Auxlangs are auxiliary languages: conlangs specifically created to be a medium of communication, rather than for artistic purposes. In other words, auxlangs are made to be used. And two auxlangs have become relatively popular in the world. Esperanto is actually spoken by a couple million people, and it has, at times, been considered a possibility for adoption by large groups of people. Lojban, though constructed on different principles, is likewise an example of an auxlang being used to communicate.

The promise of auxlangs, of course, is the end of mistranslation. Different languages have different meanings, different grammars, different ways of looking at the world. That results in some pretty awful failures to communicate; a quick Internet search should net you hundreds of “translation fails”. But if we had a language designed to be a go-between for speakers of, say, English and Spanish, then things wouldn’t be so bad, right?

That’s the idea, anyway. Esperanto, despite its numerous flaws, does accomplish this to a degree. Lojban is…less useful for speaking, but it has a few benefits that we’ll call “philosophical”. And plenty of conlangers think they will make the one true international auxiliary language.

So let’s fast-forward a few centuries. Esperanto was invented on the very edge of living memory, as we know, and Lojban is even younger than that, but Rome wasn’t built in a day. Once auxlangs have a bit of history behind them, will any of them achieve that Holy Grail?

The obvious contender

They’d have to get past English, first. Right now, the one thing holding back auxlang adoption is English. Sure, less than a quarter of the world’s population speaks it, but it’s the language for global communication right now. Nothing in the near future looks likely to take its place, but let’s look at the next best options.

Chinese, particularly Mandarin, may have a slight edge in sheer numbers, but it’s, well, Chinese. It’s spoken by Chinese, written by Chinese, and it’s almost completely confined to China. Sure, Japan, Korea, and much of Southeast Asia took parts of its writing system and borrowed tons of words, but that was a thousand years ago. Today, Chinese is for China. No matter how many manufacturing jobs move there (and they’re starting to leave), it won’t be the world language. That’s not to say we won’t pick a few items from it, though.

On the surface, Arabic looks like another candidate. It’s got a few hundred million speakers right now, and they’re growing. It has a serious written history, the support of multiple nations…it’s almost the perfect setup. But that’s Classical Arabic, the kind used in the Koran. Real-life “street” Arabic is a horrible mess of dialects, some mutually unintelligible. But let’s take the classical tongue. Can it gain some purchase as an auxlang?

Probably not. Again, Arabic is associated with a particular cultural “style”. It’s not only used by Muslims or even Arabs, mind you, but that’s the common belief. There’s a growing backlash against Muslims in certain parts of the world, and some groups are taking advantage of this to further fan the flames. (I write this a few hours after the Brussels bombings on March 22.) But Arabic’s problems aren’t entirely political. It’s an awful language to try to speak, at least by European standards. Chinese has tones, yes, but you can almost learn those; pharyngeal and emphatic consonants are even worse for us. Now imagine the trouble someone from Japan would have.

Okay, so the next two biggest language blocks are out. What’s left? Spanish is a common language for most of two continents, although it has its own dialect troubles. Hindi is phonologically complex, and it’s not even a majority language in its own country. Latin is dead, as much as academics hate to acknowledge that fact. Almost nothing else has the clout of English, Chinese, and Arabic. It would take a serious upheaval to make any of them the world’s lingua franca.

Outliving usefulness

It’s entirely possible that we’ll never need an international auxiliary language at all, because automatic translation becomes good enough for daily use in real-time. Some groups are making great headway on this right now, and it’s only expected to get better.

If that’s the case, auxlangs are then obsolete. There’s no other way of putting it. If computers can translate between any two languages at will, then why do you need yet another one to communicate with people? It seems likely that computing will only become more ubiquitous. Wearables look silly to me, but I’ll admit that I’m not the best judge of such things. Perhaps they’ll go mainstream within the next decade.

Whatever computers you have on your person, whether in the form of a smartphone or headgear, likely won’t be powerful enough to do the instantaneous translation needed for conversation, but it’ll be connected to the Internet (sorry, the cloud), with all the access that entails. Speech and text could both be handled by such a system, probably using cameras for the latter.

For auxlang designers, that’s very much a dystopian future. Auxiliary languages effectively become a subset of artlangs. But never fear. Not everyone will have a connection. Not everyone will have the equipment. It’ll take time for the algorithms to learn how to translate the thousands of spoken languages in the world, even if half of them are supposed to go extinct in the coming decades.

The middle road

Auxlangs, then, have a tough road ahead. They have to displace English as the world language, then hold off the other natural contenders. They need real-time translation to be a much more intractable problem than Google and Microsoft are making it out to be. But there’s a sliver of a chance.

Not all auxlangs are appropriate as an international standard of communication. Lojban is nice in a logical, even mathematical way, but it’s too complicated for most people. A truly worldwide auxlang won’t look like that. So what would it look like?

It’ll be simple, that’s for sure. Think something closer to pidgins and creoles than lambda calculus. Something like Toki Pona might be too far down the scale of simplicity, but it’s a good contrast. The optimum is probably nearer to it than to Lojban. Esperanto and other simplified Latins can work, but you need to strip out a lot of filler. Remember, everyone has to speak this, from Europeans to Inuits to Zulus to Aborigines, and everywhere in between. You can’t please everybody, but you can limit the damage.

Phonology would also tend to err on the side of simplicity. No tones, no guttural sounds half the world would need to learn, no complex consonant clusters (but English gets a pass with that one, strangely enough). The auxiliary language of the future won’t be Hawaiian, but it won’t be Georgian, either. Again, on the lower side of medium seems to be the sweet spot.

The vocabulary for a hypothetical world language will be the biggest problem. There’s no way around it that I can see, short of doing some serious linguistic analysis or using the shortcut of “take the same term in a few big languages and find the average”. Because of this, I can seriously see a world auxlang as being a pidgin English. Think a much simplified grammar, with most of the extraneous bits thrown out. Smooth out the phonology (get rid of “wh”, drop the dental fricatives, regularize the vowels, etc.) and make the whole thing either more isolating or more agglutinative—I’m not sure which works best for this. The end result is a leaner language that is easier to pick up.

Or just wait for the computers to take care of things for us.