Some very fine imaginary languages are to be found in works of fiction. The people in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) speak a blend of Greek and Persian called — imaginatively — Utopian; in Francis Godwin’s Man in the Moone (1638), a lunar-dwelling population communicate via a musical language in whi...

A universal language will always be an unattainable dream. For centuries, idealists and crackpots tried to invent a global tongue, but even Esperanto never took off. Marina Yaguello explains why.

The comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, in his stage pe...

Throughout history, however, a motley array of eccentrics has done just this, and received a fair bit of attention.

Originally published in 1984 but only now translated into English, Marina Yaguello’s fascinating survey of constructed languages revisits the history of two distinct but inter...

 ------>i t is in the nature of language to resist such limitations. Flexibility and mutability are essential; flux is a feature, not a bug.

‘A universal language,’ writes Yaguello, ‘is as impossible as perpetual motion.’ But when did futility ever get in the way of a good idea? The catalog...

 Its lexicon was more clipped and its syntax deliberately mangled so as not to resemble French. These endeavours took on a political dimension in the modern era.

Utopians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — among them L.L. Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto — believed a universal ...

The chimera of a universal language could also be enlisted for reactionary ends, as demonstrated by the career of the Georgian-born Soviet philologist Nikolai Marr.

He peddled a vulgar Marxist theory that language is a superstructure mirroring society’s economic base, and the unification o...

You don’t have to be mentally disturbed to invent a language, but it helps: glosso-maniacs, paranoiacs and megalomaniacs are well represented in this pantheon.

Yaguello’s archetypal innovator is a tragicomic obsessive reminiscent of Edward Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch:

...

------->the Newspeak in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is probably the best known fictional example of a ‘philosophical language’ — one specifically designed to demarcate the boundaries of acceptable thought.

Yaguello, a professor of linguistics at the University of Paris VII, ...