What is Interlingua?
Interlingua is an international auxiliary language (IAL)
prepared between 1924 and 1951 to be as easy to learn as possible
for as many people as possible worldwide. The International
Auxiliary Language Association (IALA), a society of professional
linguists and researchers, found that many words occur in a great
variety of languages. IALA collected these words, standardized
them, and supplemented them with a simple, regular grammar.
The result is a spoken and written language that large
populations, including some 600,000,000 speakers of the Romance
language alone, can largely understand without prior study. This
immediate comprehension makes for rapid learning, and some reports
suggest that people from fairly diverse linguistic backgrounds can
learn Interlingua in approximately one week. Once learned,
Interlingua speeds the learning of many major languages. Gopsill
reports that students can learn the Romance languages, for example,
in roughly half the time after learning Interlingua. Students of
English and Russian have also shown successful results.
Interlingua has been used to assist dyslexic students,
facilitate computer translation, produce international summaries of
scientific and medical studies, and reach large audiences at a low
cost. In the early 1970s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture used
Interlingua to compile a large phytopathological dictionary to help
combat plant diseases in the developing world. The powerful
International Standardizing Organization chose Interlingua as the
basis for its dictionaries.
Several authors have criticized international auxiliary
languages for having a Western bias. Interlingua is the only
auxiliary language that has been scientifically prepared to reduce
this bias. While most highly international words are of Western
origin, many have spread to non-Western languages such as Arabic,
Hindi, and Japanese. Many have calques, or loan translations, in
the Chinese language. IALA has selected the most international
vocabulary available, increasing the range of people who can
recognize Interlingua words and learn Interlingua in a short time.
Non-Western people are also helped by Interlingua's simple grammar,
and by its method of deriving words regularly from a relatively
small number of roots and affixes.
Words in Interlingua can be taken from any language. The
internationality of each word is verified by its presence in
specific combinations of "control languages:" Spanish, Portuguese,
Italian, French, English, German, and Russian. These languages were
selected because their vocabulary tends to appear in a wide range
of other languages. Thus, IALA's researchers were able to obtain
words from all language families worldwide without examining each
language separately.
The popularity of Interlingua, while modest compared to English
or French, has grown almost continuously in the half-century since
it was introduced to the public. Interlingua has also gained
respect, and demonstrated its usefulness, in academic, business,
and government settings. Interlingua shows that people can make
great progress when the language barriers that separate them are
tossed aside.