Interglossa and Glosa

Isolating planned language(s)

This site documents Interglossa, a communication (meta)language platform described in 1943 and the constructed language Glosa, its main implementation.

Interglossa, a metalanguage

In his books «The Loom of Language» (1944) and «Interglossa» (1943), British biologist and statistician L.Hogben set a framework for a scientific communication (meta)language. Under a symbolic name «Interglossa» for this lingua franca, he formulated three principles that a candidate language should adhere to in order to become receivable as an auxilary language:

The grammar: analytic or even isolating.
The lexicon: internationalized and based on scientific and technological terminology.
The phonetics: facilitated (e.g. Toki Pona).

Hogben proposed some possible lexifications and etymological operators, but has never accomplished implementing any particular language, neither did he produce any texts demonstrating his approach. Thus, his achievement was to define a language template or a metalanguage. Based on this system, dozens of different languages could be created, every single one being a specific Interglossa recension/implementation.

Glosa, an Interglossa language

Among other attempts within this framework (Interglossa ipso by L.Hogben, 1943; Lingua (Sistem)Frater by Pham Xuan Thai, 1957 and Paul O. Barlett 1998), language Glosa was the most articulated project. It was created as a modified version of Interglossa, by Ronald Clark and Wendy Ashby (1972,1992) and promoted by Marcel Springer.

Glosa, a dying language

Since the passing away of Wendy Ashby, the inventor of this Interglossa recension, in 2015, the Glosa-speaking community (mainly populating this Facebook group and this Telegram channel) struggles to maintain the intensity of language use. The language vitality assessment guidelines (as defined by UNESCO) specify several areas whose stagnation might indicate the negative trend:

education of the new speakers
language transmission
content creation.

The necessary condition for a positive outcome of those activity facets is the existence of a standardized and documented version of the language. The Language Planning Committee of the FIAS has decided to launch a language planning initiative in order to document the elaboration of the language standard as well as to systematize and centralize linguistic resources on Glosa and its documentation.

Content policy

This website’s aim is to aggregate and conserve materials available in Glosa and Interglossa — as well materials about them. This site doesn’t seek to promote those languages and tries to enforce professional linguistic treatment and neutrality in its exposition of the material. Language creators, promoters and zealots are known to present facts in a skewed manner. We systematically denounce such claims.

The source code is available on Github.

Fast links: Interglossa » Glosa »