 Linguists often make a distinction between two ways of thinking. Linguistic descriptivism, where you just try to describe how people talk, and linguistic perscriptivism, where you try to prescribe how they should talk. Linguists can be kind of insecure about their status as scientists, so they tend to shun linguistic perscriptivism. And my last big video is part of a long tradition of pointing out how a lot of linguistic perscriptivism is just the result of ignorance and prejudice between linguistic groups. But it's worth mentioning that there are completely valid reasons to say that people should speak one way and not another. Like if you're in a German class, then it makes perfect sense to say that this should be pronounced Deutsch. Or if you're writing an academic paper, then it's perfectly reasonable to say that you shouldn't say ain't. These are both examples of people trying to sound like other people for one reason or another, but sometimes people have argued that we should start speaking in a way that no one currently does. And in its most extreme form, this eventually leads to the topic of this video. People making up completely new languages. There are two main reasons people have done this. The first is that people get sick of having to learn lots of languages in order to communicate with lots of groups of people and start wondering, what if we all just learned one language and communicated in that? Such a language is called an auxiliary language, and in practice, this usually happens with the language of the dominant political power at the time, like French around 1800 or English today. But the problem with using languages that a lot of people already speak natively is that it's unfair to the people who didn't grow up with it. Like, why should almost the entire world have to learn English while the Americans and Brits get to just keep using the language they already know? So another solution to the problem is to create an artificial auxiliary language, one that would be equally hard for everyone to learn. The first really popular artificial auxiliary language was Wallapook, created around 1880 by Johann Schleyer, and to gain some serious ground in the 1880s. This might have been a time of rising nationalism across Europe, but it was also a time of reaction against that nationalism, and to a lot of people, Wallapook seemed like a symbol of universal brotherhood. At its height, there were hundreds of Wallapook clubs across the world. In 1889 at the Third International Wallapook Conference, the proceedings were held entirely in Wallapook, but after that things started going downhill. A lot of people wanted to change Wallapook, but when Schleyer wouldn't let them, they started going off and designing their own languages based off of it. But that wound up just fracturing the movement. Like, if you wanted to learn Wallapook, should you learn the original that the creator has stubbornly refused to change, or pick one of the dozens of improved versions floating around out there? Increasingly, people chose neither, and instead opted to learn a competitor to Wallapook. It had been created around the time Wallapook was just getting popular by a guy named Ludwig Zamenhof for basically the same reason as Wallapook. Zamenhof had seen how different languages had divided the people of his hometown into Russians, Poles, Germans, and Jews, and he wanted to create a common language for everyone to speak. Interestingly, he never actually names the language in the book he published it in. He only recalls it the international language, and he never names himself either, simply referring to himself as the one who hopes, or in his language, Esperanto. Without something to call it, people decided to just name the language after him, or at least what he called himself. Hence the language of Esperanto was born. If you've heard of an artificial auxiliary language, it's probably Esperanto, and there's a reason for that. At its height in the early 20th century, Esperanto was huge. Both the League of Nations and the UN for a while seriously considered adopting Esperanto. Part of the reason was that Esperanto managed to mostly avoid the fracturing that led to the end of Wallapook. Zamenhof was actually really open to the idea of reforming the language, but people had seen what minor disagreements had done to Wallapook. Besides, an auxiliary language doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be not obnoxious enough for people to be willing to learn it to communicate with each other. Some people did break off and make Esperanto-inspired rivals, like Edo and Interlingua, but there's been an impressive continuous community of Esperanto speakers that's lasted up to today. Nowadays, it's by far the most well-known artificial language, and it's one of only a few to brag that it has native speakers. That's right, more than once, speakers of Esperanto had children and regularly spoke Esperanto in their home, enough so that their child grew up speaking it. Not only that, but one of those children, Kim Henrickson, is currently raising a second-generation native Esperanto speaker. The second reason people create artificial languages is because people just want to improve language. From this point of view, the problem with languages isn't that there's too many of them, it's that all of them suck. People complain all the time about how the way we say things isn't really how things are in the real world, and if you follow this line of reasoning far enough, you inevitably start asking, well, how is the world then, and how should we speak? Pretty soon, you're coming up with your own words that perfectly reflect the way things really are in the world, and you've got yourself a philosophical language. Different philosophical languages from different times often reflect the values of the people and cultures that made them. During the Enlightenment era in Europe, there was a little bit of a philosophical language fad. In the era when everyone was talking about the supremacy of human reason, it makes sense to think that we should be able to design our own better languages. One of the most popular was created by John Wilkins, who did his best to take everything in the universe that can be talked about and categorize all of it into one giant hierarchy, and then the sounds for the word for that thing would be determined based on its place in that hierarchy. So an alphabetically organized dictionary for this language would feel like it's sorted according to something like the Dewey Decimal System, with the first sound in a word telling you generally what kind of word it is, and then the next sound getting more specific, and so on. Now, Wilkins put an enormous amount of effort into making the words in his language have reasons for sounding the way they do, but he barely put any effort at all into the grammar of his language, in that respect, morphosyntactically, it was basically just English with a bit of Latin thrown in, but the most popular philosophical language today takes the exact opposite approach. There's an idea in linguistics that I really haven't talked about enough called the Warfian Hypothesis. It proposes basically that language affects the way we think. There are different versions of the hypothesis that try to narrow down and get really specific about exactly how language influences our thought, but that's the gist of it. Different languages encourage people to think in different ways. In 1960, a man named James Cook Brown proposed a possible test for this hypothesis. If we design a language to be extremely different from all natural languages and try to make it as logical as possible, and then we get a bunch of people to learn it, what would happen to them? Would their behavior in non-language-related tasks change? Well, to find out, he created such a language, logon. A lot of people really liked this idea of a logic-based language. It never became nearly as popular as Esperanto, but to this day there's a decent community around it. Well, sort of. See, the logon community wound up getting into a bit of a similar conflict as the one that happened to Valapuk almost 100 years earlier. A lot of the speakers of it wanted to change it, but the guy who made it wanted it to stay the same. Eventually, most of the people interested in logon wound up leaving and creating their own language on the same principles as logon, called logebon, which has been managed collectively ever since. Now, let me talk for a second about logon and logebon, because they are basically just the weirdest thing ever. Logebon doesn't care about the sounds of the words, it just based all of its vocabulary off of a handful of existing languages. But it does care about making sure that the interactions between words happen in a consistent, logical way, and in the process it winds up working in a completely different way from any natural language. Frankly, if someone tried to raise a native logebon speaker the way people have raised native Esperanto speakers, I'm not sure what would happen. Like, if our brains are hardwired to use language a certain way, which we're not sure if they are, but if they are, in my opinion, logebon almost definitely falls outside the realm of things our brains evolved to handle. I've learned a little bit, and it doesn't feel like an actual language, it feels like spoken computer code. So yeah, that about sums it up. None of these artificial languages have really taken off or achieved the success they wanted to. Neither Esperanto nor any other artificial auxiliary language has managed to overcome the inertia of people just learning the language of whatever superpower happens to be dominating. And philosophical languages have never really caught on, because, well, everyone has a different philosophy. And it's a bit hard for people to all speak in a way that truly reflects the world when no one can agree on how the world really is. So given that both of these reasons for inventing languages are basically doomed from the start, the whole thing seems pretty much like a waste of time to meet... Oh, hi, Artifexian. Wait, hold on. What? Everyone, I'd like you to meet Artifexian. Last I checked he was making some cool videos about space and stuff, but I'll admit it's been a while since I've caught up on his videos. Anyway, what are you doing here? What do you mean the whole thing is a waste of time? You're leaving out the biggest reason people make artificial languages. And what would that be? Fun! What? Making up a language is a monstrous amount of work. You have to create a phonology and a syntax and create thousands of words of vocabulary. Why would anyone do that for fun? Okay, let's back it up a bit. So early in JR Tolkien's life, he became obsessed with Welsh and later Finnish. He loved the way Welsh looked and sounded, and he loved the way Finnish syntax works, and he started to make up his own language inspired by them. Not just a language either, but a whole family of languages, and then a culture to go along with them. And then a world to put the culture in. The languages he made up became the languages of the elves and the other creatures of Middle Earth. And later he would say that he wrote Lord of the Rings, mostly to justify his weird hobby of making up languages. Okay, but that was just one guy. Yeah, but he started something. Ever since, loads of fantasy and sci-fi writers have made up their own languages for the universes they create. Let's see, you've got the Navi language from Avatar, the Thraki from Game of Thrones, and of course, my personal favourite, Klingon. A gruff, vaguely alien-sounding language spoken by a violent warlike race from the Star Trek universe. Kapla! Just when I thought this couldn't get any nerdier. In fact, I was just about to begin constructing my very own language over on my channel. You should totally come help. Sorry, but I have better things to do than make up words for your silly pretend language. You could give people advice on how to construct phonological inventories. I'm just gonna... Ah, come on, it'll be fun. Huh? What? Help!