History of Pandunia
Before Pandunia
Ideas for Pandunia were formed in an inspiring environment. Risto, the initiator of Pandunia, worked and exchanged ideas with other people who are interested in languages. He participated in forums like the AUXLANG mailing list and the Auxlangs bulletin board in Reddit.
He exchanged ideas with Florent Garet (creator of Luni), Jens Wilkinson (Neo Patwa), Dana Nutter (Sasxsek), Rex May (Ceqli), Steve Rice (Inlis), Dmitri Ivanov (Lingwa de Planeta), Olivier Simon (Sambahsa Mundialect), Zeinelabidin Elhassi (Ardano), Sonja Lang (Toki Pona) Arkadii Balandin, and Justin Kunimune only to mention a few.
Years of development
In the early years, Pandunia was Risto's personal language project. It was like play dough to him that could be shaped and reshaped again for experimenting new ideas.
Pandunia flag in 2007
He published the first sketch of Pandunia in 2007, but it was only in 2012 that other people learned Pandunia for the first time. Risto recorded a short video in Pandunia in 2013 to show what Pandunia sounded like then.
Pandunia flag in 2016
A few more people got interested about Pandunia in 2016, and the Pandunia community started to grow slowly. Pandunia got more known in 2017 when an article titled "Pandunia, a global contact language" was published in the Interlinguistica Tartuensis journal, and a chapter is dedicated for Pandunia in the book Keksittyjä kieliä (in Finnish) by Kauko Kämäräinen. One year later, Pandunia is mentioned in the Artificial Languages article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedias.
Risto recorded another short video in Pandunia in 2016 to show how the language had evolved. Alex André recorded a 30 day challenge to learn Pandunia in 2019. This was called the base version 1 of Pandunia and it used word-final vowels for marking word classes in the style of Esperanto. However, the language was still evolving, and the second base version was published in 2021 and it didn't use the word-class markers anymore.
Pandunia flag in 2018
Stabilization
The third and final base version of Pandunia was published in early 2024. It combined the best features of the previous versions: word derivation system aligned to the international vocabularies and simplified, inflectionless grammar. In addition the most frequently occurring words were replaced with those that are resemble English. Pandunia had evolved from a creative constructed language into a serious successor for international English that would level the playing field for international and multicultural communication.
Pandunia in Wikipedia
Here are the creation years of the Wikipedia articles about Pandunia.