A pan-Germanic language is a zonal auxiliary language designed for communication amongst speakers of Germanic languages. Many of them are very similar and overlap in their approach but they are mutually inconsistent in their orthography, phonology, and vocabulary.
The intention behind a zonal auxiliary language is to create a means of mutual communication among speakers of related languages. Due to the diversity and variation among Germanic dialects, the most-spoken languages—English, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian—are usually given precedence over others. Some of the pan-languages focus on unifying subgroups of the Germanic languages, such as the North or West Germanic languages.
The development of each language is similar to the process for developing other auxiliary languages. To create a word or a grammatical form, samples are taken from all of the Germanic languages and the form common to most of the languages is selected. Reference is also made to previously existing and parallel Germanic zonal auxiliary languages.
The first known active and concise effort[ citation needed ] to unite the Germanic languages is Tutonish . It was developed by Elias Molee in 1901, and reformed in 1906 and 1915.[ citation needed ] It was extremely simplistic. The orthography, while straightforward, was not related to any of the existing natural Germanic languages. However, despite its shortcomings, Molee established Four Principles[ further explanation needed ] that provided a framework for future works.[ citation needed ]
Later in the 20th and 21st centuries, other projects have been launched as well, none of which has ever been successful, though:
The Frisian languages are a closely related group of West Germanic languages, spoken by about 400,000 Frisian people, who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany. The Frisian languages are the closest living language group to the Anglic languages; the two groups make up the Anglo-Frisian languages group and together with the Low German dialects these form the North Sea Germanic languages. However, modern English and Frisian are not mutually intelligible, nor are Frisian languages intelligible among themselves, owing to independent linguistic innovations and foreign influences.
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers. All Germanic languages are derived from Proto-Germanic, spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia and Germany.
German is a West Germanic language mainly spoken in Western and Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Italian province of South Tyrol. It is also an official language of Luxembourg and Belgium, as well as a recognized national language in Namibia. Outside Germany, it is also spoken by German communities in France (Alsace), Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary (Sopron).
International English is the concept of using the English language as a global means of communication similar to an international auxiliary language, and often refers to the movement towards an international standard for the language. Related and sometimes synonymous terms include: Global English, World English, Common English, Continental English, General English, and Engas. Sometimes, these terms refer to the actuality of the situation, where English is spoken and used in numerous dialects around the world. These terms may acknowledge the diversity and varieties of English spoken throughout the world.
An international auxiliary language is a language meant for communication between people from all different nations, who do not share a common first language. An auxiliary language is primarily a foreign language and often a constructed language. The concept is related to but separate from the idea of a lingua franca that people must use to communicate. The study of international auxiliary languages is interlinguistics.
The North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages—a sub-family of the Indo-European languages—along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages. The language group is also referred to as the Nordic languages, a direct translation of the most common term used among Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish scholars and people.
The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three branches of the Germanic family of languages. The West Germanic branch is classically subdivided into three branches: Ingvaeonic, which includes English and the Frisian languages; Istvaeonic, which encompasses Dutch and its close relatives; and Irminonic, which includes German and its close relatives and variants.
Pennsylvania Dutch, sometimes referred to as Pennsylvania German, is a variety of Palatine German, also known as Palatinate German or Palatine Dutch, spoken by the Pennsylvania Dutch, including the Amish, Mennonites, Fancy Dutch, and other descendants of German immigrants in the United States and Canada. There are approximately 300,000 native speakers of Pennsylvania Dutch in the United States and Canada.
Low German is a West Germanic language spoken mainly in Northern Germany and the northeastern Netherlands. The dialect of Plautdietsch is also spoken in the Russian Mennonite diaspora worldwide.
Saterland Frisian, also known as Sater Frisian, Saterfrisian or Saterlandic, is the last living dialect of the East Frisian language. It is closely related to the other Frisian languages: North Frisian, spoken in Germany as well, and West Frisian, spoken in the Dutch province of Friesland.
Elfdalian or Övdalian is a North Germanic language spoken by up to 3,000 people who live or have grown up in the locality of Älvdalen, which is located in the southeastern part of Älvdalen Municipality in northern Dalarna, Sweden.
A pluricentric language or polycentric language is a language with several codified standard forms, often corresponding to different countries. Many examples of such languages can be found worldwide among the most-spoken languages, including but not limited to Chinese in mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore; English in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, India, and elsewhere; and French in France, Canada, and elsewhere. The converse case is a monocentric language, which has only one formally standardized version. Examples include Japanese and Russian. In some cases, the different standards of a pluricentric language may be elaborated to appear as separate languages, e.g. Malaysian and Indonesian, Hindi and Urdu, while Serbo-Croatian is in an earlier stage of that process.
Dutch is a West Germanic language spoken by about 25 million people as a first language and 5 million as a second language. It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language, after its close relatives English and German. Afrikaans is a separate but mutually intelligible sister language of modern Dutch, and a daughter language of an earlier form of Dutch. It is spoken, to some degree, by at least 16 million people, mainly in South Africa and Namibia, evolving from the Cape Dutch dialects of Southern Africa. The dialects used in Belgium and in Suriname, meanwhile, are all guided by the Dutch Language Union.
Zonal auxiliary languages, or zonal constructed languages, are constructed languages made to facilitate communication between speakers of a certain group of closely related languages. They form a subgroup of the international auxiliary languages but are intended to serve a limited linguistic or geographic area, rather than the whole world like Esperanto and Volapük. Although most zonal auxiliary languages are based on European language families, they should not be confused with "Euroclones", a somewhat derogatory term for languages intended for global use but based (almost) exclusively on European material. Since universal acceptance is not the goal for zonal auxiliary languages, the traditional claims of neutrality and universalism, typical for IALs, do not apply. Although they may share the same internationalist commitments of the latter, zonal auxiliary languages have also been proposed as a defense against the effects of the growing hegemony of English on other cultures or as a means to promote a sense of ethnicity or community in a manner similar to revitalized languages, such as Modern Hebrew and Cornish. Related concepts are koiné language, a dialect that naturally emerges as a means of communication among speakers of divergent dialects of a language, and Dachsprache, a dialect that serves as a standard language for other, sometimes mutually unintelligible, dialects. The difference is that a zonal language is typically a mixture of several natural languages and is aimed to serve as an auxiliary for the speakers of different but related languages of the same family.
Tutonish is a constructed language created by Elias Molee. He worked on it for several years, and he reformed it multiple times, in 1906 under the name nu teutonish, in 1911 under the name altutonish and in 1915 under the name alteutonik. It is known to be the first Pan-Germanic language.
A pan-Slavic language is a zonal auxiliary language for communication among the Slavic peoples.
Ill Bethisad is a collaborative alternate history project which had 58 active participants as of March 2021. Originally created by Andrew Smith from New Zealand, it was initiated in 1997 as the Brithenig Project. It can be characterized as an instance of the subgenre of steampunk. Ill Bethisad has a largely encyclopedic character, consisting of constructed languages, written histories, timelines, news items, maps, flags and other images, short movies, descriptions of cultures, religions and technologies, as well as short stories.
A pan-Romance language or Romance interlanguage is a codified linguistic variety which synthesizes the variation of the Romance languages and is representative of these as a whole. It can be seen as a standard language proposal for the whole language family but is generally considered a zonal constructed language because it's the result of intense codification. Zonal languages are, according to interlinguist Detlev Blanke, constructed languages which "arise by choosing or mixing linguistic elements in a language group".
Interslavic is a pan-Slavic auxiliary language. Its purpose is to facilitate communication between speakers of various Slavic languages, as well as to allow people who do not speak a Slavic language to communicate with Slavic speakers by being mutually intelligible with most, if not all, Slavic languages. For Slavs and non-Slavs, it can be used for educational purposes as well.
Wede, Weltdeutsch, Weltpitshn, and Oiropa'pitshn were a series of languages created by Bavarian politician and teacher Adalbert Baumann to create a zonal auxiliary language based on the German language. The first of the languages, Wede, was published in 1915, with Weltdeutsch, Weltpitshn, and Oiropa'pitshn being published in 1916, 1925, and 1928 respectively. The languages were a posteriori, largely based on the German language – they primarily differed in grammatical and orthographic simplifications. Baumann's languages received a largely negative reception, being mocked by members of the Esperanto and Ido communities; none were implemented in any official manner.
Das Projekt ist jedoch weniger weit ausgearbeitet als die drei im Mittelpunkt dieser Arbeit stehenden slavischen Plansprachenprojekte, und es haben sich aufgrund diverser Uneinigkeiten verschiedene Versionen herausgebildet.