AN INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE:
The Need, the Candidates and the Prospects

Learning a foreign language has been described as "nasty, brutish and long". I always laugh at those old tales of the British Empire where the hero says something like "thanks to my natural aptitude for languages, after a few weeks I was speaking the lingo like a native." I've met people who speak a dozen languages, but no one speaks like a native unless they are a native speaker. The rest of us spend years learning a language, and still wind up with bad grammar and a funny accent.

It is not surprising then, that people often settle on a lingua franca, or auxiliary language. At various times and places, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Arabic, Mandarin, Chinook and Swahili have enabled people who were not native speakers of those languages to communicate with speakers of another language altogether. In fact, sometimes even speakers of the same language prefer to use the auxiliary language, as with Cantonese discussing literature in Mandarin, or Muslim scholars debating in Classical Arabic. The advantages of an auxiliary language are that, firstly, you get to speak to a lot more people (which is why few people learn Danish or Catalan) and secondly, that it puts people on an equal footing; if neither of you is a native speaker, neither is at linguistic disadvantage. As a friend of mine once said, the great thing about Latin is that you don't need to worry about your accent.

This is one reason why, despite making a passable living out of teaching it, I do not think English is the best choice for an international auxiliary language (IAL). Having the world speak English gives a linguistic advantage to a group who are already at a tremendous economic and political advantage. However, before considering the pros and cons of English, we need to look at what makes a good IAL.

What an IAL should do

As in the case of English, auxiliary languages have been spread through trade, religion or conquest. However, if we are going to adopt an IAL consciously, other criteria become more important. This has been the subject of some debate, but here are a few ideas.

Learnability. No IAL should take years to master.
Familiarity. Ideally, an IAL should have a grammar and vocabulary that are familiar to as wide a range of people as possible. In practice, though, this tends to be a swings and roundabouts situation e.g. a language based on Latin will have a large number of words familiar to speakers of European languages, but few to speakers of Chinese.
Neutrality. In some ways opposed to the principle of familiarity, this requires that an IAL should be as linguistically and culturally neutral as possible. Features of a language which seem perfectly "natural" and even universal often turn out to be the products of a specific culture and worldview, and may strike speakers of radically different languages as cumbersome, confusing or oppressive. It may seem obvious to a Spanish speaker that the gender of an adjective should be the same as that of the noun it describes, but of course many languages don't have gender, and some don't even have adjectives.
Expressiveness. An ideal IAL would be able to express as many concepts as a natural language (or even more, perhaps). Obviously, though, there is a trade-off between expressiveness and learnability: the more vocabulary you have, the more you need to learn.
Flexibility. Speakers of an IAL should have a fair amount of freedom in how they use it, including the ability to coin new words. Again, however, there is a trade-off too much flexibility reduces standardisation, and there is a risk of dialects forming and splitting off, as happened when Latin fragmented into French, Spanish and so on.
Clarity. Native English speakers can usually tell the difference between "there", "their" and "they're", which of the two meanings of "Moving machinery can be dangerous" is intended, or that "Can you open the window?" is a request, not a question. However, when you are not speaking your native tongue, such ambiguities become much more problematic. An IAL therefore needs to be considerably more precise than a natural language, while on the other hand, the principle of flexibility requires that its speakers should able to be vague when they want to.

So, having established some criteria for IALs, on to the candidates.

Natural Languages

English has become the main auxiliary language, but we should not forget that this dominance is due to circumstances which may not last. After all, it would have been hard for a Medieval monk to imagine that one day hardly anyone would speak Latin, and when it was proposed that the League of Nations adopt Esperanto, the French objected on the grounds that French was already the international language.

Actually, English does have a few points in its favour. It is certainly expressive, having more words than any other language, but of course this means you have more words to learn. English grammar is fairly simple compared to other European languages, but this is offset by its ridiculous spelling, which makes even many native speakers semi-literate. English is also a highly idiomatic and metaphorical language try explaining to a learner of English why you run up a debt, run into trouble and run out of milk, for example.

There have been proposals to regularise and simplify English for international consumption. Spelling reform would obviously benefit everybody (including the English themselves), and there is also something to be said for agreeing on a basic vocabulary for international broadcasting and publication (as Voice of America does). We might even go as far as to get rid of some irregular verbs and eliminate adverbs altogether (something Americans and sports commentators seem to be doing already). However, any radical simplification of English would essentially be a different language, and one which would not have much to recommend it. Learning English as it stands may be difficult, but at least you get to read Shakespeare and watch MTV, while learning some kind of Newspeak might not be very much easier, and would render you in effect a second-class English speaker.

Other natural languages are pretty much non-starters in the current economic and cultural climate, although one friend of mine bravely concludes all his e-mail with the slogan "Learn Spanish, the other international language." While a few priests may be able to communicate in Latin, few people would willingly undergo the torture of learning Latin grammar, and the same goes for Arabic in spades (remember what I was saying about English being too metaphorical?).

Naturalistic Languages

As a compromise between adopting an existing language and inventing one from scratch, most proposed IALs tend to start from a selection of natural languages. Esperanto, the oldest constructed IAL still in existence, and still the most widely spoken, does this, taking its vocabulary from a variety of European languages and adopting a fairly simple, regular grammar. Esperanto is quite easy to learn and also seems to be reasonably expressive, if the large amount of both original and translated literature in Esperanto is anything to go by. There are even a few native Esperanto speakers.

However, not everyone in the IAL community is content with Esperanto. The first alternative was Ido (meaning "offspring"), essentially a reformed version of Esperanto which never achieved the popularity of its parent. Ido made the grammar of Esperanto more systematic (according to Idists, at least) and eliminated most of the Slavic vocabulary.

A more radical departure was Occidental (also known as Interlingue). While Esperanto emphasised regularity, Occidental aimed at recognisability, with a fairly free grammar and vocabulary taken largely from Germanic and Romance languages. The main criterion for selection was to prioritise words which already had some international use. Taking the process further, Interlingua restricts its vocabulary to English and the Romance languages, extracting words by looking at the common roots of these languages essentially Latin for the modern world. Arguments have raged as to the relative merits of Occidental and Interlingua, but what they both promise is a language which an educated European can more-or-less understand at sight, and can learn with minimal study. This of course makes them, like Esperanto, more pan-European than international languages. Because of their regularity and reduced vocabulary, they are still easier to learn than any natural languages, but the objection has been raised that if, say, a Chinese speaker is going to learn a European language, they may as well go to the extra trouble of learning a real one (in fact, Esperanto has been quite popular in China, but seems to be losing ground to English).

A slightly less "cloned" approach is provided by Glosa, a descendent of Lancelot Hogbens Interglossa, which he proposed as an international language for the scientific community. It derives most of its vocabulary from Greek and Latin, but has a grammar based to a large extent on Creoles. A Creole is a sort of second-generation Pidgin, deriving from contact between different languages, but having its own grammar. Some linguists (such as Derek Bickerton) have gone as far as to claim that Creoles represent some kind of universal grammar. It is certainly the easiest type of grammar to learn, with little or no inflection (e.g. in a Creole you might say "I bin see" rather than "I saw"). Glosa is basically language stripped to the bare bones.

To give an idea of what these languages look like, here is the beginning of the UN Declaration of Human rights in each of them.

English

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Esperanto

Pro tio, ke agnosko de la esenca digno kaj de la egalaj kaj nefordoneblaj rajtoj de chiuj membroj de la homara familio estas la fundamento de libero, justo kaj paco en la mondo,
(actually, this is an approximation, since Esperanto has a number of non-Latin characters)

Ido

Konsiderante ke agnosko dil inheranta digneso e dil egala e netransferebla yuri di omna membri di la
familio homal es la fundamento di libereso, yusteso e paco en la mondo,

Occidental

Considerante que li aconossentie del dignita' inherent a omni membres del familie homan e de lor jures egal e inalienabil constitue li fundament del liberta', del justicie e del pace in li munde,

Interlingua

Considerante que le recognoscentia del dignitate inherente a tote le membros del familia human e de lor derectos equal e inalienabile constitue le fundamento del libertate, del justitia e del pace in le mundo,

Glosa (thanks to Robin Gaskell)

Lo-iso rekogni de un inati digni, e plu eqa e no-alian-abili privilegi de holo membra de u homi familia, es u funda de libera, justi e paca in u munda,

"A priori" languages

As an alternative to manipulating existing languages, some language designers have chosen to start from scratch, or almost from scratch, an approach sometimes called "a priori". Most of these invented languages have been constructed for fictional purposes, like Tolkiens Elvish, or simply as hobbies, but throughout history there have been examples of people trying to create languages from first principles, not only as an aid to international communication, but also to improve on natural languages in some way, rather like the Marain of Iain Banks science fiction novels ("language as cultural weapon, and proud of it").

Most such historical experiments have failed dismally, but one project that shows promise is Lojban. Lojban is an offshoot of an earlier and better-known (though much less used) language called Loglan. This was the brainchild of James Cooke Brown and was intended to, as the name suggests, be a logical language which would be as free as possible from cultural bias. The Loglan/Lojban split arose primarily because Brown not only tried to keep copyright of Loglan but also kept changing it (a bit like Microsoft), and this naturally frustrated those trying to learn and use the language. Eventually various people broke away to form Lojban (and a few other projects, like Cecqli - essentially an Anglo-Mandarin version of Loglan).

Like Loglan, Lojban's grammar is based on predicate logic (a system of logical notation similar in some ways to computer languages such as C or Prolog). The root vocabulary was generated from the world's six most widely spoken languages (Chinese, Hindi/Urdu, English, Spanish, Arabic and Russian). In this way, it is unlikely that a word in Lojban will be the same as one in your native language, but likely that it will have a few sounds in common (e.g. vanju is reminiscent of French "vin" and Chinese "jiu"). Lojban thus scores much higher on universality than the Euroclones, although the vocabulary is thus harder to learn for Europeans (and easier for Chinese, of course!).

An interesting feature of Lojban is its "attitudinal indicators": short words which express the speaker's thought/feelings about what she/he is saying. An example of this is .ui (pronounced whee!). On its own it just means "I'm happy", and is the same as the Lojban sentence "mi gleki". However, you can also tag it onto a sentence. For example:

mi klama ti - I come/came/will come here
.ui mi klama ti - I'm happy to be coming here
.uinai mi klama ti - I'm unhappy to be coming here

Note that tense is not specified. Speakers of European languages assume that verbs need to refer to some particular time, but some languages, like Chinese, don't feel the need for this, and just add extra words when necessary. Lojban follows the Chinese model, so if you want you can say:

mi pu klama ti - I past come here = I came here

or even

mi puza ruinai klama ti - I past-medium-time-distance continuously-not come here = A while ago, I used to come here from time to time

An important aspect of Lojban is that you can use as much or as little of the language as you like.

This "modular" approach to the language is also adopted by NGL (Next Generation Language). This is a group project designed to "create an artificial language which is more expressive than natural languages, is usable as a person's first language as well as their second, removes all the historical baggage, and yet is still regular and easy to learn." NGL is the most eclectic of all the languages discussed so far, taking vocabulary and grammatical features from anywhere and everywhere, and making decisions by group vote. It is also unusual in being designed as an "improved" first language, not just an auxiliary language; the NGL attitude is that existing languages do not meet the needs of modern society (hence the name).

Finally, mention should be made of Klingon, "the fastest-growing language in the Galaxy." Although the language was created for Star Trek (of course!) and was never intended as an auxiliary language, it has taken off in a surprising way, with over a thousand members of the Klingon Language Institute, Klingon translations of numerous texts, including large amounts of Shakespeare and the Bible, Klingon being spoken as a genuine auxiliary language at Star Trek conventions, and even one native speaker. As far as I know, no one is seriously advocating Klingon as a world language, but it shows how much people can do with a language if they have sufficient motivation.

Prospects

Appealing though many of these languages might be, it has to be said that the prospects for any of them replacing English as an international language seem remote. English simply has too much time and money invested in it for its momentum to be slowed much in the near future. Learn English and you can communicate with several hundred million people; learn Esperanto and the figure goes down to about a million (at a generous estimate).

Numbers are not everything, though (otherwise we'd all be learning Chinese). After all, English was once a sort of Creole enabling a small number of Francophones to communicate with their Anglo-Saxon serfs. If an alternative language were to reach a critical mass, it could rival English as an auxiliary language simply because that is what it was designed for, and would do better. Given the choice between spending years studying English and still not speaking it properly, and spending a few months learning Esperanto or Interlingua, your average European would go for the latter, if only there were enough people speaking the language in the first place.

Europe may in fact provide this critical mass, thanks to EC politics. At present all EC documents have to be translated into over a dozen languages, and debates need simultaneous translation (you may have noticed how when a Euro MP makes a joke, the laughter spreads slowly round the chamber as different translations reach their listeners). In fact most EC delegates and bureaucrats speak English, but to adopt English as the official language of Europe would be politically unacceptable. Esperanto has been seriously proposed as an EC language, and also a group of dedicated folk have been translating European Parliament reports into Interlingua. The proposal is still far from gaining wide acceptance, but a combination of small countries who realise that nobody is going to bother to learn their languages and big countries who resent the dominance of English may yet make a pan-European language a reality. From then on, non-Europeans would probably prefer to learn that than an individual EC member language, and thus it could become a de facto international language.

As for Lojban, which readers may have guessed is my favourite language, at first sight the prospects look less encouraging. Unlike Occidental and Interlingua, someone who has not studied Lojban would not have the faintest idea what a Lojban text was about, and it takes longer to master Lojban than most of the other IALs (at least for Europeans). However, just as numbers aren't everything, neither is ease of learning. Lojban is still easier than just about any natural language, and it has certain advantages of its own, notably the ability to express thoughts and feelings much more precisely than in other languages. It is also as culturally neutral as it is possible to be, which, aside from making it more potentially popular with the majority of the world's population who don't speak European languages, makes it a valuable tool in studying, as well as communicating between, cultures. It is possible that Lojban may be used as an auxiliary language amongst people who have the kind of needs that Lojban addresses, such as scientists or philosophers. From there, it could perhaps go on to become a general language of education and research a sort of Classical Latin or Greek for the twenty-first century.

A common question is "What language should I learn?" Any answer has to be subjective, but in my opinion, it depends on what you want to learn a language for. Each language has its own strengths, but here are my personal recommendations:

1. If you want the language with the largest number of speakers, learn Esperanto.
2. If you want a language that's really easy to learn, and you're already fluent in English or a Romance language (well, you must be if you can read this), try Interlingua or Occidental/Interlingue
3. If you want something a bit different, have a look at Lojban or Glosa .

In the end, I suspect that which language people learn is less important than simply learning one - despite the bewildering profusion of languages, if you learn one, it is very easy to transfer to another if you feel the need. The important thing is to get talking.