Conlang Directory: International Communication

Dutton Speedwords

This language's claim to fame is that it is intended to be a shorthand system as well as a method of international communication. The most common words are the shortest; all are between one and three letters. There is also a short dictionary online. [Dutton][archivist: Richard Kennaway]

Esperanto

The most famous constructed language. It's more regular than evolved languages, easier to learn, and based on vocabulary taken from several European languages. It has probably a million or so speakers, and there are even a few native speakers. See also Don Harlow's Esperanto site in North America, and Martin Weichert's Virtuala Esperanto-Biblioteko in Sweden.

The Elephant's Memory

According to the author, "It's an embryonic system. A kind of pictoral version of Cyberyak/Earth-Minimal" [Kapitano Eglefino]

Glosa

Intented for international communication. Glosa takes its roots from Greek and Latin and it's word order from English. It's mostly uninflected; you can use the same word as a verb, noun, or adjective. What inflections it does have are marked with dashes so they're easy to pick out. Some critics say it's just a code for English. There are a few more articles about it here, some of which are in Esperanto.

InterScandinavia

A merging of Scandinavian languages.

Latino Sin Flexione

A version of Interlingua. See also www.interlingua.com [Giuseppe Peano]

Lingua Franca Nova

Simple and well-thought out European-like language. [George Boeree]

Novial

A proposed international language, invented by Otto Jesperson. Bruce Gilson put it on the web as an example of something he likes better than Esperanto. Like Esperanto, it takes its vocabulary from European languages. [Otto Jesperson][archivist: Bruce Gilson]

Romanova

A regularized blending of French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, intended for communication between speakers of all Romance languages. [David Crandall]

Suma

Created by Dr. Barnett Russell in 1957, this language is intended for universal neutral communication. It doesn't contain consonant clusters (except in borrowed words) and it appears most words are one or two syllables. There are about 2000 words in the vocabulary. The words are made up, not borrowed from any natural language, and there is some regularity -- similar words sometimes have similar sounds. [Dr. Barnett Russell][archivist: Rick Harrison]

Uni

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Universal Networking Language

A United Nations University project to create an interlanguage for use on the internet; the idea being that you'd use special tools to create a document in this language and it would be automatically translated into any of the UN member languages on demand. They plan to make this feasible by restricting the grammar and vocabulary of the interlanguage, and have translation be only one-way, from the interlanguage to national languages. The interlanguage's vocabulary will be English words, with probably some type of grammatical markup added -- not intended for people to read or use directly. [Institute of Advanced Studies, United Nations University]

Volapük

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