Klaus Schubert, on the basis of a thorough review of the literature, has concluded that "interlinguistics according to the by far most accepted definition is concerned with planned languages" (1989a: 18). By this he means systems of signs for human communication that begin as descriptions, or "language projects", and then make their way into actual communicative use. As Schubert puts it, "one of the most exciting objects of interlinguistics, which characterizes the whole discipline and distinguishes it from neighbouring fields, is the development of a language project towards a full human language" (1989a: 21). This has also been the view implicit in previous contributions to this section of LPLP (Fettes 1996; Corsetti 1996).
It can plausibly be argued that such a transition from auxiliary language project to international language, observed first with Volapük (1880) and then Esperanto (1887), became possible only with the development of efficient postal and transportation systems in 19th-century Europe. Since that time, the technology for putting people in many-to-many contact with one another has progressed for the most part in gradual, quantitative ways (speed, access, affordability), in contrast to qualitative leaps in one-to-many technology (e.g. radio, television) - a thesis first elaborated by Marshall McLuhan (1964). Within the economic and political frameworks of modernity (Bauman 1992), one-to-many media have tended to maintain and extend the hegemony of national ("modern") languages in intranational and international communication, at the expense of both minority and immigrant languages on the one hand and planned languages on the other.
The Internet may in the process of changing all that, as Geoffrey Nunberg has recently argued (1996). By enabling rapid, low-cost, many-to-many communication across political and geographical boundaries, the Internet constitutes a radically new medium both for the reinforcement of minority and immigrant languages and the development and spread of planned languages. Such a hypothesis is extremely difficult to investigate, and much of the methodology for conducting the relevant research has still to be worked out; the University of Hartford's conference on "Language and the Internet", to be held in 1998, appears to be the first general forum in this area (1). However, the present article has a more modest goal: to provide a brief survey of Internet sites for the development, use and study of planned languages, in the hope of stimulating awareness, interest, and further research (2).
The most common step beyond constructing a description of a language is to provide it with an imaginary cultural context, often in the domain of science fiction. There are probably well over a hundred such "imaginary languages" described on the Net, some of them sketchy or tongue-in-cheek, others developed with meticulous care. Classic examples are J.R.R. Tolkien's languages of Middle-Earth (http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/misc/local/TolkLang/) and the Klingon language of Star Trek (http://www.kli.org/KLIhome.html). Another such project, notable for its attention to semantic issues, is the women's language Láadan (http://www.interlog.com/~kms/Laadan/), which plays a central role in the novels by linguist Suzette Haden Elgin. Many more examples can be found through the Web sites of Chris Bogart (http://www.quetzal.com/conlang.html) and Richard Kenneway (above).
Some language projects have attracted a genuine community of users for periods of several decades. These include Volapük (a grammar is available in Esperanto at http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0444wow/volagram.eo.html), Ido (http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/5037/yindex.html), and Interlingua (http://www.interlingua.com). Periodicals and occasional works are still published in the latter two languages. Among their would-be competitors are Glosa (http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/6223/glosa.html) and Novial (http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/5037/novial.html); both are reformed versions of earlier projects by well-known linguists (Hogben and Jespersen, respectively). More details about these and other sites are given in Ulrich Becker's informative survey "Interlinguistik im Internet" (http://www.snafu.de/~ubecker/internet.htm). Richard Harrison's extensive bibliography of auxiliary language projects can be consulted at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/5383/langlab/bibliog.html.
Probably the best index page is Martin Weichert's Virtuala Esperanto-Biblioteko (http://www.esperanto.net/veb/), the central node in a coordinated set of reference pages. The first of these provides links to pages about Esperanto, and about learning it, in some two dozen languages (European ones include Catalan, Galician, Occitan and Welsh, while non-European ones include Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Swahili). The remaining topics are organized into three main categories: "organizational" (including Web sites and e-mail addresses of Esperanto-speaking individuals, groups and periodicals, and an international events calendar); "cultural" (including literature, science, music, politics and others); and "computational" (including coding standards, software and terminology). Starting from these links, a persistent explorer could probably track down 90% of the Esperanto content on the Internet, and also identify key sources of further information on particular topics.
Discussion groups on and in Esperanto are scattered through the Net, including the Usenet group soc.culture.esperanto (with some interesting content amidst a great deal of trivia), regular IRC sessions (#esperanto), and an experimental "Virtuala Esperanto-Kongreso" (telnet ford.zait.uni-bremen.de 3000). An excellent moderated list server for Esperanto-speaking families, DENASK-L, has its own Web site (http://www.helsinki.fi/~jslindst/denask-l.html), and an "Internet club" has recently been started for Esperanto-speaking children (http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/2755/). There is a Literatura Kafejo ("literary coffee-shop") at http://www.geocities.com/Paris/8159/. Other specialist discussion groups exist, but may require some work to locate.
Over 30 Esperanto periodicals have Web sites: a list can be found at http://www.esperanto.se/virtuala/gazetoj.html. One very informative Web site belongs to the monthly news magazine "Monato" (http://www.knooppunt.be/~fel/monato.hmtl). The Swedish Esperanto Federation offers a public form-based news site under the name "NUN" (now) (http://www.esperanto.se/nun/).
Partial catalogues of two of the largest library holdings in and on Esperanto, those of the Austrian National Library (18 000 items) and the Aalen Public Library in Germany (11 000), can be consulted on line. Links to these sites, as well as a list of other important Esperanto collections and some other on-line catalogues, are included in Martin Weichert's library page (http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~martinw/esperanto/bibl/). The multilingual search engine EuroSeek (http://euroseek.net) offers an Esperanto interface and can be used to search for Web pages written in the language.
A smaller site is maintained by Ulrich Becker for the Gesellschaft für Interlinguistik, the German Society for Interlinguistics (http://www.snafu.de/~ubecker/gesellsc.htm). It includes a good basic bibliography (http://www.snafu.de/~ubecker/bibliogr.htm).
Relatively little on-line material is available on the linguistics of Esperanto, another notable contrast to the constructed language sites. At least two documents, however, illustrate the existence of the sophisticated analytical tradition referred to by Schubert (1989b; 1993): Jouko Lindstedt's detailed and critical review (http://www.helsinki.fi/~jslindst/pag_rec.html) of Kalocsay and Waringhien's monumental Plena Analiza Gramatiko (1980), which remains the most ambitious treatment of Esperanto syntax and morphology to date; and Bertil Wennergren's recent alternative synthesis, the Plena Manlibro de Esperanta Gramatiko (http://purl.oclc.org/NET/pmeg).
Clearly the Internet offers an exciting new domain for research into international linguistic communication in general, and the development and use of planned languages in particular. Particularly interesting will be the increasing use of the Net for language learning and for spoken communication, neither of which receive much attention in the sites covered in this review. Furthermore, by lowering long-established technical and perceptual barriers to research on interlinguistics, the Internet promises to open up the discipline to a new generation of scholars, and to new techniques and concepts in linguistics and sociology. In fact, the definition of the field itself may come in for some rethinking: this will be the focus of a future column in LPLP.
2. I am indebted to Ulrich Becker for his earlier article on "Interlinguistics on the Internet" (see references), which provided the stimulus for this paper.
3. A periodically updated version of this article, with all Web addresses activated as links, is available at http://infoweb.magi.com/~mfettes/internet.html.
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