Everyone knows what natural languages are. And if he doesn’t know, then at least he’s guessing - after all all the people of our planet speak them. But so that confusion does not arise, one can give them such a definition - it is the fruit of people’s communication that has arisen and improved over the centuries, has experienced the influence of cultures, traditions and historical processes. Almost all languages are natural: they are Russian, and English, and Chinese, and German, and Indian, and many others. They can be both simple and complex; both common and rare; both international and used only in their own homeland.
But what are artificial languages? Why are they called that? How did they come about? What are they needed for?
Artificial languages were created by man and were not influenced by cultural traditions and historical events. When creating such a language, a dictionary can be formed both from nowhere existing words and from words from various natural languages. Its use is possible only for a relatively small circle of people who undertook the study of such a linguistic neoplasm, and the rules in it are often complicated. The comprehension of the secrets of such languages, as a rule, is occupied by very, very few, mainly linguists.
However, they have artificial languages and their advantages: they can be used by cryptographers, it’s convenient to talk to them about something secret, with their help you can completely immerse yourself in the world of the work, if the characters there speak such a syllable.
Today, there are many languages artificially created by man. But the most famous are only five.
Volapyuk - one of the first artificial languages - was invented by a German. Due to its simplicity and unusualness (all the words of this language were invented by the author) Volyapyuk quickly became widespread, for some time they not only spoke it, but also published newspapers.
Esperanto, like Volyapyuk, appeared in the 19th century and was even more popular than the first. In Esperanto, words are borrowed from several natural languages, more precisely, from groups of Slavic, Romance, and Germanic languages. Esperanto is still spoken to this day; people even live for whom it is native. This occurs in international families, where spouses speak Esperanto among themselves, and children learn it from childhood.
Ido is an Esperanto analogue perfected by the Frenchman Louis Couture and Dane Otto Jespersen. However, Ido did not win such popularity as Esperanto.
Quenya - the so-called "language of the elves", invented by the world famous writer Tolkien. It was created on the basis of the ancient languages of the Germanic group. It is quite popular among fans of his work.
Sloviansky is a very young language, created in 2006 to facilitate international communication between Slavs. Sloviansky is a language sufficiently understood by almost all speakers of Slavic languages, including Russians, Ukrainians, Croats, Czechs, Bulgarians and Belarusians.
Thus, using the examples of Esperanto and Slovenian, we can conclude that artificial languages can be of tangible benefit in communication between speakers of different languages.
However, this is not the end of the conversation about languages. In separate categories should be allocated not only natural and artificial languages, but also artificially revived.
So, in the Czech Republic at the end of the 18th century, almost the entire population of the country spoke German, and Czech was forgotten. In his dialects, conversations were conducted in the countryside, and even then peasants from different villages hardly understood each other. Realizing the sad fate of their native language, the indigenous Czechs took up its restoration, which they were very successful at. Another thing is that to this day, Czech spoken and Czech literary are, albeit related, but completely different languages.
A similar story happened with Hebrew, which almost no one spoke in the 19th century. No, he was not forgotten - newspapers were printed on it, Jews from different countries used it for communication, but it was not used in everyday life, and therefore there were simply not many words in it. Therefore, in order to revive this language, it was necessary not only to make people remember it, but also to invent new words.
An attempt to artificially restore was made in relation to another, almost now unknown language - Kafarevus, but it was unsuccessful.