11. Language contact and constructed languages

Abstract

People who construct languages – whether they are called Esperanto (Zamenhof 1887), or Dothraki (Peterson 2011-2016) –, typically do so because they are somehow dissatisfied with the set of existing languages: those are considered inadequate instruments for thought or for communication, or too difficult to learn, or to not fit the imaginary world of a fiction writer. A common distinction in interlinguistics, the field that studies such languages (cf. Schubert 1989 for an overview), is between a posteriori and a priori constructed languages, where the former are built on the model of existing languages (for instance Latine sine flexione of Peano 1903, which, as its name suggests, is basically a version of Latin without the inflectional morphology), whereas the latter are constructed ‘from scratch’, such as Lojban (Cowan 1997), which is supposed to provide a purely logical way of expressing thoughts. However, the a priori – a posteriori distinction is best to be seen as a scale rather than as a binary opposition. On the one hand, a posteriori languages will always display elements of willful design, based on some a priori idea of how languages can be improved. On the other hand, it is probably not difficult to show that a priori language creators are influenced by the languages they already know, and that such influence is similar to the influence that language contact has. Artificial or constructed languages are interesting for any scholar of language contact for this reason alone. They present extreme cases of contact: extreme in the level of consciousness that is involved in their planning, and extreme in that we can typically point to an originator or a committee of originators. Furthermore, in the (rare) case people adopt constructed languages in their everyday life, for instance as a family language, the language will undergo further contact, for instance because there are no communities in which one can live one’s entire life speaking an artificial language. There will always be an ‘outside world’ in which other languages will be used; the speakers of these languages will therefore always be at least bilingual; and these other (‘natural’) languages will always be dominant. In this chapter, I discuss both parts of language contact in constructed languages, where I concentrate mostly on languages from the 19th and 20th Century. Those of the 17th Century were mostly ‘philosophical’ and were not necessarily meant to resemble existing languages in any way; the eventually led to notation systems in logic and mathematics. Languages of the 21 st Century are usually designed for use in fictional worlds and often meant to express the fictionality of those worlds in some way (see Peterson 2015 for a nice introduction for how to use linguistic insights in this kind of language design). The most interesting contact phenomena we find, I think, in languages that were designed for human and international use, and that has been mostly a preoccupation of the 19th and 20th Century. After a terminological discussion in section 1, I first turn to the relevance of the a priori vs. a posteriori dimension in our understanding of language contact before I discuss the way language projects are influenced by existing languages in section 2 and their development when they become part of a community in section 3. The emphasis in this later section will be on Esperanto, as this is the artificial language with the longest history and the widest application. In section 4 I point to some implications of these findings for contact linguistics.