The International Language

The international language is an artificial language designed for international use in a secondary capacity; or a national language, either extinct as such or still living, whose use has spread beyond its original boundaries.

The most important international language of the latter kind is Latin, which has served for more than a thousand years as a vehicle of communication in the world of learning and in the Roman Catholic Church. In the eighteenth century French was widely cultivated throughout Europe as the language of polite society. It was the diplomatic language of the world and enjoyed considerable popularity in literary and scientific circles. During the nineteenth century, the prominence of Germany in all fields of scholarly and scientific endeavor made the knowledge of the German War I English has undoubtedly been the most widely known secondary language.

Among the multilingual populations in some parts of the world mixed or hybrid languages have arisen for commercial purposes. Such hybrid languages are Lingua Franca in the Levant, Pidgin English in the ports of the Far East and Swahili in East Africa.

During the seventeenth century, the concept of a philosophical or a priori language was first thought of. The philosophers Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Rene Descartes both believed that a language could be constructed of arbitrary elements arranged accordingly to logical patterns. Several languages were proposed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; as a rule, they were systems of classified concepts represented by corresponding signs.

Much more numerous were the proposed a posteriori languages- those which make use, to a varying extent, of words and notions common to several national languages. Between 1880, and 1907 fifty three universal languages were proposed. Some of these enjoyed an amazing, if temporary, vogue. In 1889 Volapuk claimed nearly a million adherents. Today, it is all but forgotten. A few years later Esperanto experienced a similar popularity, but there is no longer much interest in it. Some a posteriori languages, like Esperanto or Ido, are said to be “schematic”; they aim at simplicity through regular consistent spelling, grammar, and derivation. Others, like Occidental, are called “naturalistic,” since they aim at greater conformity to natural languages. By the side of these autonomous languages, there are some schemes, which involve drastic simplifications of previously existing languages/ such are Latino sine flexion, where simplification has been achieved at the expense of Latin grammar without trying to reduce the vocabulary, and Basic English, where the chief features of English grammar have been left practically intact, but where the vocabulary has been reduced to fewer than one thousand words.

International languages have been constructed because of a conviction that existing languages are too complicated and too irregular, and also because of the very obvious fact that no one existing national language could be elevated to the position of a universal world language without arousing insuperable nationalistic prejudice on the part of the speakers of other tongues of wide usage and recognized importance. A grave defect (though perhaps unavoidable) is that every international language thus far proposed has been essentially upon one of the European families of languages and upon the vocabulary of the Latin-Romance or of the English-speaking world. Hence, for the populations of Asia, Africa, Oceania and even great parts of Europe, acquisition of any one of them would be tantamount to learning a language of a type hitherto more or less unknown. Be fairly easy to gain; but the vocabulary would remain hopelessly alien. Even if the language proved more than a pleasing theoretical exercise and actually became vernacular, it would either remain static, since it seems to allow little scope for further grammatical evolution, or it would be split into dialects.

Authors of recent schemes to promote an international language do not profess any intention of displacing existing national languages. On the contrary, they insist on the auxiliary character of their proposals; the international language is no longer meant to become the sole language of mankind but a second language for all. Experience has shown, it is clamed, that constructed languages can be used with success as international mediums of communicational languages. Otto Jespersen, the Danish linguist and creator of the artificial language Novial, has pointed out that the best among the international languages would compare favorably with national languages as spoken or written by foreigners. The international Auxiliary Language Association of New York, founded in 1924, has been conducting researches on the form of international language best fitted to cover the needs of modern civilization. The group developed Interlingua. This language is based on word forms occurring in English, Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese, grouped into word families and etymologically traced back to the latest form from which they had all derived. This aimed achieve the greatest consistency with all grammars.