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A Brief Survey of Interesting Conlangs from Across History

I first got interested in constructed languages because of fantasy and sci-fi worlds, as I imagine is the case for many conlangers. Recently, though, I’ve been getting more interested in constructed languages unconnected to fictional worlds—ones invented for the creator, or other people, to use in the real world, not as part of the worldbuilding for a made-up civilization.

One of the intriguing things about these languages is the variety of reasons that people create them. These can be grouped into a few categories:

…and, across those categories, you might be surprised by just how many languages people have invented. Here are some of the ones I’ve been looking into lately. 

Lingua Ignota

Creator: Hildegard von Bingen
Category: Mystical language
Created in: c. 1200

I learned about Hildegard von Bingen in music school. In that context, I knew her as a 12th-century abbess, composer, and playwright whose works include what’s thought to be the oldest surviving musical morality play (Ordo Virtutum). What I didn’t know until recently was that she also wrote a language, Lingua Ignota—what is considered by many to be the oldest extant constructed language.

There’s still some debate about Hildegard’s goals for her language. Some think she meant it to be secret, known only to her and used to communicate with God. Another theory is that it was known only to other nuns in her order, so they could communicate without outsiders understanding, while others think she created it to be a universal language. 

One reason there’s so much speculation is that not a lot of info on it survives, though there is a glossary of 1,011 words and there are a few extant records of it being used in hymns and other writings. It’s not an especially exciting language from a construction standpoint, with a grammar modeled after Latin and a relatively small vocabulary. But its status as potentially the first conlang, and the fact that it was created by such a fascinating historical figure, makes it worth learning about.

Solresol

Creator: Francois Sudre
Category: Art language
Created in: 1827 

Speaking of music, Solresol was a language created to communicate through music. It essentially uses musical notes as syllables, specifically the 7 notes on the solfege major scale. This gives the language a very limited “alphabet”, as it were, with only 7 individual units to combine into words. Other musical concepts are used to add to this, like lengthening the final syllable of a noun to make it plural, or accenting a specific syllable to denote part of speech.

The idea of communicating through music is intriguing in itself. What’s even cooler about Solresol is it’s designed so any set of 7 distinct items could be substituted for solfege syllables. The colors of the rainbow are commonly substituted, for example, turning it into a visual language. 

That flexibility is the most intriguing thing about Solresol to me, although the direct use of music to communicate is an interesting concept, too. It also has a unique script and was popular enough for a while that speakers created three different versions of it, so there’s a good amount of history to geek out about if you dig deeper into the language.

Ithkuil

Creator: John Quijada
Category: Philosophical language
Created in: 2004 

The story of Ithkuil’s creator is almost as interesting as the language itself. John Quijada was an aspiring linguist but couldn’t afford to finish his degree. Instead, he got a job at the DMV and kept writing Ithkuil in his free time, finally publishing its initial version in 2004.

Ithkuil is not a language that’s made to be spoken easily. It is widely regarded as one of the most complicated conlangs ever created, and Quijada has said it was never intended to be a language people would communicate in on an everyday basis. Instead, the goal of the language is to minimize semantic ambiguity and express concepts as precisely as possible. 

To accomplish this, Ithkuil is incredibly complex. The original form of the language used 65 consonants and 17 vowels. A 2007 simplified update, Ilkash, trimmed that down to only 30 consonants and 10 vowels (plus tones), and there have been further updates since that hover around those numbers.

The latest version of the language is agglutinative, with words formed by connecting affixes to roots. It also has a unique morpho-phonetic writing system, which means there are two sets of symbols used, one for grammatical concepts and the other for roots and affixes.

What I maybe find most fascinating about Ithkuil is, despite the fact that it was explicitly not designed to be learnable, people have tried it—and succeeded, in some cases, at least to a degree. The idea of a language that can convey absolute clarity of meaning has some appeal, too, though I don’t think I’ll ever personally try my hand at learning this one. 

Toki Pona

Creator: Sonja Lang
Category: Philosophical language
Created in: 2001 

Toki Pona is on the opposite end of the spectrum from Ithkuil. It’s also a philosophical language, but focused on simplicity. Minimalism is the core concept of the language. It uses only 14 phonemes (9 consonants and 5 vowels) and a core set of 120 words.

The goal of Toki Pona is to promote positive thinking by encouraging people to focus on the essential elements of life. Speakers are forced to express themselves in a simple way, breaking things down to their basic, core component and meaning. The way that speakers use the limited vocabulary to describe more complex concepts reveals the way they think about them.

Despite its extreme simplicity, Toki Pona is a functional language and has a small but active community of online speakers. It also does have its own writing system, Sitelen Pona, which assigns a unique symbol to each of the 120 words in the official language.

If you’re looking for the fastest way to learn a new language, Toki Pona is a strong contender. People who have learned it report grasping the core concepts within 2 weeks, though it can take a few months to fully memorize the vocabulary.

Volapük

Creator: Johann Martin Schleyer
Category: International Auxiliary Language
Created in: 1879 

There was a surge in interest in universal languages during the 19th century, and Volapük was one of the early contenders to come out of that movement. It was created by a German Catholic priest, who combined grammar and vocabulary from various European languages, in a similar way to how other IALs like Esperanto or Interlingua were created.

This is another one whose story is arguably more interesting than the language itself. It was immensely popular in the 1880s. By 1889, the third Volapük convention was held entirely in the language, and there were textbooks for learning it from 25 languages with hundreds of clubs devoted to it across Europe. 

The thing was, the creator of Volapük forgot one key detail about languages: even when they’re constructed, they evolve. He didn’t want to revise the language, or let anyone else do it, either. A schism broke out in the Volapük community. Many of its speakers abandoned the language, turning instead to other IALs invented around the same time, like Esperanto.

Esperanto’s creator, Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, took the opposite approach: he turned control of the language over to its speakers as soon as he had it finalized, which is one thing that’s helped to keep it alive for over a century. Volapük is still around—there’s even a Wikipedia in the language—but it only has about 20-30 active speakers at any given time. In comparison, Esperanto has as many as 2 million speakers, by some estimates, including 1,000 native speakers who were raised to speak it from birth.  

The interesting thing to me about Volapük is looking at is as a case study compared to Esperanto. Looking at the reasons it failed yields insights into the core traits of a successful language—a helpful thing to consider for any aspiring conlanger.

 

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