Artificial language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An artificial language is a language created by a person or a group of people for a certain purpose, usually when this purpose is hard to achieve by using a natural language. Such a language can be based on an existing vocabulary or can create a new vocabulary.
If an artificial language does not serve the purpose of general-purpose communication (as natural languages do), then it is necessarily a second language.
Examples of artificial languages include:
- Constructed languages ease inter-human communication, bring realism to fictional worlds, and allow for linguistic experimentation.
- Formal languages are tools in the field of mathematical logic and computer science where meaning (semantics) and grammar (syntax) are very precisely defined.
- Computer languages are formal languages used by humans to communicate with computers or for communication among computing devices. Most prominently, Programming languages control the behavior of a computing machine.
- Some languages are developed to express an existing language in an alternate form (most languages only define a written and spoken form):
- Manually Coded Languages are invented representations of spoken languages in a gestural-visual form.
- Written forms were developed in modern times for some natural languages like Hawaiian.
- Inventions like character encodings for information storage or transliteration and transcription (linguistics) for international communication serve similar purposes.
It should be noted that the above categorization is not exclusive; for example, it reasonable that a computer language can be constructed for a fictional work or that a linguistic experiment can be used to instruct a computer.
