A Novelist's Farewell to Auxlangs

A year ago I began this amazing journey, essentially in search of a constructed international auxiliary language in which I could write novels for a global audience. The idea was to find a language easy enough for readers to learn relatively quickly, well enough to read and enjoy a novel, but which was still powerful enough and unambiguous enough to allow literature of the highest standard.

I worked incredibly hard on this quest. The first thing you will notice, if you pick a dozen posts at random and read them, is that I continually changed my mind. Again and again and again and again I would make little lists of the languages which I had 'decided' to learn above all others, but I would stick to learning them only for a few days or a few weeks before creating a new list of languages, often dramatically different from the previous list. This was a symptom.

One month I would be singing the praises of a particular auxlang; the next I would abandon it in disgust. To make matters worse, I went through the entire cycle about three or four times, shuffling languages like cards in a hopelessly loaded deck and dealing them out to myself over and over. I attempted to learn most of the major auxlangs about four times, and when either failure or disappointment came, as it always inevitably did, I wondered if the problem was me (not the languages). Perhaps if I had only tried harder it would have worked out, I thought. This was another symptom.

Finally I came around to learning Esperanto for about the fourth time, since it was the only auxlang still standing as a reasonable choice for the novelist who wishes to write for readers who have no knowledge of any European language. Unsurprisingly my conclusion, like the first three times around the linguistic merry-go-round, was that Esperanto was simultaneously excessively difficult and excessively ambiguous and overall was woefully inadequate. It is one thing to be rather too difficult. It is another thing to be rather too ambiguous. But to learn a language which is simultaneously difficult and ambiguous? Another symptom.

There is a rather large and smelly clue here. What causes all these incredibly intelligent and creative language designers to keep drafting new languages despite the existence of Esperanto? And what caused me to go on a gigantic trek through every auxlang I could find, despite trying Esperanto first? Obviously the answer is that Esperanto, despite its relative popularity, is deeply flawed and that its flaws are not minor but are actually unacceptable. Yet despite a plethora of competing auxlangs, none is today a significant success in terms of number of speakers; most have a few dozen speakers at best. Another symptom.

So putting all these symptoms together what can we conclude? That unfortunately there is no currently available constructed international auxiliary language which is well suited for global literary use at this point in time. There are some languages which show considerable potential but most of them are either too poorly documented or too immature at this point in time. Other languages are generally excellent but not well suited to use by those who do not already speak a European language; although they might be admirable languages their design is not necessarily aimed at maximum ease of use. The bottom line is that right now the language I am looking for does not exist.

One year of repeatedly banging my head against a brick wall attempting to find something which does not yet exist is long enough. It is time to admit defeat.

So, this is a novelist's farewell to auxlangs.

I hasten to add that there are many enjoyable auxlangs out there which one can beneficially learn as a scholar of Indo-European languages or for fun as a private hobby. But for the serious novelist aiming to write the next War and Peace, in a language both easy and powerful, a language accessible to the whole world and not just to those who speak European or Indo-European languages? None.

I furthermore hasten to add that the whole endeavour of creating constructed languages is not a waste of time merely because the languages invented to this date have not found an acceptable solution. On the contrary, this is all the more reason to keep trying, keep inventing, keep thinking laterally. Quite frankly, there is little doubt that if a consortium of major governments ever officially decides to sponsor the creation of an international language, and is willing to fund the endeavour to the tune of a few hundred million dollars, employing the best linguists from a hundred countries around the world, such a project would almost certainly produce a better result than any constructed language currently in existence and would probably hugely facilitate international communication. Creating a language is like a space program: the European Space Agency can make a much better rocket than even the most brilliant genius who builds rockets in his garage. The auxlangs we have now are just backyard rockets.

By the way, in case you think spending a few hundred million dollars on creating an international language is too expensive, consider that the European Union currently spends an estimated €800000000 per year on translation!

For me personally, the existence of Indonesian makes any further investigation of the currently available auxlangs redundant. That has been the truly surprising and unexpected destination of my journey: I found a (mostly) natural language which outperforms all of the auxlangs I have encountered. And this, I now realise, should not be surprising since Indonesian was partly constructed; Indonesian in fact represents a lesson for the European Union to learn from and indeed for the entire planet to learn from. Indonesia, a country consisting of thousands of islands whose inhabitants speak hundreds of different native languages, created Bahasa Indonesia (the proper name of the Indonesian language) as an official standard language with a simple constructed orthography. Essentially Indonesian is a normative form of the Riau dialect of Malay, standardised and rationalised. Compared to Esperanto, for example, it is clearly superior; the only reason this is not quickly apparent and not widely known is because the vast majority of Indonesian words are not recognisable to Europeans.

Now, I am not sure if I will ever write novels in Indonesian. I might, although because it is a national language it could be difficult to convince international readers around the globe to make the investment of learning it, even though it is a much easier language to learn than English. But I am learning Indonesian with great pleasure and at the very least I will enjoy reading books in it myself. And there is some possibility I might one day try to organise the creation of an international auxiliary language based on Indonesian grammar but with more internationally-recognisable words taken from around the planet; such languages are known as worldlangs. Such a language could be called something like Bahasa Internasional, which simply means 'International Language'.

But that is for the future, some time after I have learned Indonesian, and in the meantime I also have the pleasure of learning French to keep me happy.

And so, thanks for reading over this past year. Now I say not "Onward..." but "Farewell", because this is the end of my journey. Adieu. Selamat tinggal.

This is a novelist's farewell to auxlangs.

The End