Munto Te: The Creation of a Universal Auxiliary Language

How universally accessible can a constructed auxiliary language be made? How likely is it that different varieties would emerge over time based on various speaker's linguistic tendencies, and then to what extent? This was the question I was set for an essay as part of a course called Language Variation and Change; we had, the previous week, discussed the extent to which variation occurred between speakers of constructed languages, whether they be intended as auxiliary languages or fictional languages. This got me thinking: is it possible to create an auxiliary language that is as inclusive as possible, so that as many people as possible can learn it? Is it possible to prevent variation in speakers of said language so that mutual intelligibility is retained? While researching this topic, I found that preventing variation was likely not the best approach to retaining intelligibility, but rather accommodating it so that variation is as allophonic as possible rather than phonemic. Only phonemes that were found to be most prevalent throughout the world’s languages were considered; this was to ensure that as many people as possible can pronounce the various sounds of the language. As well as the phonological considerations mentioned above, multiple other aspects of the hypothetical language – such as morphology, orthography, etc. - were designed with the same aim of inclusivity and accessibility in mind. What resulted was an auxiliary language that had a very restricted phonemic inventory, an isolating morphological structure, and a very simple orthography using the roman alphabet.