History of Interlingua

The history of Interlingua comprises the formation of the language itself as well as its community of speakers.

Ultimate credit for Interlingua must go to the American heiress Alice Vanderbilt Morris (1874–1950), who became interested in linguistics and the international auxiliary language movement in the early 1920s. In 1924, Morris and her husband, Dave Hennen Morris, established the non-profit International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA) in New York City. Their aim was to place the study of IALs on a scientific basis.

Investigations of the auxiliary language problem were in progress at the International Research Council, the American Council on Education, the American Council of Learned Societies, the British, French, Italian, and American Associations for the advancement of science, and other groups of specialists. Morris created IALA as a continuation of this work. She developed the research program of IALA in consultation with Edward Sapir, William Edward Collinson, and Otto Jespersen.

The IALA became a major supporter of mainstream American linguistics, funding, for example, Sapir's cross-linguistic semantic studies of totality (1930) and grading phenomena (1944). Morris herself edited Sapir and Morris Swadesh's 1932 cross-linguistic study of ending-point phenomena, and Collinson's 1937 study of indication. Although the Morrises and their family provided most of IALA's funding, it also received support from such prestigious groups as the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

In its early years, IALA concerned itself with three tasks: finding other organizations around the world with similar goals; building a library of books about languages and interlinguistics; and comparing extant IALs, including Esperanto, Esperanto II, Ido, Peano’s Interlingua (Latino sine flexione), Novial, and Interlingue (Occidental). In pursuit of the last goal, it conducted parallel studies of these languages, with comparative studies of national languages, under the direction of scholars at American and European universities. It also arranged conferences with proponents of these IALs, debating features and goals of their representative languages. With a "concession rule" that required participants to make a certain number of concessions, early debates at IALA sometimes grew from heated to explosive.

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