Two Types of IAL: Auxlang & Onelang

In Chapter 1 we introduced the international auxiliary language (IAL). These have often been divided into two types: firstly, the new constructed language, and secondly the existing "national" language with users beyond the home culture. Current convention among "ialers" is to term these categories "auxlang" ("auxiliary language") and "natlang" ("national language") respectively. However, "onelang" may be more descriptive than "natlang" because many people choose these languages voluntarily in later life as their primary vehicle of thought and expression, even though the language bestowed upon them by the accident of birth ("natlang") was quite different. Moreover, the great "onelangs" have always contained a supranational ("above nations") element through an association with religious or scientific culture (Arabic, French, English etc.). Loosely, the IAL concept has contained both categories, but strictly speaking an IAL is an auxlang since a onelang cannot also be an auxlang to its native speakers - so in later chapters the terms IAL and auxlang will be used interchangeably.

Thus a onelang may be defined as a major existing language suitable for monoglots which has acquired a supplementary auxlang role. The obvious example is English, which has acquired official status in a few specialised areas, including air and maritime telecommunications, besides being widely used in science, commerce etc.. Other languages - Chinese (Putonghua), Hindi/Urdu, Bengali, Spanish - have more mother tongue speakers but native speakers of English are much more dispersed geographically. This fact, together with a pre-ponderance of second-language speakers, confirms English's position as the leading auxiliary language in the world today - a status which will probably continue for a long time to come. However, the official selection of English for the IAL role seems as unlikely as ever, and for three related reasons: the large body of mother-tongue speakers already referred to (and often cited as giving an unjust advantage to the host nations in international negotiations), an irregular spelling system which has proved highly resistant to reform, and a rapidly changing political and economic set-up.

As regards the last-mentioned, the pre-eminence of the English language owes more to the historic and current status of English-speaking civilisation than to inherent linguistic qualities. It follows, therefore, that if the dominance of the English-speaking countries - which has arguably lasted from 1815 to the present - were to be superseded, the English language might consequently be expected to go the way of Ancient Greek, Latin, Arabic and French. The demise of the British Empire, the relative economic decline of America, the reversion of several ex-colonies to native languages, the establishment of rival languages in former English-speaking heartlands, and the continued political and cultural opposition to the English language from various quarters in several countries - all these are indications of a decline which is already proceeding.

The following statements are still pertinent in this regard, though nearly 20 years old:

......."In 1989 a study conducted in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain concluded: "The real correct understanding of English in all the countries studied is notably inferior to the most pessimistic existing evaluations and our own guesstimates" Van de Sandt, Report in "Initiative Media News Bulletin" (London: Lintas Worldwide, January 1989)

.......In 1990 Sir (later Lord) Randolph Quirk, Professor of English at University College in London, put it thus: "Despite the persistent and glib assumptions in Britain and America, we are witnessing a significant relative decline (perhaps even an absolute decline) in the currency of English worldwide. This may come as a surprise to those who think of English as the medium of high-tech skills, international conferences, and professional journals: here indeed continued growth is doubtless the order of the day. But these are relatively slim and specialized lines of communication."

.......In 1991 Richard Bailey, Professor of English Language and Literature at the the University of Michigan and Associate Editor of the "Oxford Companion to the English Language" was even more specific: "The proportion of the world's population who regularly use English is 15% - and falling".

According to historic precedent, Chinese (Putonghua), the language of the rising economic power, might be expected to gain this unofficial IAL mantle from English. However, a number of related reasons would suggest otherwise. Firstly, Chinese is hardly suitable as a global auxiliary language, at least in the short or medium term. Western peoples tend to find it unfamiliar and difficult, not least re the tones. Secondly, the past century has of course seen the inauguration and rapid advancement of a supplementary trend with power transferring not so much from nation to nation, or empire to empire, as from the part to the whole of humanity via global institutions. Obviously, this trend would ultimately tend to favour a language that was more international than national - in effect a new constructed IAL rather than the likes of Chinese or English. Thirdly - and integral with this globalising trend - we have witnessed a change in broadcasting from the printed word to the spoken word: an electronic transformation which has acted to the detriment of irregular languages which formerly relied upon print memorisation. These three trends have constituted a large part of the impetus for a culturally-balanced constructed IAL that is written as it is spoken and spoken as it is written.

The second type of IAL - and truer expression of the acronym - is that which is wholly auxiliary, with no mother tongue speakers. A number of authors in the 17th Century, including Lodwick, Urquhart, Dalgarno, Wilkins and Leibniz, published philosophical languages which influenced later auxlangs in various ways. However, their arbitrary a priori approach to the selection of roots never met with any success, and the reason seems to be that successful words in existing languages have an inherent sound symbolism. Cratylus brought this out in Plato's eponymous dialogue. He pointed out that rho is a sign of motion, found in words such as "tremor, tremble, strike, crush, bruise, tremble and whirl" because it is linked to the physical activity of pronunciation. He added that, according to Socrates, the tongue is "most agitated and least at rest in the pronunciation of this letter" and therefore it was originally used to express motion. Aspirated phonemes requiring expenditure of breath, likewise find themselves in windy, tempestuous words such as "shivering, seething, shock and shaking", and Lamda, with its liquid smoothness produced by the slipping of the tongue, is found in words like "slip, level, floor, flood, sleek" (when combined with another syllable it denotes easy but repetitive motion as in "handle, swivel, anvil, paddle"); gamma, in which the tongue is detained, combines with lamda to express the notion of stickiness, as in "glue, glutinous, glucose".

For the same reason neologism is an art in which even the best practitioners, such as Shakespeare and Bullokar, had many failures. Sometimes a newly-coined word, usually of obscure origin, has gained general currency, but most often only an established word proven by long usage in another language, and then adopted entire or closely transliterated, has succeeded. Thus it is the importance of sound-symbolism, and associated continuity of meaning, which has ensured that any successful auxlang has been constructed of proven speech elements from existing languages.

Having thus defined the concept of an auxlang, it is important to note that there are two distinct varieties thereof. The first is a historic phenomenon limited to circumscribed geographic areas. I have called this phenomenon the jargon -> pidgin -> vernacular progression (JPVP) and will return to it in Chapter 4. The second is the modern universal auxlang intended for present-day world-wide application, of which the outstanding but by no means sole example is Esperanto, for which reason I have named it the "Esperanto-type modern auxlang" (ETMA). Another class of constructed language is the so-called "conlang" ("constructed language"), which is designed not so much for communication in today's world as to test linguistic ideas - somewhat in the tradition of the 17th Century philosophical languages. The best ideas - normally rationalised and regularised constructions from existing languages - currently being developed within conlangs might be expected to gradually appear in a future auxlang. The handful of oligosynthetic a priori languages segueing the 17th Century philosophical languages should also be classed as conlangs.

The thesis here presented is that the ETMA solution, though excellent in many respects, has also contained fatal flaws. Indeed, the long hiatus in the IAL movement has coincided with the ETMA approach to auxlangs: arguably starting after World War 1 with the refusal to break the terms of Zamenhof's "Fundamento" and radically revise Esperanto, following the failure of endorsement by informed opinion and the League of Nations. An "auxlang/onelang stand-off" then continued with the rise of U.S. power after World War 2, the publication of Orwell's "1984", and the promotion of English as the language of telecommunications, business, science, politics and publishing. Thus we arrive at the fragile present-day status quo which the next chapter attempts to dramatise via an imaginary dialogue between proponents of extreme positions. The onelang might be English, and the modern auxlang Esperanto, but similar arguments would apply to any generic variant. As we can see, the dialogue or controversy ends in stalemate. Later chapters set out the case for the JPVP model as the way forward from this impasse.