Constructed language
A planned or constructed language (sometimes called a conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary have been consciously devised for human or human-like communication, instead of having developed naturally.
It is also referred to as an artificial or invented language.
Description
There are many possible reasons to create a constructed language, such as:
- To ease human communication (see international auxiliary language and code)
- To give fiction or an associated constructed setting an added layer of realism
- For experimentation in the fields of linguistics, cognitive science, and machine learning
- For artistic creation
- For language games
The expression planned language is sometimes used to mean international auxiliary languages and other languages designed for actual use in human communication.
Some prefer it to the term "artificial", as that term may have pejorative connotations in some languages.
Outside Esperanto culture, the term language planning means the prescriptions given to a natural language to standardize it; in this regard, even "natural languages" may be artificial in some respects.
Prescriptive grammars, which date to ancient times for classical languages such as Latin and Sanskrit, are rule-based codifications of natural languages, such codifications being a middle ground between naive natural selection and development of language and its explicit construction.
The term glossopoeia is also used to mean language construction, particularly construction of artistic languages.
See also
External links
- Constructed language] @ Wikipedia
