Language is a wonderful thing, evolving over millennia from simple noises that signified events to the words that allow writers to create complex, intricate works every day. But what about languages that haven’t been created naturally? Rather, some are constructed languages, or conlangs, made by a person or a team of people, to serve a purpose.

One of the original reasons to create conlangs was to provide better communication between differing groups of people. Esperanto is an early conlang, created in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof. It was intended to be easy to learn for speakers of worldwide languages, and it was one of the first to be made for this purpose. It had grammar and words that had similarities to many different languages, so it was easier for everyone to learn. Sadly for Zamenhof, it didn’t end up working out. Although there are several thousand Esperanto speakers today, it never ended up becoming the global communication language he sought.

There are also “simple” conlangs. Toki Pona is a language created by Sonja Lang in 2001 in order to simplify thoughts. It contains an astonishingly low 120 words compared to the 170,000 in English. As Henry David Thoreau said, “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify!” Toki Pona makes use of combining words to create deeper meaning. For example, the language’s name itself is made up of the words “toki” meaning to speak, and “pona” meaning good or simple. So “Toki Pona” means to speak well or speak simply, which are deemed the same in this simple, good language.

For a language on the other side of the spectrum, there is Ithkuil. Classified as a logical language, it’s designed to provide a level of specification not in any natural language. It tests the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language determines thought, posing the question of whether the speed that a language is spoken can influence the speed its speakers think. John Quijada, creator of Ithkuil, doesn’t think this is true because each word takes such a long time to think of in the first place. Ithkuil isn’t designed to be learned by humans. It has an exceedingly large number of root words and suffixes, almost all a combination of just a few sounds, with specifications that’s entirely unnecessary in everyday speech. As an example from the Ithkuil website, the phrase “Ôqölöňtauspûls  êļnelôzra  iaçtaxhtiamsíţ” translates to “Aided by the bird’s own stupidity, the man unexpectedly and accidentally killed it without even realizing he’d done so, by inadvertently letting it out of the house.” As you can see, it’s quite a thought experiment.

Conlangs are a very interesting subject and a fun hobby to get into. Whether it’s just the enjoyment of seeing what crazy linguistic features are in a conlang or making your own, it’s something to check out.