ABSTRACT
An artificial language is one which has been created for some specific purpose or reason, as opposed to a natural language, such as those spoken by most speech communities around the world, which is normally thought of as having evolved along with its speech community, and for which it is not possible to find some ultimate source of creation. The machine codes and various programming languages we use with computers (see ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE) and the languages of logic (see FORMAL LOGIC AND MODAL LOGIC) are all artificial languages, but will not be dealt with in this entry which is devoted, rather, to those artificial languages which have been developed for general use in attempts to provide ‘a neutral tongue acceptable to all’ (Large, 1985, p. vii). The best-known such language is probably Esperanto, which was one hundred years old in 1987. In that year, the United Nations estimated that Esperanto was spoken by 8 million people, from 130 countries. There were around 38,000 items of literature in Esperanto in the Esperanto library at Holland Park, London, which is the largest in the world, and the Esperanto Parliamentary Group at Westminster numbered 240 MPs. The Linguist (vol. 26, no. 1, Winter 1987, p. 8), lists the following further facts as evidence for the success of the language as an international medium of communication:
Radio Peking broadcasts four half hour programmes in it each day, British Telecom recognise it as a clear language for telegrams, Dutch telephone booths have explanations for the Esperanto-speaking foreigner, it is available under the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme, and the Wales Tourist Board have begun issuing travel brochures in it…. Liverpool University has recently appointed a Lecturer in Esperanto, and the Dutch Government has given the computer firm BSO a grant of £3 million to develop a machine translation programme with Esperanto as the bridge, or intermediate language.
