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Constructed language

An artificial or constructed language, colloquially conlang, is a language whose vocabulary and grammar were specifically devised by humans, rather than having naturally evolved as part of a culture like a natural language. They are usually designed for use in human communication, the same as natural languages. Many are devised to function as an international auxiliary language, but they can also be created for secrecy, use in fiction, or linguistic experimentation.

The term planned language is also used, especially for international auxiliary languages, and by those who may object to the more common term "artificial". Speakers of Esperanto, for example, have said that "Esperanto is an artificial language like an automobile is an artificial horse."

Constructed languages are often divided into a priori languages, in which much of the grammar and vocabulary is created from scratch to serve a particular purpose, and a posteriori languages, where the grammar and vocabulary are derived from one or more natural languages and are intended to resemble them. A posteriori languages can be further divided into naturalistic planned languages which follow the natural languages from which they are patterned closely to minimize learning time, and schematic planned languagess, whose features are deliberately simplified or synthesized from various sources.

Another common way of dividing up constructed languages is:

A constructed language can have "native" speakers, if children learn it at a young age from parents who have learned the language. Esperanto has a considerable number of native speakers, variously estimated to be between 200 and 2000. A member of the Klingon Language Institute, d'Armond Speers, attempted to raise his son as a native Klingon speaker, but found that at that time the vocabulary of Klingon was not quite large enough to express the large number of objects normally found in the home, such as "table" or "bottle".

Proponents of particular constructed languages often have many reasons for using them. Among these, often cited is the famous but disputed Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which claims that the language one speaks essentially limits and drives the way in which one thinks. Thus, a "better" language should allow the speaker to reach some elevated level of intelligence. Many question the validity of this claim.

Note that a constructed language is not necessarily an international auxiliary language; many people construct languages as hobbies, experiments, etc.

Table of contents
1 Intended for general human use
2 Intended for machine assisted automatic translation purposes
3 Non-verbal languages
4 Languages designed for knowledge representation
5 Languages of fictional worlds and peoples
6 Language games
7 See also
8 External links

Intended for general human use

Intended for machine assisted automatic translation purposes

Non-verbal languages

Languages designed for knowledge representation

Languages of fictional worlds and peoples

See Fictional language.

Language games

See also

External links