Is Scholarly Communication Possible in a So-called "Artificial" Language?

Abstract

Important for the status of any language is its function as a scholarly language. Are "artificial" languages, i.e. "international planned languages", available for such a function? This article demonstrates that they are. Among planned languages, language planning, and research on scholarly language there are several connections, particularly demonstrable through the example of Esperanto. This language, from as early as the beginning of the 20th century, has had available to it scholarly texts in journals and other publications, and oral scholarly discourse through individual communication among individual scholars and in the context of organizations and other communities of discourse on various subjects, today also web-based. Characteristics of the language, particularly its word-formation, tend to favor the flexible naming of notions and the creation of terms in line with the criteria of ISO/TC 37. Such stabilized scientific vocabulary is recorded in over 200 dictionaries covering some 90 fields. The Universal Esperanto Association seeks to coordinate work on terminology and collaborates with the principal international terminological institutions. Outside their own range of discourse, planned languages have served to stimulate work, for example, in decimal classification, in nomenclature, and in terminology science. There is a broad scholarly literature in the field.

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