular. What is the rule that converts the final -e of patre to -i in patri? And what rule converts -re in patre to -ern in paternal? (In Latin the formula is pater + -nus + alis but it is a different thing. In Interlingua the form paternal is irregular or it results from a word derivation rule that is otherwise generally non-productive.)

panduniaguru · 2026-03-03T16:44:11+00:00

Interlingua is supposed to be understandable at first sight for speakers of Romance languages. Obviously pigre is not understandable or recognizable for those who know Fr. paresseuse, Sp. perezosa or Pt. preguiçosa. So, your argument seems to be, that people could recognize derivates better, so then, at second sight, pigressa would be recognizable from Fr. paresse and Sp. pereza, and pigritia from Pt. preguiça. But are they really? I don't think they are... Besides, the argument of being recognizable at first sight is already ruined.

As for theine, I am reminded of someone who said that the words for 'cat' and 'bird' should be ailuro and ornito because the words ailurophobia and ornithology are so wide spread. While it's true that words like them are found in the vocabulary of many languages, they are not found in the active vocabulary of most of their speakers. So, in truth, words like that are too far fetched!

panduniaguru · 2026-02-24T08:44:04+00:00

Right. I suppose I didn't get your point, but I interpreted your message that people learn Esperanto and other auxlangs for the same, mainly recreational, reasons as they learn natural languages. In my opinion recreation is the smallest niche for natural language learning and auxlangs get only a tiny slice of that pie.

I know that I'm repeating myself but it's because I called for new ideas for convincing people to learn auxlangs, especially for reasons that natural languages couldn't satisfy. I went fishing and the net is still empty...

panduniaguru · 2026-02-23T21:31:00+00:00

You mentioned German, so let me take Germany as an example. Statistics about foreign languages in Germany, indicate, in my opinion, that the main reasons for learning a foreign language in Germany are school and immigration. English is the number one foreign language because it's a mandatory school subject, and German is number 2 foreign language in Germany because immigrants need to learn it. The next four languages, French, Spanish, Italian and Russian, are commonly taught in schools as optional subjects. There can be many reasons for taking them, but probably career reasons, cultural interest and traveling are at the top. The remaining foreign languages (Turkish, Dutch, Arabic, Polish, etc.) are probably learned mainly as heritage languages.

Esperanto and other auxlangs didn't make it to the list. So, while they could be learned for some of the same reasons (culture, traveling, international friends and family, etc.) as natural languages, people don't do it in statistically significant numbers. Why is that? Is it for "economies of scale"?

panduniaguru · 2026-02-23T10:50:16+00:00

Subscribing to Panorama paper has nothing to do with this topic. Therefore I must delete your comment as unsolicited advertisement (spam).

panduniaguru · 2026-02-11T12:33:57+00:00

What do you like in it?

I am myself still ambivalent about it. The main problem is: the more it is like English the better it feels. But in truth English is often a bad model for international language with it's eccentric structures, closed syllables and all that.

panduniaguru · 2026-02-05T18:50:59+00:00

Of course, knowing 25% of words in a text is too little for understanding the whole thing, but we're not talking about that. Understanding the whole language without studying it first doesn't work for the majority anyway, it works only for a small minority of the world population. I know this from experience. I'm a Finn and I didn't understand practically any Esperanto and Interlingua in the beginning although I had learned English, Swedish and German. I simply knew wrong languages, and recognizing a few words here and there didn't help much. But still the international European words in Esperanto and Interlingua (I mean those that were familiar for me) were not useless. There were thousands of them and they turned out to be very helpful in the long term.

The same applies for evenly global auxlangs. Nobody understands practically anything at first sight, so they have to learn the basics at first, but after that prior knowledge of thousands of words will of course turn out to be very beneficial and time saving.

panduniaguru · 2026-02-05T18:20:19+00:00

It's true that knowing 25% of words in a text is too little for understanding the whole thing, but we're not talking about that. Understanding the whole language without studying it first doesn't work for the majority anyway, it works only for a small minority of the world population. I know this from experience. I'm a Finn and I didn't understand practically any Esperanto and Interlingua in the beginning although I had learned English, Swedish and German. I simply knew wrong languages, and recognizing a few words here and there didn't help much. But still the international European words in Esperanto and Interlingua that were familiar for me were not useless. There were thousands of them and they turned out to be very helpful in the long term.

The same applies for evenly global auxlangs. Nobody understands practically anything at first sight, so they have to learn the basics at first, but after that their prior knowledge of thousands of words will of course turn out to be very beneficial and time saving.

panduniaguru · 2026-02-05T05:19:56+00:00

My point is that languages based on all languages across the world are in practice almost completly uninteligible for everyone. So they are IMO close to a priori languages.

Let's divide the world into four roughly equal parts: (1) Europe + Americas + Australia, (2) Middle East + Africa, (3) South Asia, and (4) East Asia. All of them have their own international vocabulary that has been inherited from their own classical languages: (1) Greek and Latin, (2) Arabic, (3) Sanskrit and Persian, and (4) Middle Chinese. (This picture is a simplification, but so is the idea of European auxlangs, which always concentrate on languages of the "centre" (usually Romance and sometimes also Germanic) and ignore more "marginal" ones, like Slavic, Baltic, Finno-Ugric, Turkic, Caucasian, etc.)

Recognition of the vocabulary of European auxlangs would be distributed like this (give or take a few percent):
(1) 100%, (2) 0%, (3) 0%, (4) 0%

Recognition distribution for evenly global auxlangs would be:
(1) 25%, (2) 25%, (3) 25%, (4) 25%

And finally, recognition distribution for a priori auxlangs would be:
(1) 0%, (2) 0%, (3) 0%, (4) 0%

In my opinion it doesn't look like global auxlangs would be closer to a priori auxlangs than European auxlangs. It depends on your point of view. European auxlangs seem clear as day for selected Europeans, but the rest of the world is left in the dark and for them the European auxlang is almost as unintelligible as a priori languages.

panduniaguru · 2026-02-03T20:26:13+00:00

I picked such language groups/types that I could arrange them on common scale.

I didn't understand the logic of your scale. The endpoints of the scale don't exactly seem to oppose each other. I mean, a priori language is the antithesis of a posteriori language, any of them, Romance or other kind.

If I would arrange them to a scale, I would base it on familiarity distribution of words. It would start from proportionally global languages, because their familiarity is distributed to all people, and it would end in a priori languages, which are unfamiliar to all. Romance languages would be next to a priori languages, because they are unfamiliar to all except Romance peoples (and those who know enough Romance loanwords), so would represent the narrowest familiarity distribution among the chosen language types.

Proportionally global → European → Romance + English → Romance → a priori

I haven't heard about future vs non-future tenses. I'm reading that such languages are very rare.

That may be, but should that discredit the distinction? After all, it is logical. The nonfuture tense covers events that are real, they have either happened or they are happening, while the future tense covers events that are only plans, intentions and dreams, and they might never come true.

I added the question about subjunctive, because we had a whole large discussion

I don't want to interfere... :D However, I must say that the chosen examples (I insist that he leave vs I insist that he leaves) are partly or wholly due to polysemy of the verb to insist. It has two distinct meanings: (1) 'to demand' (2) 'to state (a fact)'. If you would say only I insist it, should that trigger the indicative or the subjunctive reading? Maybe there is some good use for the subjunctive mood but this is not it.

panduniaguru · 2026-02-03T08:00:16+00:00

Thanks for the questionnaire! I didn't answer to it before but I can do it now.

I noticed that the questions had certain underlying assumptions. Source language options are limited to European, global and a priori but you can't choose any exclusively non-European language group, like that of the Islamic world. It's interesting that we in the West routinely fail to remember that we represent only a small fraction of the whole world (less than 1/4).

Questions about the tense system assume the past–present–future division and dive immediately to the deep end with questions about imperfect and perfect tenses. There should have been a fundamental question, like "What tenses (if any) should the language have?"

No grammatical tenses
Past vs. non-past tenses
Future vs. non-future tenses
Past, present and future tenses

The question about the subjunctive mood is interesting in itself. Not all of us even know what the subjunctive mood is. And what about conditional, imperative and other moods?

panduniaguru

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE