Constructed Language - Collaborative Constructed Languages

Collaborative Constructed Languages

The Talossan language, a cultural base for the micronation known as Talossa, was created by a single person in 1979. However, as interest in Talossan grew, guidance of the language became (in 1983) the province of a recommending body, the Comità per l'Útzil del Glheþ, and other independent organizations of enthusiasts. Villnian draws on Latin, Greek and the Scandinavian languages. In its syntax and grammar it is reminiscent of Chinese. The core elements were created by a single person and its vocabulary is now enlarged by suggestions from the internet community.

While most constructed languages begin as did Talossan, having been created by a single person, a few are created by group collaborations; examples of these are Interlingua, which was developed by the International Auxiliary Language Association, and Lojban, which was developed by a breakaway group of Loglanists.

Group collaboration has apparently become more common in recent years, as constructed language designers have started using Internet tools to coordinate design efforts. NGL/Tokcir was an early Internet collaborative engineered language whose designers used a mailing list to discuss and vote on grammatical and lexical design issues. More recently, The Demos IAL Project was developing an international auxiliary language with similar collaborative methods. The Voksigid and Novial 98 languages were both worked on by mailing lists, though neither was issued in final form.

Several artistic languages have been developed on different constructed language wikis, usually involving discussion and voting on phonology, grammatical rules and so forth. An interesting variation is the corpus approach, exemplified by Madjal (late 2004) and Kalusa (mid-2006), where contributors simply read the corpus of existing sentences and add their own sentences, perhaps reinforcing existing trends or adding new words and structures. The Kalusa engine adds the ability for visitors to rate sentences as acceptable or unacceptable. There is no explicit statement of grammatical rules or explicit definition of words in this corpus approach; the meaning of words is inferred from their use in various sentences of the corpus, perhaps in different ways by different readers and contributors, and the grammatical rules can be inferred from the structures of the sentences that have been rated highest by the contributors and other visitors.

A special example for this kind of language is Simplish: the German Artist Ulli Purwin tried to set a focus on (what Germans call) 'Anglicisms'—in a humorous way. Everyone is invited to increase the vocabulary: from 'ââtist' to 'ørn'.