Frequently Asked Questions

General

How many people can speak Panlingue?

Currently there is a handful of people who understand Panlingue. It is still a very new language.

How can I help to spread Panlingue?

Learn Panlingue! Speak it with others! Talk about it with others! Write stories or articles, make videos, podcasts, music, etc.

You can also help with this website by translating content and correcting mistakes. Contents ("source code") of this website are stored in GitHub. You can also send your edited files by email to risto@pandunia.info

When was Panlingue created?

Panlingue was created in 2023 from a version of an earlier language called Panlingue. Panlingue was an experimental auxiliary language project that went through many experimental phases. Panlingue was born from one of the branches of this project. Therefore the history of Panlingue can be traced back to early 2000s.

Past, present and future

I want to change something in Panlingue. What should I do?

Panlingue is a flexible language that allows a lot of experimentation. You are free to experiment! Check first can you try your new idea out inside the confines of the language. If you can, go ahead and do it in public! If other people like your idea in practice, it will catch on.

Creating offshoot languages is very common in the auxiliary language community. The case of Esperanto is famous. Offshoots of Esperanto are counted in the hundreds, but most people haven't heard about any of them. Esperanto is still the most popular language of its kind.

It is better to have one big language with several dialects than many competing languages.

Which languages have influenced the grammar of Panlingue?

Panlingue has been influenced by both natural and constructed languages.

Natural languages with isolating grammar were a useful model. For example the pivot structure comes directly from Chinese.
Works of earlier language makers were inspirational.
- Esperanto, Ido, Novial etc. were closely examined.
- Latino sine Flexione, Lingua Sistemfrater and Interglossa all have well thought-out isolating grammars.
Natural contact languages gave many ideas. It is an interesting observation that when speakers of different languages come into contact, they tend to create extremely simplified grammar to overcome the language barrier — no matter how complex languages they speak natively.

Who made Panlingue?

The starter of Panlingue is Risto Kupsala, who was born in Finland in 1979. He is a computer scientist (M.Sc.) and a linguist (M.A.) by education. He has been interested in languages all his life. He got into constructed languages in the year 2000 when he learned about Esperanto. People from many countries have helped Risto over the years. There is a list of some of the contributors in GitHub.

Auxiliary language

What is a worldlang?

A worldlang is a constructed interlanguage that borrows its words, speech sounds and possibly grammar from different language families of the world. There are many worldlangs. Some of them are listed here.

How does Panlingue differ from other auxiliary languages?

The grammar of Panlingue is unique, concise and very flexible. Panlingue has only a few grammatical mechanisms, which are re-used over and over again.
Panlingue has multicultural vocabulary that is evenly global. It consists of Euro-American, Afro-Asian, East Asian and South Asian international words. Many other auxiliary languages use only or mostly just Euro-American words, which is neither fair nor global.
The main criterion for borrowing words for Panlingue is internationality. All Panlingue words are known by many nations in some continent or several continents.
Panlingue is a truly neutral language. It's not meant to imitate any single group of languages, whereas for example Esperanto, Ido and Interlingua are intentionally similar to the European languages only.

Did Esperanto contribute to the birth of Panlingue?

Esperanto was an important source of inspiration at first. However, also many other languages have influenced Panlingue, so the effect of Esperanto is limited. In the end, Panlingue has a very different structure and quite different vocabulary compared to Esperanto.

Are the makers of Panlingue aware of the history of the IAL movement?

Yes. Here are some of the most important lessons to be learned from the history of the international auxiliary language (IAL) movement.

Over 99% of IALs do not survive in the long term.
Languages that are created without any pre-existing model (so called a priori languages) have very low chance of survival.
Languages that imitate and simplify one or more natural languages have some chance of survival.
Out of a group of many similar languages only one is likely to do well.
Success can be short-lived. (Remember Volapük and Ido.)
Rational reasons do not explain success. The "best" language doesn't necessarily win.
Large international organizations, such as the UN or the EU, pay very little attention to IALs. So it is up to grassroots movements to push an IAL to success.

Should Panlingue replace other languages?

Panlingue is not meant to replace English or any other language. The world is multilingual and also people can be multilingual. They can speak many languages, and they speak every language for a different reason. Some people speak one language at home, another at work and yet another on international travels. We can imagine a world where English and all other languages will continue to be spoken, and where Panlingue will be spoken as the universal second language.

If the generation of today has chosen to speak English as the international language, that's okay. You don't have to stop speaking English or any other language just because of Panlingue. However, we don't know yet, which language the future generations will speak. Maybe their international language won't be English but Panlingue. You never know! The landscape of languages changes naturally from generation to generation. There have been different international languages in the past, like Greek, Latin and Sanskrit. and there will be different international languages in the future.

The most important thing is to make the choice for yourself. You are free to speak Panlingue, English and any other language that your heart desires.

Grammar

Is Panlingue a pidgin or a creole?

Pidgins and creoles are natural contact languages. Panlingue is a constructed contact language. So the answer is no, Panlingue is not a real pidgin or a creole. However, it is characterized by many of the same features as pidgins and creoles.

The following is a list of characteristic features of pidgins and creoles. Most of them apply to Panlingue too.

Lack of grammatical complexity
No definite or indefinite article
Omission of the copula 'be'
Tense, aspect, modality and negation are not part of the verb.
Passive structures are not used.
Lack of morphological complexity
Nouns and pronouns are not inflected
Verbs are not inflected and tense is marked by separate words
Semantic transparency
Meaning of a word can be determined from the meanings of the parts of which the word is built.
Reduced vocabulary
Multifunctional words
All-purpose prepositions
Simple phonology
Avoid difficult sounds.
Use mostly simple syllable structures.
Prefer short words.
Tone is not used to distinguish words.

How word forms change in Panlingue?

In general, word forms can change in four ways.

Total change: go ⇒ went
Change in the stem: write ⇒ wrote
Change of an affix: electric ⇒ electron
Addition of an affix: man ⇒ manhood

In Panlingue, only 3. and 4. are used. We can change the ending of a word, so for example vize 'sight' can be changed to viza 'to see'. We can also add suffixes, so for example novike 'novice, newbie' can be created from novi 'new'.

Why word forms change in Panlingue?

Panlingue uses different word forms to indicate different word classes. There are many good sides:

Learning the grammar is very easy, because the essential grammatical structure is encoded in words both visibly and audibly.
You can understand the structure of a sentence without knowing the meaning of all words.
You don't have to memorize the word class with each word separately – words include that information in the last vowel!
Word derivation is always symmetrical, because word roots are neutral in Panlingue.
A word stem becomes a verb, a noun or a modifier only when the corresponding vowel ending is added.
Even transitive and intransitive verbs are derived symmetrically in Panlingue, so we always know is the subject the agent or the recipient of the action.

Word class marking is a very efficient method for implementing a functional grammar. It is done in Panlingue with a minimal set of only six endings. (In comparison, Esperanto employs 10 basic and 7 combined endings.)

Why agglutinating structure was chosen for Panlingue?

Different structures were considered and tested during the development of Panlingue. The main choice was between an agglutinating and an isolating structure.

In an agglutinating language every word can be clearly divided into component parts. For example Esperanto word "niaj" (our) is made out of three parts: ni- (we), -a- (adjective marker) and -j (plural marker).
In an isolating language every word consists of just one part. For example in Mandarin Chinese the word for "our" consists of three separate words: wǒ (first person pronoun), men (plural marker) and de (possessive marker). Then they are simply put together: wǒmende, 我们的.

Panlingue is a lightly agglutinating language. It uses separate words to express things like person, number, mood, tense and aspect, which are typically expressed with inflection in agglutinating and inflecting languages.

To demonstrate the difference, let's compare the same sentence in Esperanto (a heavily agglutinating language) and Panlingue. The parts of each word are separated with the hyphen.

Esperanto: Mi vol-as  vid-i  vi-a-j-n  du   bel-a-j-n  okul-o-j-n  nun.
Panlingue: me vol-a   vid-a  t-i       du   mey-i      ok-e        zay-o.
           I  want to see    your      two beautiful   eyes        now.

Are the word class markers unnatural?

Panlingue uses final vowels as word class markers. It is not an unnatural thing to do, because there are comparable morphemes in natural languages that are used for marking various word classes and their subclasses.

Example 1. The Bantu languages use a system of prefixes for marking nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Here are some Swahili words together with the same words in Panlingue.

Panlingue	Swahili	English meaning
kitab-	-and-	the root related to writing
kitab-a	ku-and-ik-a	'to write'
kitab-u	ku-and-ik-w-a	'to be written'
kitab-e	ma-and-ish-i	'writing, script'
kitab-i	-a ma-and-ish-i	'written, scriptural'

Example 2. Arabic uses a system of vowel infixes to convert consonant roots into different word classes and their subclasses. Here are some Arabic words together with the same words in Panlingue.

Panlingue	Arabic	English meaning
kitab-	k-t-b	the root related to writing
kitab-a	kataba	'to write'
kitab-u	kutiba	'to be written'
kitab-e	kitāb	'writing, script, book'
kitab-i	kitābi	'written, scriptural'

Example 3. English uses a complex system that involves suffixes, auxiliary words and root modification (as in write : wrote : written) to convert words into different classes and types.

Panlingue	English
kitab-	writ-
kitab-a	to writ-e
kitab-u	to be writt-en
kitab-e	writ-ing
kitab-i	writt-en

Panlingue's system is a very simple one – it includes only the bare minimum! – but otherwise it's nothing new. Various natural languages have comparable morphemes for marking words in different word classes. The morpheme type doesn't matter: prefixes, infixes, circumfixes and suffixes can do the same task. Single-vowel suffixes are the most minimal and therefore the simplest type!

Looking at the examples above, it's obvious that the system of Panlingue is simpler than those of Swahili, Arabic and English. In conclusion, using simple vowel suffixes for word class marking is unnatural only for its simplicity, nothing else.

Vocabulary

Where Panlingue's words come from?

Panlingue's words come from all parts of the world.

In our opinion the world language should be a mix of all languages in the world. That's why Panlingue has at least a few words in common with almost all languages of the world.

A lot of words are in common to international and important regional languages.

Figure. Bar chart showing the percentage of words similar in the source languages and Panlingue.

Figure. Pie chart showing distribution of influence from the main source languages to Panlingue.

Why Panlingue borrows words mainly from widely spoken languages?

About 6500 languages are spoken in the world today. It would be possible to borrow one and only one word from every language. But it wouldn't be very useful, if you knew only one or two words in the world language beforehand, would it?

It's smarter to borrow words that are in common to many languages. Then most people will know many words in Panlingue.

There are common words in every region of the world. For example, in Europe there are European international words, which often come from important ancient languages like Latin and Greek. In the Indian peninsula there are ancient words from Sanskrit that are in common to every language of that region.

That's why it is enough that we select some languages from every part of the world. They represent also the other languages of that region.

Why the last vowel of words is sometimes different in Panlingue than in language X?

In Panlingue, words consist of a stem and one or more suffixes. A suffix is a part of word that belongs to the end. The final vowel of a word has a grammatical meaning in Panlingue. That's the basic reason why the final vowels are sometimes different in Panlingue than in other languages.

The second reason is that Panlingue borrows words from many languages, and often those languages don't agree about the final vowel. For example the word supe (soup) ends in -a in Spanish sopa, in -u in Japanese スープ or sūpu, in -e in German Suppe, and not in any vowel in English soup. So it's not one and the same word but rather an international family of similar words, and Panlingue's supe fits perfectly into that family.

The third reason is that endings of words change already in many source languages. For example, Panlingue word novi is borrowed, among others, from Portuguese. In Portuguese, this word has many forms and only the stem nov- remains the same: nov-o, nov-a, nov-os, nov-as, nov-idade, re-nov-ar... So it makes sense to take only the stem and attach our regular Panlingue suffixes to it.

What is Panlingue called in other languages?

Here are some translations of the name Panlingue in various languages.

Latin panlingua
Esperanto Panlingvo
Russian панлингвэ /panlingve/
Mandarin Chinese 泛话 /fàn huà/
Cantonese 泛話 /faan wa/
Japanese 汎語 /han-go/

Shouldn't "salam" mean "peace"?

In many languages, expressions of greeting have something to do with peace, health or well-being. The origins of Panlingue's word salam can be traced back to Semitic triliteral root SLM, which covers a variety of meanings including safety, security, peace and health. Likewise the English word salutation (and French greeting salut) can be traced back to Latin "salus", which means safety, security, health and well-being.

So the meaning of salam is greater than the meaning of peace. It means well-being in general and you can use it as a general expression for well-wishing in all kinds of situations, not just when you meet somebody. See the first lesson in the phrasebook for a lot of examples!