Esperanto, Ido, Indonesian, or Afrikaans.
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2025
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I've heard good things about Indonesian/Malay. It probably helps it was a regional lingua franca for a long time.
English was legit the best choice in Europe - analytic, with vocabulary drawn from a couple major families, and (almost) no grammatical gender. If only we could unfuck the orthography...
I feel like Indonesian is what Esperanto could've been.
Esperanto. Logical. Clear. Easy.
Mi amas Esperanton!
Globasa. A constructed language, but with most world language families represented, and a process that ensures new words meet a few other good criteria.
Barring that, toki pona.
Lojban, or Toki Pona for shits and giggles.
French, we could all be a little more french when keeping our leaders on a leash
Esperanto! Yes, there are better conlangs, yes, it's eurocentric, and yes, there are ways to improve it or even come up with something better. But it has a cool history, it's tied to socialist movements and anarchist movements, it is fairly easy to learn (especially for speakers of European languages), it's grammar is super simple, it uses a system of root words and affixes that make me think of Legos, and it has real, native speakers already, meaning it is a living language that has changed over time, and is fully capable of being used exclusively to communicate efficiently.
Plus, the fascists fucking hate it
Not against Esperanto but creating a βuniversal languageβand then making it gendered seems a little stupid.
Itβs not as bad as other languages on this front, but if I remember correctly thereβs still no agreed-upon gender neutral singular pronoun in Esperanto is there?
Mi forgesis, ke mi lernis Δi tiun lingvon.
There's a daughter language called Ido that's done away with gender, iirc. And I believe there's some gender neutral ways to get around it in the community, but it's been a long time since I've attempted to do anything with it
Plus, the fascists fucking hate it
Lol was waiting for this kick-back
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(4 replies)
Esperanto. It's an artificial language designed to be easy to learn and communicate in. Although it's worth noting that there are esperanto dialects and speakers of one don't necessarily understand speakers of another.
Although it's worth noting that there are esperanto dialects and speakers of one don't necessarily understand speakers of another.
WHAT!? OK biggest failure of an artificial language in my book then
I think this is actually a success: this is the process of all languages. A usable language will evolve and grow, and something as geographical dispersed and isolated as Esperanto will certainly show divergence if it is being used.
So rather than a failure, I think this demonstrates it can be a real language. Though my interest in language isn't for communication. So eh. Your milage may very.
I think it is easy, but I speak only european languages. Not sure if it is really easier or I just feel that is easy because I know the languages I do.
I would love to say mandarin/chinese, but tonal languages scares me.
I made a grammar rule set (not a complete conlang yet) where verbs don't need to be conjugated, and information about time is separated from the verb; A new lingua franca, IMHO, should not have verb conjugation.
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Sanskrit.
Dutch, but only because I'm tired of Dutch people telling me I really shouldn't have bothered when they find out I learned to speak Dutch.
I just like learning different languages because it lit|really provides new frameworks of understanding for me, goddamn.
I think it's worth it learning dutch if you nail the accent, especially common ones found 50 years ago (as in dubbed Pipi Longstocking).
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Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese are totally unrelated languages. Chinese languages are sino-tibetan, Vietnamese is austro-asiatic, Japanese is japonic, and Korean is alone in its own family. Totally unrelated to each other as far as we can trace.
Despite that, they all used to use the same writing system and, shockingly, they were mutually intelligible when written down. In Japanese this method of reading Chinese (without actually knowing Chinese) was called kundoku but I think that the other languages also had ways to read & write Chinese writing with very light translation. Even today, Chinese writing unites the different dialects/languages of China.
My proposed lingua franca is the Chinese writing system. Everybody should keep their own writing systems, but they should also learn to transcribe into Chinese, the only extant written language in which this is really possible.
everything you said is true because chinese script is not based on pronounciation, but on (highly abstracted) images. these icons are universal because the concepts they represent are universal.
This is only partially true. Very early on, this was the case - Chinese characters started as pictograms representing objects and concepts. But this was fairly limiting in how much complexity you could capture without creating an unmanageably large set of unique pictograms. So the system evolved to use compound characters (characters made up of 2 or more components) incorporating phonetic (i.e. pronunciation) information into the writing system.
Most Chinese characters used in past 2000 years are made up of parts related to their meaning or category of meaning, and parts related to the pronunciation of the spoken word they represent (at least at some point in time, typically in Old Chinese) - these are called phono-semantic compound characters. The first comprehensive dictionary of Chinese characters that was created almost 2000 years ago already classified over 80% of all characters as phono-semantic compounds. This percentage also went up over time in later dictionaries as new compound characters were still being added.
As an example the character for book (ζΈ) - is made up of 2 parts, the semantic part is θΏ (brush - in its original form a literal picture of a hand holding a brush) on top (so the word is related to writing or painting), and θ on the bottom (the meaning of θ is not important here (it was a picture of a mouth eating sugarcane originally, but lost this meaning long time ago), but θ in Old Chinese was pronounced similar to the Old Chinese spoken word for book, so it serves a purely phonetic function here)
When Chinese writing was adopted in Japan, it wasn't really used to write Japanese - it was used to write Classical Chinese. Literate people would translate from Japanese to Chinese (which they would have been fluent in) and write it down in Classical Chinese grammar and vocabulary, not spoken Japanese grammar. They could also read it back and translate on the fly into spoken Japanese for Japanese speaking audience. They also brought in the Chinese pronunciation of the Characters into Japanese (in fact several different versions of this over time - see Go-on, Kan-on, etc.) so the phonetic hints in the characters were still useful when learning the system.
Attempting to write spoken Japanese using Chinese characters was difficult, initially they would actually use Chinese characters stripped of their meaning to represent Japanese syllables. These were later simplified to become modern kana
Spoken Chinese itself evolved beyond the monosyllabic written Classical Chinese (which remained quite rigid), so for a long time, Chinese also wrote essentially in a different language from how they spoke. It was only fairly recently that vernacular Chinese began to be written (rather than Classical Chinese) with it's polysyllabic words (most words in modern Chinese have 2 or more syllables, and require 2 or more characters to write, further distancing modern words from the original simple pictogram meanings)
So while the idea of some kind of universal abstract concept representation divorced from phonetics sounds intriguing, in practice it is a poor way to capture the complexity and nuance of spoken languages, and all languages (including Chinese) that attempted to adopt it ended up having to build various phonetic hints and workarounds to make the system actually useful and practical for writing.
yeah :)
you're right
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Lojban for now
Certainly not Esperanto
- Lojban like Esperanto has been created to be a neutral lingua franca.
- I've heard that it's a logical language that tries to do away with ambiguity and that sounds interesting to me.
- Esperanto feels like a language made for the EU rather than the world and so do all Esperanto look-a-likes.
- Lojban sounds like a cross between Romansh and a lost native American language. Not good compared to my two favorite sounding languages, Japanese and French, but at least more neutral than Esperanto. Esperanto sounds Spanish and Interlingua sounds like an Italian that thought that Esperanto should sound Italian and I don't like how either of those two languages sound.
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Esperanto. it's not the statisically-average best lingua franca but it's the best known that's not tied to a single nation. Plus Hitler and Stalin both hated it.
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Something with a consistent phonetic alphabet, like Korean with hangol.
Gaeilge just to fuck with the brits. We all have to write it in ogham too, I don't care how inconvenient it might be.
That or serbo-croatian because we are all serbs anyway
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I feel like Indonesian is a decent start. There are already a lot of people speaking it, and it's REALLY easy to learn.
There's no conjugation and no cases/agreement. I'm a native English speaker and picked up a functional amount of Indonesian in a matter of months, just from reading a couple books before we went.
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