I told myself I wouldn't learn any more conlangs, then I read through half of Mini's document last night and now I'm going to rank them all because there's nothing in my head now but CONLAAAANGSSS
Obligatory exposition:
- Conlangs are constructed languages, IAL stands for "international auxiliary language"
- I'm primarily interested in conlangs for the hypothetical ~best IAL~ and since there's no objective correct answer I like dissecting each of the attempts
- Obviously these are all my opinions and I'm 100% a hobbyist so these don't mean anything
- I'll only be noting the conlangs I've directly studied, with the exception of Esperanto because I've done a good amount of adjacent studying of it through Ido
I'm ranking each language in 3 categories: enjoyment is how much I personally like using it, effectiveness is how well-designed I consider it to be as an IAL, and feasibility is how possible I feel it is to become a real IAL (relatively speaking, cuz we know that's not happening)
Esperanto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto)
enjoyment: 5/10
effectiveness: 5/10
feasibility: 8/10
Esperanto's grown on me! I like the logical design and its dedication to things like one-letter-one-sound, which technically doesn't exist in even Ido. However, its pretty largely agreed that it isn't the most friendly auxlang -- weird sounds to learn, weird letters, and some difficult words. Feasibility is rated high due to the already-large community, but not 10/10 because it doesn't hold the same sort of explosive growth as I've seen some other conlangs have.
Ido (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ido)
enjoyment: 7/10
effectiveness: 7/10
feasibility: 6/10
Ido takes everything I like about Esperanto and makes it all neat and tidy. I'm still personally horrified by the number of verb conjugations, and not sure how truly universal the language is, but it's generally agreed to be a step up from Esperanto. Feasibility could swing pretty high or pretty low, both hinging directly on its relationship to Esperanto. Its similarities to Esperanto essentially give Ido speakers access to both communities and vice versa, but it also means that people might have less reason to learn Ido because "why not just learn the more popular one." (the answer is the flag, the flag's cooler)
Elefen (https://elefen.org/)
enjoyment: 8.5/10
effectiveness: 8.5/10
feasibility: 7/10
I really really like Elefen! Its small inconsistencies are a bit unfortunate (and it fully dedicates its vocabulary to Romance), but otherwise it's a super simple language that also feels naturalistic. It passes comprehension tests (at least for Romance speakers) which is important to me, and I'm already having a lot of fun speaking bits and pieces of it. It also has the benefits of being a completed language with a decently strong online presence (it has its own website AND a searchable dictionary). If the community continues to grow, I could see it being a legitimate force. However, it seems juuust not popular enough to not be included in every IAL conversation next to Esperanto and Interlingua.
Mini (https://minilanguage.com/)
enjoyment: 8/10
effectiveness: 8-9/10?
feasibility: 4/10
Cursory research makes me love this language's design, but it's not very well-known at all. Stopped at 1,000 words, very simple grammar, based partly on toki pona but meant to have less ambiguity. The words are very recognizable as an English speaker, and a lot of thought was put into it. I hope the community for it grows, because it feels like a nice in-between point for Elefen and toki pona. Will also have to wait for it to age because it's a VERY new language, but the fact that it has a full walkthrough translated to Chinese shows a strong dedication to having a truly international language.
toki pona (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona)
enjoyment: 9/10
effectiveness: 8/10
feasibility: 8/10
I love toki pona. It has a very strong online presence and only feels to be growing rapidly. The concept resonates strongly with people of the internet, and it uniquely has a VERY international vocabulary like no other language on this list (other than maybe Mini). That does hurt its immediate readability though, which from my experience makes people less interested in learning it. People mainly want to learn toki pona once they resonate with the concept -- just hearing it in the wild seems to come off as "oh, I just don't know what they're saying, so I will wait until they stop talking" (this is what started happening every time me and my friend speak it in voice chats lol). However, in my opinion it has the potential to become as popular as Esperanto, PRECISELY because it accidentally became a very different approach to the same problem. Still has some issues with ambiguity, even though this is massively overstated by people who don't understand toki pona.
kalibe (https://www.vecderg.com/kalibe)
enjoyment: 10/10
effectiveness: 3/10
feasibility: 2/10
Obliged to put my baby here because it's still my favorite. In terms of expressing things in a very small number of words, I think it's decent, but it has a lot of the same issues as toki pona, except even worse due to less words. Most of the words are completely unrecognizable, and the grammar isn't technically fully fleshed out. But sometimes, I just wanna be a rat gremlin who goes babagubaba.
EXTRA NOTES:
- Multiple languages here have an ISO 639-3 code: Esperanto, Ido, toki pona, and Elefen. I'm not gonna pretend like I fully understand what ISO codes mean, but it gives me the impression "these languages are important enough to have a code dedicated to them for websites n stuff"
- There is still an unimaginably large gap between Esperanto and other conlangs in terms of resources and community size. toki pona is the only conlang I've consistently seen decently large communities for (MULTIPLE active Discords), and Elefen is the only one I've seen with easy-to-access tutorials in several languages, through its main website.
**update i just found this link and not quite!! toki pona and Esperanto are actually super comparable in terms of online community sizes... and apparently so are a number of non-IAL conlangs too lol: https://tokipona.org/largest_conlangs.html