How do you Invent a Language?

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March 24th marks the birth anniversary of Dario
Fo, an Italian actor, playwright, comedian,
singer, theatre director, songwriter, painter,
and political campaigner known to the world for
his Nobel prize-winning play Mistero Buffo. The
play, staged in 1969, is a series of monologues
drawn from the Biblical apocrypha, Italian folk
tales and the Commedia dellArte. One of the most
peculiar features of the Mistero Buffo is the
language in which it is performed, Grammelot.
This constructed language, which goes back before
the 1500s, comprises of dialects of the Po river
valley, invented words which emulate
stereotypical sounds of different foreign
languages and gestures which assume a critical
role in the spectator understanding of the
play. On the occasion of Dario Fos birth
anniversary, lets take a look at other
artificial or constructed languages. Esperanto Esp
eranto is the most widely spoken artificial
language in the world with approximately 2
million speakers worldwide. It was created in
1887 by the Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist Ludwik
Lejzer Zamenhof with the objectives to make the
study of a language as easy as possible and to
make communication easy between people from
different countries and cultures.
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Fun fact In the Charlie Chaplin movie The Great
Dictator, the shop signs in the Jewish ghetto
are written in Esperanto. Klingon (tlhIngan
Hol) The Klingon language was originally
developed by Dr. Marc Okrand for the American
movie and TV series Star Trek. As per the Klingon
Language Institute website, although Klingons
have never existed, the language has been
developed from gibberish to a proper tongue with
its own writing system, grammar, vocabulary,
figures of speech and regional dialects. A
Klingon version of A Christmas Carol (tlhIngan
ram nI bom) was premiered in 2007 in
Minnesota. Fun fact Dr. dArmond Speers, a
Klingon speaker, raised his son Alec to speak
Klingon as a first language. After his fifth
birthday, though, Alec stopped responding to his
father in Klingon.
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Toki Pona Toki Pona was invented in 2001 by Sonja
Elen Kisa, a Toronto-based translator and
linguist. This is possibly the worlds smallest
language, with only little more than 100 words
and 14 letters. With such a small basic
vocabulary, a lot of words are created as
compound words, for example purple would be
translated as laso (blue) loje (red). Toki Pona
mainly borrows from European languages such as
English, Finnish, and Dutch, but also from
Chinese, Acadian French and Tok Pisin. Fun fact
The creation of compound words in Toki Pona is
quite subjective and entirely depends on the
individual perception and different situations.
For example, the term car could be translated
as tomo tawa (indoor space)
(moving) if you mean it like a space used for
movements
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Fun fact In the Russian translation of the
novel, most of the Russian-borrowed terms are
retained in their English transliteration. In the
past, people have created artificial or
constructed languages with the main objective of
making communication easier and break the
language barriers between people speaking
different languages. Of all the languages
mentioned in this article, Esperanto seems to be
the best example. However, Grammelot too was
initially developed with this objective jesters
travelling from one end to the other of Medieval
Europe, who could not speak all the languages of
the countries they visited, created a language
made of onomatopoeic sounds, gestures and words
which simulate the stereotypical sounds of those
foreign languages, so that everybody would
understand and enjoy their performances. In the
last couple of centuries, however, the so called
artlang or artistic languages began to arise.
This particular type of artificial languages
generally serves aesthetic or artistic purposes
and includes Klingon, Dothraki, Nadsat, but also
Navi (from the movie Avatar), Quenya and
Sindarin (from Tolkiens The Lord of the
Rings).
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People have been inventing languages since
centuries many think that St. Hildegard of
Bingens Lingua Ignota, which was created in the
XXII century, is the first example of artificial
language. Creating an accurate list of
constructed languages seems like a daunting task
as there exists thousands of languages simply
created for artistic purposes (the now closed
website langmaker.com listed more than 1,900
invented languages in 2007). So, what seems to be
the future of artificial languages? Given the
data in our hands, it is easy to predict that the
number of these kinds of languages is just going
to increase in the future as artificial languages
are increasingly used in literary work, TV series
and movies to add realism to the story. The
public has been extremely receptive to these new
languages, with people learning the artificial
tongue and using it for online or offline
everyday communication.