What is Interlingua?

Answer 1

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.