Creating new languages

Every year, humanity loses 30-50 languages. Of roughly 7,000 we still

have, just 10 are used by half the world’s speakers. It seems inevitable that
eventually the world will use just one – Spanish, perhaps, or Mandarin or
English.

While the number of natural languages has fallen, people have tried to
create entirely new ones. Volapük, invented by a German priest in 1880,
was one of the first attempts at an artificial universal language.
Conferences were held in Volapük and periodicals and books were
published in the language, which, at its peak, claimed a million speakers.
It was usurped at the end of the 19th century by Esperanto, which was
made up by a Polish Jewish opthalmologist and claims 2 million speakers
today. Various attempts were made to stamp out Esperanto, surely the
most reliable sign of a “real” language. The most aggressive attack came
from the Nazis, who hated it because it had been invented by a Jew. It was
taught illicitly in concentration camps, by prisoners who told guards it
was Italian. In the end, however, Esperanto’s failure to become universal
came down to the same pressures that threaten the rest: the handful of
languages that are truly global.
Even as tongues succumb to extinction, new pidgin dialects – word and
grammar hybrids of pre-existing languages –
emerge. Kiezdeutsch originated in Turkish migrant communities in
Germany, but has now become a common way of speaking for young
people who otherwise have perfect German, including those with no
Turkish origins. Like British teens using Jafaican (or multicultural
London English) – a melange of Jamaican patois, Los Angeles rap-speak
and south London slang – Kiezdeutsch is strongly tied to identity and how
the speakers see themselves in society.
Meanwhile, as channels such as MTV are broadcast internationally,
English speakers across Europe are modifying their accents as well as
their vocabulary, so even if English ends up the one global language, it
won’t be the Queen’s English everyone is speaking.