Most successful constructed language

How successful could a constructed language be? Could it acquire millions of speakers? What circumstances would be required for such success, and how far back would the POD have to be? By constructed language, I mean the artificial creation of an individual or group of designers, not merely a revival of a previously extant natural language.
 
I don't see any situation where people would learn an artificial language nobody understands when they can learn a popular extant one. Similarly, I don't see any reason for monolingual speakers of a popular language to learn an artificial one.
 
Languages are so diverse and evolve so much because language changes are a useful way to outgroup and ingroup. In very broad terms, I see three ways this AHC could happen:

1. As part of a deliberate process of ethnogenesis, a group creates their own language and then manages to succeed and spread over the years. This would be somewhat similar to Modern Hebrew.

2. A new religion (using a broad definition of religion) has a special language that they use. The religion spreads. I'm actually surprised this hasn't happened. Successful religions need barriers for entry and some kind of serious commitment from their adherents in order to thrive. But most commitments either seem ludicrous to outsiders (rituals) or run up against human nature (commandments, sin). Maybe Esperanto or something like it becomes a more successful part of the progressive faith, more akin to veganism, or some sort of equivalent happens for the rightwing nationalist faith, maybe a reconstructed PIE that serves as a basis for pan-European white nationalism.

3. A power conspiracy adopts a constructed language for whatever ostensible reason but functionally because it helps them have very strong ingroup solidarity and better conspiring opportunites. Eventually in the course of the circulation of elites, this particular faction takes power. Their constructed language is high prestige and spreads.

At the margin, these three bleed into each other.
 
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Here's a bizarre and not very well thought out option:

Some group like the Tianming or the modernizers in Japan or Peter the Great either (1) get their hands on a number of foreign texts in some language that is perceived as 'modern', but for whatever reason they don't have good access to actual speakers of that language, so they try to adopt the language in order to be more modern but end up creating a new language or (2) deliberately create a new language based on high prestige and modern foreign languages but using simplified features of their own language to make it easier to adopt or (3) decide to adopt Esperanto as more modern and advanced.
 

JJohnson

Banned
Esperanto is the most widely known constructed language. But I like my own Niw Englisc - it's a 'what-if' of Old English evolving like German did, retaining cases and inflections, and adding in new words as needed. I've been told that Germans and Dutch can understand it almost like their own languages.
 
Esperanto had a (very small) chance of becoming an international language. It's trivial to learn (compared to natural languages) and in a less Anglo dominated world, it might have been widely adopted. A world without OTL's World Wars, with Germany and France both as major world powers, could easily see France, for instance, insisting on any treaties not in French be in Esperanto, and Germany insisting treaties not be in French.
It could easily be the official language of a LoN/UN equivalent.
 
Esperanto had a (very small) chance of becoming an international language. It's trivial to learn (compared to natural languages) and in a less Anglo dominated world, it might have been widely adopted. A world without OTL's World Wars, with Germany and France both as major world powers, could easily see France, for instance, insisting on any treaties not in French be in Esperanto, and Germany insisting treaties not be in French.
It could easily be the official language of a LoN/UN equivalent.

Agreed. I do believe that th only chance for this scenario to happen is a multi-polar world, with a post French Revolution POD. Before that, a possible scenario is a world where somehow the Lingua Franca Mediterranea gets an official international status. Since there were many version of this language, an international committee of scholars writes a new, standardized grammar and vocabulary, introducing some features from, say, Latin, in order to make it a nobler language, making it the facto semi-artificial. A bit of a stretch, I admit, but at least the Lingua Franca was actually used all over the Mediterranean well into the XIX Century.
 
but at least the Lingua Franca was actually used all over the Mediterranean
Well, the Lingua Franca was so successful that it gave it's name to a whole category of languages. Or language usages.

It, however, was not 'constructed', and if someone tried to modify it enough to qualify, it would likely fail as being neither something everyone already knew, nor really easy easy to learn, nor an imperial language.

Oh, I am sure you could get a non ASB TL that made work, but it would be really, really improbable.
 
Well, the Lingua Franca was so successful that it gave it's name to a whole category of languages. Or language usages.

It, however, was not 'constructed', and if someone tried to modify it enough to qualify, it would likely fail as being neither something everyone already knew, nor really easy easy to learn, nor an imperial language.

Oh, I am sure you could get a non ASB TL that made work, but it would be really, really improbable.
Yeah, I admitted it was a stretch. The modifications I was thinking about were a sort of a compromise between the different versions of the lingua franca, but I have to be honest, that hardly makes it artificial. I simply liked the idea of an actual, historical pidgin "service language" gaining official status. Or maybe, Zamenhof stumbles upon the Lingua Franca, which was an existing language already fulfilling (at least partially) his desires for an international language and uses it as a basis for an ALT-Esperanto. This language eventually becomes the official Language of a Federalist "European Union" after an ALT-WWII in which a larger Soviet Block (including all of Germany) gives the drive for a quicker and more radical union of the Western European Countries.
 
People don't easily begin use totally foreign language as their first one voluntarely if not move to another country but even then they would speak local language. Only way how for example Esperanto could become first language of some group is that there is space colony or very large spaceship where is people who speak several different languages and they decide that it is easier that all learn one language for example Esperanto.
 
How successful could a constructed language be? Could it acquire millions of speakers? What circumstances would be required for such success, and how far back would the POD have to be? By constructed language, I mean the artificial creation of an individual or group of designers, not merely a revival of a previously extant natural language.

Look at the coding languages in OTL.
 
I wonder: If someone not only constructed a new language, but also wrote a great book that loses so much in translation that you have to read the original...
 
I wonder: If someone not only constructed a new language, but also wrote a great book that loses so much in translation that you have to read the original...
That is the case for all languages though. It is the job of the translator to overcome that. Still, you have cases like poetry where things are literally untranslatable. Or at least not without an annotation, but that isn't as exciting.
 
That's true, you did.

Tok Pisin in New Guinea, Swahili in parts of East Africa, Kreyol (Haitian Creole), and arguably Bahasa Indonesia and Afrikaans would count, no?
Sorry... my bad. I was mainly thinking about Europe/the Mediterranean basin, but of course all the examples do count. By the way, thank you for pointing them out; I did not know anything about Tok Pisin, and I liked to learn (something) about it.
 
A robot separatist state that's antagonistic toward humans might choose to create an original language to distance themselves from humans.
Well unless the robot was a simulated version of the human brain, or an unusual system of interconnected chatbots, then it probably wouldn't use natural language in the first place.

However, if it's capable of reprogramming itself to the extent that it becomes antagonistic to humans, then even if it started off using natural language it would soon switch to something more efficient.
 
I wonder: If someone not only constructed a new language, but also wrote a great book that loses so much in translation that you have to read the original...

Even currently texts are losing something when they are translated. Speciality religious texts lost much of original meaning when are translated. Poetry and some jokes are too such that they lost much stuff when are translated. Sometimes I have seen when British comedies have became even more difficult to understand when they are translated. And even translation of some novels have been pretty difficult. I have once read where person who translated Harry Potter books in Finnish that it was sometimes very difficult job.
 
I have once read where person who translated Harry Potter books in Finnish that it was sometimes very difficult job.

I think it is mostly with the "names that mean something" and all the "magical language". Translating English fantasy names and terms into Finnish rarely works out very well, in my view. Words that are great in English often look just daft if they are translated into Finnish, even if the translator is a good one and does his/her best job. Cultural specificity is a bitch.
 
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