Often, the term is used specifically to refer to planned or constructed languages proposed to ease international communication, such as Esperanto, Ido and Interlingua.
Lingua francas have arisen around the globe throughout human history, sometimes for commercial reasons (so-called "trade languages") but also for diplomatic and administrative convenience, and as a means of exchanging information between scientists and other scholars of different nationalities.
Since all natural languages display a number of irregularities in grammar that make them more difficult to learn, and they are also associated with the national and cultural dominance of the nation that speaks it as its mother tongue,[citation needed] attention began to focus on the idea of creating an artificial or constructed language as a possible solution.
However, most or all of these languages were, as far as can be told from the surviving publications about them, too incomplete and unfinished to serve as auxlangs (or for any other practical purpose).
During the 19th century, a bewildering variety of such constructed international auxiliary languages (IALs) were proposed, so Louis Couturat and Léopold Leau in Histoire de la langue universelle (1903) reviewed 38 projects.
Volapük, first described in an article in 1879 by Johann Martin Schleyer and in book form the following year, was the first to garner a widespread international speaker community.
Under Waldemar Rosenberger, who became the director in 1892, the original Academy began to make considerable changes in the grammar and vocabulary of Volapük.
The vocabulary and the grammatical forms unfamiliar to Western Europeans were completely discarded, so that the changes effectively resulted in the creation of a new language, which was named "Idiom Neutral".
This simplified Latin, devoid of inflections and declensions, was named Interlingua by Peano but is usually referred to as "Latino sine flexione".
After the emergence of Volapük, a wide variety of other auxiliary languages were devised and proposed in the 1880s–1900s, but none except Esperanto gathered a significant speaker community.
[citation needed] From early on, Esperantists created their own culture which helped to form the Esperanto language community.
[12] Esperanto is spoken today in a growing number of countries and it has multiple generations of native speakers,[citation needed] although it is primarily used as a second language.
Edgar de Wahl's Occidental of 1922 was in reaction against the perceived artificiality of some earlier auxlangs, particularly Esperanto.
However, this design criterion was in conflict with the ease of coining new compound or derived words on the fly while speaking.
[18] It was mostly inspired by Idiom Neutral and Occidental, yet it attempted a derivational formalism and schematism sought by Esperanto and Ido.
Interlingua, published in 1951, was primarily the work of Alexander Gode, though he built on preliminary work by earlier IALA linguists including André Martinet, and relied on elements from previous naturalistic auxlang projects, like Peano's Interlingua (Latino sine flexione), Jespersen's Novial, de Wahl's Interlingue, and the Academy's Idiom Neutral.
The theory underlying Interlingua posits an international vocabulary, a large number of words and affixes that are present in a wide range of languages.
This already existing international vocabulary was shaped by social forces, science and technology, to "all corners of the world".
Interlingua's success can be explained by the fact that it is the most widely understood international auxiliary language by virtue of its naturalistic (as opposed to schematic) grammar and vocabulary, allowing those familiar with a Romance language, and educated speakers of English, to read and understand it without prior study.
The CONLANG mailing list was founded in 1991; in its early years discussion focused on international auxiliary languages.
Besides giving the existing auxlangs with speaker communities a chance to interact rapidly online as well as slowly through postal mail or more rarely in personal meetings, the Internet has also made it easier to publicize new auxlang projects, and a handful of these have gained a small speaker community, including Kotava (published in 1978), Lingua Franca Nova (1998), Slovio (1999), Interslavic (2006), Pandunia (2007), Sambahsa (2007), Lingwa de Planeta (2010), and Globasa (2019).
Louis Couturat et al.[27] described the controversy in the preface to their book International Language and Science: Leopold Pfaundler wrote that an IAL was needed for more effective communication among scientists: For Couturat et al., Volapükists and Esperantists confounded the linguistic aspect of the question with many side issues, and they considered this a main reason why discussion about the idea of an international auxiliary language has appeared unpractical.
Though interest among scholars, and linguists in particular, waned greatly throughout the 20th century,[30] such differences of approach persist today.
Some consonant sounds found in several Latin-script IAL alphabets are not represented by an ISO 646 letter in IPA.
As a reference for comparison, one can find the Latin, English, French, and Spanish versions here: Pater noster, qui es in cælis, sanctificetur nomen tuum.
Et ne nous laisse pas entrer en tentation mais délivre-nous du Mal.
El pan nuestro de cada día dánosle hoy; y perdónanos nuestras deudas así como nosotros perdonamos a nuestros deudores; no nos dejes caer en la tentación, mas líbranos del mal.
Patro Nia, kiu estas en la ĉielo, via nomo estu sanktigita.
Examples range from the original Characteristica Universalis proposed by the philosopher Leibniz in the 17th century, to suggestions for the adoption of Chinese writing, to recent inventions such as Blissymbol, first published in 1949.
[48] The term "Euroclone" was coined to refer to such languages in contrast to "worldlangs" with global vocabulary sources.