International auxiliary language

An international auxiliary language (sometimes abbreviated as IAL or auxlang) or interlanguage is a language meant for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common first language. An auxiliary language is primarily a second language.

Languages of dominant societies over the centuries have served as auxiliary languages, sometimes approaching the international level. Latin, Greek and the Mediterranean Lingua Franca were used in the past, and Arabic, English, French, Russian, Spanish, and Standard Chinese have been used as such in recent times in many parts of the world. However, as these languages are associated with the very dominance—cultural, political, and economic—that made them popular, they are often also met with resistance. For this reason, some have turned to the idea of promoting an artificial or constructed language as a possible solution.

The term "auxiliary" implies that it is intended to be an additional language for the people of the world, rather than to replace their native languages. Often, the term is used to refer to planned or constructed languages proposed specifically to ease international communication, such as Esperanto, Ido and Interlingua. However, it can also refer to the concept of such a language being determined by international consensus, including even a standardized natural language (e.g., International English), and has also been connected to the project of constructing a universal language.

The use of an intermediary auxiliary language (also called a "working language", "bridge language", "vehicular language" or "unifying language") to make communication possible between people not sharing a first language, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both mother tongues, may be almost as old as language itself. Certainly they have existed since antiquity. Latin and Greek (or Koiné Greek) were the intermediary language of all areas of the Mediterraneum; Akkadian, and then Aramaic, remained the common languages of a large part of Western Asia through several earlier empires. Such natural languages used for communication between people not sharing the same mother tongue are called lingua francas.

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