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Constructed language

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The term artificial or constructed language describes a language designed for human communication which was created by the work of one or more persons, rather than having naturally evolved as part of a culture (see Natural language). The term planned language is also used, especially for international auxilliary languages, and by those who may object to the more common term "artificial". Speakers of Esperanto, for example, have said that "Esperanto is an artificial language like an automobile is an artificial horse." These languages are often created for a special purpose such as international communication, secrecy, use in fiction, or linguistic experimentation.

Constructed languages are often divided into a priori languages, in which much of the grammar and vocabulary is created from scratch to serve a particular purpose, and a posteriori languages, where the grammar and vocabulary are derived from one or more natural languages and are intended to resemble them. A posteriori languages can be further divided into Naturalistic planned languages which follow the natural languages from which they are patterned closely to minimize learning time, and


Schematic planned languages, whose features are deliberately simplified or synthesized from various sources.

Languages intended for general-purpose human use

Languages intended for machine assisted automatic translation purposes

Languages designed for knowledge representation

Languages of fictional worlds and peoples

See Fictional language.

Language games

See also:

External links (others can be found on language pages):

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