State Engineered Conlangs

[Nachtswalbe]

In certain works of speculative fiction, states may use artificial languages either to make a clean break with the old society, and to better enforce control (Newspeak), or as a replacement for all local languages (Basic English in The Shape of Things to Come, by HG Wells). However I find it unrealistic either scenario would occur because leadership would have to waste time learning an invented language even if it was derived from their mother tongue.


There is the Israeli case, but Hebrew was used as a liturgical language already, and the shift from Yiddish and other languages to Hebrew occurred as part of nation building.

How could something like this occur plausibly?

[Pabappa]

I've considered this a few times for my writing but I haven't really found a good place to work it into the timeline. I don't even know yet whether I'd be doing a Newspeak-style language where just a few aspects have changed (and people could presumably still understand the source language) or an entirely new, whole cloth, language who speakers would lose the ability to understand any communication from the outside world.

I had a good opportunity to put the latter idea to use, in that there arose a society whose leaders (a corporation, not a party) so abused their population that they realized the need to keep them trapped in their territory, as any contact with the outside world could lead to a flood of escape attempts. However, as it happened, I decided not to create a conlang for this society because the nation's borders corresponded well enough with the settlement area of the dominant tribe, meaning that they for all practical purposes had a language to themselves already, and although there were related languages spoken nearby, none was close enough to enable readily understandable communication.

It also made me realize that in such a society, if even a single person were to escape, they could teach the entire language to the outside world and make the use of the private language moot. So, I decided that having the trapped people use the ancestral language was just about as good.

Another opportunity to use a created language I've come up with is in some societies where a slaveholding class rules two different groups of slaves, and wants to set them against each other by forcing them to learn different languages so they could not form a unified slave army and overthrow their masters. Here, too, though, it made more sense for me to just have the slaves continue to use their ancestral languages (or at least pick two among many), and even though this would require the slaveholders to learn two or sometimes three languages themselves, I dont think that's such a great barrier and the slaveowners could even take pride in their accomplishments.

[Ares Land]

There have been interesting developments in French in the past years.

• People are coming up with new, gender-neutral pronouns. (iel, celleux, etc.) I didn't think this would catch on, but surprisingly, it did. A number of activists is using these.
• There's a huge tendancy towards feminizing profession names. Ten years ago or so, using the masculine as a 'neutral' of sorts was more common.
• People are reviewing gender agreement rules. (When dealing with a group that includes both men and women, the traditional rule is to use the masculine. Now a number of strategies are used.

I think English speakers won't be surprised by any of this, as the same kind of phenomenon is happening in English. You can compare this to the use of -x as an ending in Spanish, which feels similar.

The details are interesting but besides the point here. The interesting thing is that all of this is essentially conlanging: conscious creation of language. (As opposed to language evolution, which typically we're only very vaguely aware of.)

I'm not getting into whether any of this is is a good thing. I've my own opinion on the matter, but it's irrelevant. What's interesting is that it's happening, not that it's right.

I should add that not everyone does that. Not even the majority. It's essentially used by activists, so a tiny minority of people in relative terms... but hey, still a huge number in absolute terms.

Why are people doing this?

• Essentially they feel they are correcting a wrong. The feeling is that using inclusive language is the morally correct thing to do.
• It's part of an effort to change society. Believe or not, the names 'Sapir' and 'Whorf' have been used in mainstream media. The people who put these linguistic changes into practices do believe they change the manner of thinking by changing language.
• I think to some extent is a group marker. When someone is using 'iel' or 'celleux', there's a strong sense that they are 'one of us'. (Or, conversely, one of those damn social justice warriors.)

I think the moral angle helps.

How about using this as a model? Imagine, for instance, that anarcho-syndicalists are a sizeable minority. I could very well see Pravic spreading if you can make a case that using Pravic is more egalitarian and morally more correct.
(It'd probably help if Pravic isn't too hard to learn. Getting back to my example, learning an extra pronouns and changing agreement rules isn't a huge step.)
Once you get a minority speaking Pravic, suppose then that they get in power. A sufficiently motivated modern government is good at imposing language on people. (Again, using France as an example, standard French replaced regional languages in about a century.)

[Rounin Ryuuji]

It might be worth considering that the desire for a "national" language does typically tend to push a population to prefer the language of some one of its regions (whether the capital, as with English, French, Japanese, and Mandarin, or some place which happened to produce an author now considered classical, as with German and Italian) and to treat it as a standard form of that language. It really does help if it's the one that developed into the literary form or was aristocratic in some way, which can also cause the survival of otherwise obsolete forms (as with some French verb tenses, and Classical Japanese), at least in certain contexts.

Language can also be a mark of social standing. When declaring his intention to surrender, then-emperor Hirohito used a very old-fashioned form of Japanese that was no longer widely spoken, but which had presumably been taught to him. It was also certainly rather artificial to continue using "proper" Latin after it had ceased to be widely-understood, but the ability to speak it meant one was educated, and consequently had had the means or patronage to become educated. Written language perceived as "proper" also tends to be at least a few decades behind the development of the spoken form, and can preserve otherwise obsolete features (as with the French literary tenses). I don't think it's consequently all that implausible for the ruling class to be willing to learn an artificial language derived from their natural one, as long as they have a plausible motive to do so in context. A well-established ruling class can also tend to prefer to be fashionable rather than socioculturally conservative, and this engineered form of language being fashionable could do wonders towards getting the "aristocracy" to adopt it.

The thing about a language designed to replace all other varieties is that language will generally continue to develop regional varieties, no matter what form education takes, so that it will eventually either splinter, or some form of diglossia will emerge. A situation (at least in fiction) could possibly occur in which this has only just happened, and the characters involved are all perhaps second-generation speakers, and have fairly uniform usage outside a few individual quirks, and having some difference in register already emergent. In such a scenario, however, people would probably still learn and study older languages, in order to read primary sources written in them, and if there's quite a lot of textual matter in one formerly-used language on a given subject, that formerly-used language's vocabulary will presumably be a source of new technical jargon for that field (especially if most of the vocabulary relating to it in the new language isn't derived from that language already).

[hwhatting]

In certain works of speculative fiction, states may use artificial languages either to make a clean break with the old society, and to better enforce control (Newspeak), or as a replacement for all local languages (Basic English in The Shape of Things to Come, by HG Wells). However I find it unrealistic either scenario would occur because leadership would have to waste time learning an invented language even if it was derived from their mother tongue.

The Newspeak in "1984" was no clean break, though, it was English in which undesirable words were gradually replaced by new words that still were constructed out of English material (e.g. "bad" -> "ungood"). The break is rather cumulative - someone raised with the Newspeak of the 1970s would have difficulties understanding texts from before Engsoc. The process is described as still ongoing in the novel and is even used to move the plot; O'Brien starts contacting Winston by asking him which version of the official dictionary he is using for his work and offers to give him a more up-to-date one. I could well imagine that kind of gradual process of replacement happening in a totalitarian state.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Simplified Chinese has a similar effect, if I understand right.

[Vardelm]

I think English speakers won't be surprised by any of this, as the same kind of phenomenon is happening in English. You can compare this to the use of -x as an ending in Spanish, which feels similar.

I've seen a fair bit of the -x ending where people are trying to be inclusive. My understanding is that is already being replaced by "Latine", which is thought to be even more inclusive & appropriate. I don't know if that will catch on, but it's interesting to see a sort of debate about what endings will be used in real-ish time.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I do tend to prefer Latine (I would expect more "inclusive" Spanish to replace the ending -o and -a with -e to provide a neutral form) to Latin-x.

[Nachtswalbe]

One scenario is where two countries speak the same language but A creates a simplified version of the language to distinguish itself from B and to use as an auxlang.

[Pabappa]

the -x thing honestly surprised me because i remember seeing @ used as the gender-neutral noun marker back in the early 2000s, maybe 2004 or so if i had to pick a year. -e makes more sense intuitively than either of the others, since it doesnt disrupt the visual order of the words.

[Travis B.]

I do tend to prefer Latine (I would expect more "inclusive" Spanish to replace the ending -o and -a with -e to provide a neutral form) to Latin-x.

I agree, -x is just too jarring to me, whereas -e fits much better aesthetically.

[Zju]

Aren't 19th century filled-with-native-neologisms standard languages state engineered to an extent? Seems like a good potential starting point to go down the slippery slope.

[Nachtswalbe]

Aren't 19th century filled-with-native-neologisms standard languages state engineered to an extent? Seems like a good potential starting point to go down the slippery slope.

Designs like Anglic which replace non-Germanic roots are an extension of this, although I would prefer using common roots, Germanic or Latin

[zompist]

How could something like this occur plausibly?

In a sense it does occur, as part of the process of modern nation-building, especially after a revolution. A speech variety is chosen, often one that is spoken only by a minority. A new writing system may be introduced. Not infrequently a more demotic version of the existing literary language is promoted. If it's not European, a huge number of technical terms must be invented.

There are examples in literally every country, including the US. (The only successful English spelling reform was Noah Webster's, soon after our revolution.) But I'll give two. First, the official language of Pakistan is Urdu, which almost no one speaks, except a tiny minority. The politically dominant language is Punjabi, but it's not dominant enough to be imposed on everyone. (To make things even more complicated, the laws are written in English. This leads to a strange situation in the courts: the judges and lawyers speak Urdu, discussing laws that are in English; the defendants and plaintiffs know neither language.)

Two, after the 1911 Chinese Revolution, the Chinese replaced the literary language, wényán, with the vernacular, Mandarin. To unify the spoken language, they created a five-tone system which no one actually spoke— it was said that the only person who could actually pronounce it correctly was the linguist Yuen-ren Chao. That one was eventually abandoned in favor of Beijing's tone system, which shows that there are limits to this sort of thing.

It's true that no one has chosen a conlang per se. But both of these examples show that it's quite possible to pick a language almost no one speaks.

(You may ask, why did they choose like that? In both cases, because there was a very wide variety of languages spoken by the people, and it was desired not to favor any one region.)

[Nachtswalbe]

Urdu and Mandarin examples
It's true that no one has chosen a conlang per se. But both of these examples show that it's quite possible to pick a language almost no one speaks.

The example I had in mind was that the conlang would be promoted as a “neutral” language for the same reason Urdu was, but there would also be a clear politically powerful plurality whose language was already learned e.g English in the Americas and most countries, so the conlang would be an artificially creolized version, like Basic English but also extended to phonology and morphology.

To extend the HG Wells example, it would also borrow lots of loan words from the languages it sought to extinguish, making it lexically unintelligible even without morphological and phonological changes

[Pabappa]

Im more of an experimental conlanger myself .... if I ever find a place to put this idea into practice, it will be packed to the brim with propaganda. e.g. for a society of nudists (who are more vulnerable and thus easier to control), all their words for articles of clothing would be derived from roots describing unpleasant things such as skin rashes, being tied up, and so on. Atomic root words for weapons would be replaced by long compounds, reminding the speakers that weapons are unnatural. Some verbs rquire an extra promotion morpheme if the agent is human, even t hough these speakers are themselves humans, making it more difficult for humans to conceive of certain actions in everyday life since they belong to their respective animals.

Sorry, Im not explaing myself very well here .... I'd have a better time posting the language directly, so I could show it in action .... but I wont create this language until I have a place to put it.

I also plan to create a true international auxiliary language, which to be honest I actually had forgotten about until just now ... I havenmt even begun to work on it yet because I havent finished the language its going to be based on. This IAL will be about solving *their* communication problems, not ours, but it will not be stuffed full of propganda even though its creators would have had an excellent opportunity to do so.

[vegfarandi]

How could something like this occur plausibly?

In a sense it does occur, as part of the process of modern nation-building, especially after a revolution. A speech variety is chosen, often one that is spoken only by a minority. A new writing system may be introduced. Not infrequently a more demotic version of the existing literary language is promoted. If it's not European, a huge number of technical terms must be invented.

There are examples in literally every country, including the US. (The only successful English spelling reform was Noah Webster's, soon after our revolution.) But I'll give two. First, the official language of Pakistan is Urdu, which almost no one speaks, except a tiny minority. The politically dominant language is Punjabi, but it's not dominant enough to be imposed on everyone. (To make things even more complicated, the laws are written in English. This leads to a strange situation in the courts: the judges and lawyers speak Urdu, discussing laws that are in English; the defendants and plaintiffs know neither language.)

Two, after the 1911 Chinese Revolution, the Chinese replaced the literary language, wényán, with the vernacular, Mandarin. To unify the spoken language, they created a five-tone system which no one actually spoke— it was said that the only person who could actually pronounce it correctly was the linguist Yuen-ren Chao. That one was eventually abandoned in favor of Beijing's tone system, which shows that there are limits to this sort of thing.

It's true that no one has chosen a conlang per se. But both of these examples show that it's quite possible to pick a language almost no one speaks.

(You may ask, why did they choose like that? In both cases, because there was a very wide variety of languages spoken by the people, and it was desired not to favor any one region.)

Indonesian is another similar example. This dialect of Malay was essentially adopted as a lingua franca for Indonesia as a language that a significant people knew but that wasn't a majority language and felt politically somewhat neutral. Over time, Indonesian has become bigger and bigger and devoloped into regional varieties with influence from local languages but I believe when Indonesia became independent, only about 10% of the people spoke it. Now it's spoken by ~200 million people (~50 million L1).