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Worldlang


A worldlang is a type of international auxiliary language (or auxlang) that derives its roots, phonology, and possibly grammar from different language families around the world, typically including several most widely spoken languages of the world.

Worldlangs are meant to be globally neutral. Traditional auxlangs tend to be Eurocentric as they favor the Western culture and languages: Otto Jespersen admitted, "But I cannot object to my formula [the greatest facility to the greatest number] being taken to refer only to Europeans and those inhabitants of the other continents who are either of European extraction or whose culture is based on European civilization."

Global neutrality was sometimes a claim of a-priori systems, but seldom of a-posteriori ones. Yet there are instances of the worldlang viewpoint in the twentieth century:

"And then, these languages are not international after all. A really international language ought to be as acceptable to speakers of Arabic, Chinese or Japanese as to a European."

"Not one of these semi-constructed languages so much as considers the claims of Asia or Africa in spite of the millions of enlightened races speaking Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic. They are not ‘Interlanguages’ at all, but inter-European–and very partial at that."

"Unlike its predecessors, designed exclusively, and admittedly, to meet the taste of Western Europe and the English-speaking peoples, Interglossa is for a world in which China, Japan, and eventually the peoples of Africa, will march in step with the U.S.S.R. and with western civilization."

(Interglossa combined dead lexical sources (Greek and Latin) with "Asian" or creole-like grammar. A major revision of Interglossa is now called Glosa.)


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