How to Promote an IAL

Existing "national" tongues have proved their worth through long usage, but unfamiliarity and irregularity have always been difficult for foreigners. Moreover, as English speakers have discovered, international currency awards a significant political and economic premium to native speakers. Such facts are now well known, so the choice of an existing "national" language as IAL might seem unlikely.

The alternative is of course a new constructed language endorsed and promoted by global authorities - so one might well wonder why a century of effort has failed to produce one. Could it be that the IAL movement set off on the wrong foot by imitating existing languages, rather than by investigating how successful IALs have originated in the past, and then attempting to follow their example?

At any rate, learners and "enabling authorities" have been presented with an "obvious" choice between an existing "national" tongue and a new constructed IAL of comparable complexity, though much simpler to learn. At first glance the choice might indeed seem obvious - one would go for the equivalent but easier to learn constructed language. However, there are at least two drawbacks:

Firstly, it is the very irregularity of certain existing "national" languages that has allowed them to be used in an extended range - from extreme simplicity to complexity - without breaking any rules. This is the informal hierarchy between *simple and complex* speech ("basilect and acrolect") in major tongues that LangX attempts to recapture and formalise. For example, Esperanto cannot really be used as a very simple pidgin-like language, since a higher order of grammar is already bound into its words by virtue of their division into classes (nouns -o, adjectives -a, adverbs -e etc.). On the other hand, a major language such as English can be used in various pidginised or baby-talk ways without breaking any rules.

Secondly, language does not exist independently, but is rather the vocal or written expression of a unified body of meaning, otherwise known as culture. The absence of a particular international culture behind the new constructed IAL movement has actually constituted a vacuum largely filled by suspicions, especially following Orwell's "Newspeak". Zamenhof attempted to fill this cultural void with a type of humanism, but his homaranismo - however worthy in itself - is more an absence of prejudice than a positive culture.

Set against this rather weak cultural mandate for a new constructed language, the English language has scored very well. Various reasons might be given for this, including early missionary and educational activities - or the generally high regard in which the British Empire itself was held - but the salient explanation must be the continued prosperity of the associated culture, since international language penetration has always followed the money. Thus the continuation of US commercial success even after British decline helped to ensure that English enjoyed the balance of acceptance as de facto international language until the last decades of the 20th Century.

But the English-speaking nations now find themselves at the lower end of the league table of indebtedness, and the converse economic rise of the East - and China in particular - might therefore lead us to expect that Chinese should replace English as de facto IAL. However, this seems unlikely. Firstly, Chinese (Putonghua) is wholly unsuitable as a global language: to make it so would probably require two generations of education and acculturation. The writing system, tones, phonology etc. are all quite alien to most of the world's population at the present time, and the Chinese themselves would probably object to their language being mangled by those unable to speak it properly.

Secondly, the political settlement of the future is likely to be based on the stalemate or "mutually assured destruction" of the recent past, rather than the defeat of one of the major players. More than that, an increasing number now seek a new internationalist culture above and beyond mere legal agreements, not to mention military victory. The inexorable rise of multinational corporations and international agencies over the past century has only confirmed this trend.

Thirdly, similar conditions to those which saw the establishment of the original pidgins are now being revisited, except that entrepreneurial activity is more globalised and organised. Huge amounts of capital wait on the sidelines, looking for where it can obtain the best return, subject to all the laws - government taxes, labour rights, environmental protections etc. - that exist everywhere today. Managers, key workers and essential raw material supplies are all of world-wide origin, and there is a great need of a simple language for basic mundane communication. The stage is therefore finally being set for global authorities to make a consensual decision re the international language issue.

To a great extent their decision might be anticipated, since it must also closely reflect the emerging zeitgeist in various ways, as regards the rights of the poor, of minorities, of women, and so on - though not via a religious mandate at this time, for obvious reasons. So, upon what basis might an "international auxiliary language commission" (ILC) be enabled to formulate a united program? The answer, in a word, is "science": the objective approach which makes no recommendation except on the basis of verifiable evidence. The scientific method also requires a "working hypothesis": at present, assuming that the a priori / oligosynthetic option has already been dismissed by history, the choice essentially boils down to the a posteriori alternatives of a "ready-made" IAL, such as Esperanto, and a new language formed from the best available material.

The first alternative still appears to enjoy majority support among auxlangers, although it is actually the less likely prospect, since the cultural conditions of the past are not those of today. For instance, most existing IALs have a distinctly European bias, even though the political landscape has radically altered over the past century. Gender mores are now such that words deriving the female from the male, as in Esperanto, would no longer be generally acceptable. Likewise, the economic structure of society has changed out of all recognition: in most countries a leisured middle class with the time and motivation to learn a "developed" IAL hardly exists any more. At any rate, and in spite of decades of intense effort, users of these languages remain modest in number - with patchy geographical distribution and marginal social penetration. Such facts matter, since responsible international agencies are hardly likely to officially endorse a putative existing IAL lacking significant cross-cultural and pan-societal acceptance. The educated middle class tend to be internationalists and natural linguists anyway - which is of course why they have tended to learn English and the other major languages rather than new constructed IALs which might come to nothing.

A variant on the second alternative - a new hierarchic language formed from proven linguistic elements and initially aimed at the mass-market - has never yet been tried on a global scale. LangX is offered as a model approach towards this end. Like the pidgins of yore, its "global pidgin" initial phase might be largely founded upon the English/Romance word roots and speech sounds that have formed the mundane and commercial soundscape of recent centuries. Equally, its simple analytic word order based grammar might follow the pidgins in reflecting the typical usage of China and the East. And as the language developed beyond a core vocabulary its scientific words might tend to come from Greek and Latin, its philosophical from Indian languages, its metaphysical from Arabic and Persian, its political from Russian and French and so on - each language contributing according to its strengths. In this way, the culture of the developing IAL might nowhere seem alien.

We are already seeing the first glimmerings towards this approach in the form of an accepted international core vocabulary: words like "hotel, taxi, banco". Many of these words are English, but that is only how it should be according to the JPVP. Accordingly, Lang25 was inaugurated in 2005 along just such a route. A seminal insight into what is going on was provided by Jean-Paul Nerriere

"Now retired in Provence, the defining moment of his career occurred in the late 1980s. As a high-flying vice-president of IBM in America, Nerriere was put in charge of international marketing and on company trips to Tokyo and Seoul he did what Frenchmen have to do in the global marketplace: communicate with the locals as best he could in his heavily accented English. It was then, in 1989, that he had a life-changing revelation.

In scenes reminiscent of Lost in Translation, Nerriere noted that his conversation with the Japanese and Koreans was 'much easier and more efficient than what could be observed between them and the British and American (IBM) employees who came with me'. A thoughtful man, with a fascination for the exploits of Nelson, he noted that this observation of non-Anglophone English communication applied to 'all non-English-speaking countries'.

Then Nerriere came to his radical, perhaps revolutionary, conclusion: 'The language non-Anglophones spoke together,' he says, 'was not English, but something vaguely like it.' In this language, he noted, 'we were better off than genuine Anglophones'. This language, he decided, 'was the worldwide dialect of the third millennium'. In a moment of pure inspiration he called it 'Globish' (pronounced 'globe-ish')."

Thus the way forward through the current IAL hiatus might well be through complex language deconstructed into more elementary units for ease of communication, with the best of these elements gradually reassembled in a universally-acceptable way, free from irregularity and inefficiency. A parallel process might be seen in another means of global communication - computer software - within which information is disassembled into proven or stable elements before being reconstituted.