This essay explores the notion of "artificial" or "constructed" languages, such as Esperanto and lojban. The thing I'm talking about have also been called "conlangs".
My basic conclusion is that the distinction between "Artificial"
Languages and
"natural languages" is ultimately an exercise in
anti-Nationalism. Artificial languages are languages that
lack a nation. They also more often than not lack "native speakers".
They reflect an attempt by
"Bugmen"—
rootless, culture-less people that identify themselves on
consoomerism
and other trends in cosmopolitan, urban society—to enjoy the
fruits of nationalism without being a metaphorical Nazi. While
pretending to be Klingon, a "global citizen", "logical" or something
else, having your own language to
LARP
in legitimizes your identity. /end_psychologizing
To begin, I will define what I mean by "language". A language is a standardized system of communication. Standardization usually means having a set of well-defined, discrete tokens—these may be called "words". A language is shared conventions about how these words may be formed, how these words may be ordered, and how these words may be used in larger units. Linguists will call what I just described "morphology", "syntax", and "pragmatics", respectively.
Academics in the social sciences may try to define "language" in terms of wishy-washy psychological this-and-that. Ultimately, they just want to ground their notion of "language" in something physical so they can count themselves as doing something comparable to the natural sciences. It is left as an exercise to the reader to judge whether or not they have been successful in this endeavor.
Language is ultimately a human, socially defined thing. Just how a given language is formed differs for every language. For example, many languages have grown up alongside some written system, such as Chinese. Idioms, expressions, and all sorts of other stuff interfaces with how these languages are written. Other languages haven't had much of a written tradition—you can look at which languages Protestant missionaries created writing systems for (e.g. many "indigenous" languages, languages of Africa) to see languages that didn't really have writing systems. Nonetheless, these "languages" count as languages in that there were oral (read: non-written) ways standards/norms were defined, thus defining systems of human communication ("natural" languages).
"Artificial" languages have their own histories too—they are the history of top-down design—the attempt to engineer language. More often than not, these histories are not tied to a particular (self-reproducing) people group or particularly successful line of descent. The bastard children bugmen make artificial languages to construct a cultural heritage they were never part of. Since they can't be bothered to acknowledge their own heritage, they engage in LARPing via language construction.
And now, a few case studies:
Constructed languages are often a LARPing exercise in Globalist-go (-go is how you say such-and-such language in Japanese). Esperanto—the most successful Artificial language— tries to be a catch-all auxiliary language that does everything European languages do without the nationalist connotations and irregular nouns/verbs/etc. Speaking and writing Esperanto is LARPing the European Union dream.
These are unapologetic LARPing languages. You can pretend to identify with a fictional race/ethnicity. If only it was "okay to be white"!!! 😱 Unable to accept that they might be called "racist" for embracing some national language and its history, bugmen LARP with surrogate artificial languages.
lojban tries to be "logical". What does that mean? As I understand it, basically it means reducing normal human communication to painfully explicit declarative statements. It is the Bed of Procrustes of language; an experiment in confounding clear articulation with excessive specification. All the while, being "international (read globalist) by drawing roots from a bunch of existing world languages to try to not be European. Pah!
Distinguishing "Artificial" languages is an exercise in language classification. As indicated above, I basically consider Artificial languages to be the same as "natural" languages, except that they are for nerds rejecting cultural ties and trying hard not to be Nazis.
Classifying languages means imposing categories to differentiate different sorts of languages. For example, a well-known way of classifying languages in the world of establishment linguistics is looking at VERB and OBJECT placement. In English, we say "I saw a cat", where saw is a verb and a cat is an object. Thus, we say English is a VO type language. On the other hand, in Korean, you would say 나는 고양이를 봤어 na-nun koyangi-lul pwa-ss-e (Yale romanization) where 고양이를 koyangi-lul "cat-OBJECT" is the object and 봤어 pwa-ss-e "saw-PAST-CASUAL" is the verb. Korean is an OV ("object, verb") type language.
Artificial languages can be treated by "traditional" means of classification as described above. Insofar as they communicate "normal human" semantics, they should be able to be classified on normal linguistic parameters. See the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) for many examples of these.
How Artificial languages mainly differ from "natural" languages is ultimately not the final form they take, but rather the culture (or lack thereof) that leads to their formation.
Many artificial languages have some kind of "gimmick". For example, Toki Pona makes use of a core vocabulary of 123 word roots and 14 phonemes. The fun/thrill of using a language like this that you are using something that sounds unfamiliar and has you suspend your pre-existing concepts associated with words in your own language to try to express things about the world around you. However, to get a similar effect, you don't need to learn a whole list of 123 words some person made up.
Consider this Thing Explainer book. Here's a quote from Amazon's item description for this book,
Have you ever tried to learn more about some incredible thing, only to be frustrated by incomprehensible jargon? Randall Munroe is here to help. In Thing Explainer, he uses line drawings and only the thousand (or, rather, “ten hundred”) most common words to provide simple explanations for some of the most interesting stuff there is, including:
- food-heating radio boxes (microwaves)
- tall roads (bridges)
- computer buildings (datacenters)
- the shared space house (the International Space Station)
- the other worlds around the sun (the solar system)
- the big flat rocks we live on (tectonic plates)
- the pieces everything is made of (the periodic table)
- planes with turning wings (helicopters)
- boxes that make clothes smell better (washers and dryers)
- the bags of stuff inside you (cells)
How do these things work? Where do they come from? What would life be like without them? And what would happen if we opened them up, heated them up, cooled them down, pointed them in a different direction, or pressed this button? In Thing Explainer, Munroe gives us the answers to these questions and so many more. Funny, interesting, and always understandable, this book is for anyone—age 5 to 105—who has ever wondered how things work, and why.
Rather than spending time to learn an artificial language, you may find that learning and already existing language and engaging in some form of "language game" can satisfy your curiosity while helping you learn something (potentially) useful.
Insofar as languages are used by humans to communicate, languages do not exist independently of culture. To try to make a human (c.f. "natural") language independent of culture is an autistic exercise. You should just write a programing language if you want to talk with computers. Artificial languages are exercises in trying to engineer culture and something like "national languages", without being a Nazi.
I do not oppose people using or exploring Artificial languages. I also don't really care for the survival or proliferation of Artificial languages. We already have immortal Artificial languages—they are called programing languages and are used by humans to talk with computers. People talking to people can learn other systems—e.g. national languages like Spanish, Russian, and Chinese. For those that want to learn nicely engineered things, I would steer away from Artificial languages (failed engineering) and instead turn to learning some useful engineering skills (e.g. using programing languages) which have their own grammars, jargons, etc. Curiously, I have found that the more I care about languages that do useful work in the real world, the better people treat me. Knowing some Esperanto just made me a sad nerd refraining from interjecting my "two cents" whenever language-related topics were mentioned in polite company.