Portal:Constructed languages

Introduction

The Conlang Flag, a symbol of language construction created by subscribers to the CONLANG mailing list, which represents the Tower of Babel against a rising sun

A constructed language is a language for communication between humans (i.e. not with or between computers) but unlike most languages that naturally emerge from human interaction, is intentionally devised by a person or group for a particular purpose. The term constructed language is often shortened to conlang and, as a relatively broad term, it encompasses subcategories including: fictional, artificial, engineered, planned and invented languages. Conlangs may include aspects reminiscent of natural language including phonology, grammar, orthography, and vocabulary. Interlinguistics includes the study of constructed languages. (Full article...)

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Blissymbols or Blissymbolics was conceived as an ideographic writing system called Semantography consisting of several hundred basic symbols, each representing a concept, which can be composed together to generate new symbols that represent new concepts. Blissymbols differ from most of the world's major writing systems in that the characters do not correspond at all to the sounds of any spoken language.

"I want to go to the cinema"

Blissymbols was invented by Charles K. Bliss (1897–1985), born Karl Kasiel Blitz in the Austro-Hungarian city of Czernowitz (at present the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi), which had a mixture of different nationalities that “hated each other, mainly because they spoke and thought in different languages.” Bliss graduated as a chemical engineer at the Vienna University of Technology, and joined an electronics company as a research chemist. As the German Army invaded Austria in 1938, Bliss, a Jew, was sent to the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. His German wife Claire managed to get him released, and they finally became exiles in Shanghai, where Bliss had a cousin. Bliss devised Blissymbols while a refugee at the Shanghai Ghetto and Sydney, from 1942 to 1949. He wanted to create an easy-to-learn international auxiliary language to allow communication between different linguistic communities. He was inspired by Chinese characters, with which he became familiar at Shanghai. Find out more...

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Did you know...

...that Esperanto is the world's most widely spoken constructed language, with as many as 2 million speakers?
...that Brithenig is a language that shows how Vulgar Latin could have evolved if it had displaced Celtic in Great Britain?
...that Marc Okrand, who became famous as the creator of Klingon, also created the Atlantean language for the Disney film Atlantis: The Lost Empire?

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Projects

You are invited to participate in WikiProject Constructed languages, a WikiProject dedicated to developing and improving articles about constructed languages.

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Several articles about constructed languages have been deleted for lack of verifiability, independent resources or notability. If you think one of the following subjects meets Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, don't hesitate dig it up from the graveyard, but don't forget to add proper references: