What is Interlingua?

Interlingua was published in 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association, better known as IALA. It is the most widely used naturalistic auxiliary language.

Interlingua is unusual for being immediately understandable to speakers of Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, which number over 800 million people. Because of this, Interlingua is being used as an introduction to these natural languages.

The major forces of science, technology, trade, diplomacy, and the arts, combined with the historical dominance of the Greek and Latin languages, have resulted in a large, common vocabulary among Western languages. Interlingua uses an objective procedure to extract and standardize the most common word(s) for a concept, found in the control languages. These languages are: English, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, with German and Russian serving as secondary reference languages. Words from any language are eligible for inclusion, as long as they are present in at least three of the control languages.

Interlingua combines this pre-existing vocabulary with a minimal grammar that was extracted from the control languages.

The immediate comprehension of Interlingua by speakers of Romance languages makes it unusually easy to learn. Thanks to its simple grammar and regular word formation, it is much easier for speakers of other languages to learn Interlingua than a natural language. Words in Interlingua retain their natural form. They are never distorted to fit a pre-existing grammar or set of rules. Each word retains its normal spelling, pronunciation, and meanings.

Once learned, Interlingua can be used to acquire other related languages quickly and easily, or even to understand them immediately. Research with students in Sweden has shown that after learning Interlingua, they could easily translate elementary texts from Spanish, Italian or Portuguese. For example, an Interlingua class translated a Spanish text, that students who had taken 150 hours of Spanish found too difficult to do.

Ups and Downs

An early practical application of Interlingua was the scientific newsletter Spectroscopia Molecular, published from 1952 to 1980. In 1954 Interlingua was used at the 2nd World Cardiological Congress in Washington DC, for both written summaries and oral interpretation. Within a few years, it found similar use at nine further medical congresses. Between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s, some thirty scientific and medical journals provided article summaries in Interlingua. Science Service, the publisher of Science Newsletter at the time, published a monthly column in Interlingua from the early 1950s until 1970. In 1967, the powerful International Organization for Standardization (ISO) voted almost unanimously to adopt Interlingua as the basis for its dictionaries.

The IALA closed its doors in 1953 but was not formally dissolved until about 1956. A successor organization, the Interlingua Institute, was founded in 1970 to promote Interlingua in the US and Canada. The new institute supported the work of other linguistic organizations, made considerable scholarly contributions and produced Interlingua summaries for scholarly and medical publications. One of its biggest achievements was the creation of two, immense volumes on phytopathology, in 1976 and 1977, which was produced by the American Phytopathological Society, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Interlingua had attracted many former adherents of other international language projects, notably Occidental and Ido. The former Occidentalist, Ric Berger, founded The Union Mundial pro Interlingua (UMI) in 1955, and by the late 1950s, interest in Interlingua in Europe had already begun to overtake that in North America.

Interlingua works were published by university presses in Sweden and Italy, and in the 1990s, Brazil and Switzerland. Several Scandinavian schools undertook projects that used Interlingua as a means of teaching the international scientific and core vocabularies.

In 2000, the Interlingua Institute was dissolved amid funding disputes with the UMI. The American Interlingua Society, established the following year, succeeded the institute and responded to new interest emerging in Mexico. This was followed by the establishment of the Interlingua Education Institute.

The Soviet Bloc

Interlingua was spoken and promoted in the Soviet Union, despite attempts to suppress the language. In East Germany, government officials confiscated the letters and magazines that the UMI sent to the Interlingua representative there. In Czechoslovakia, Július Tomin received threatening letters after his first article on Interlingua was published. Despite continuing persecution, he went on to become the Czech Interlingua representative, teach Interlingua in the school system, and author a long series of published articles and books.

Interlingua Today

Today, interest in Interlingua has expanded from the scientific community to the general public. Individuals, governments, and private companies use Interlingua for learning and instruction, travel, online publishing, and communication across language barriers. Interlingua is promoted internationally by the Interlingua Education Institute and the Union Mundial pro Interlingua (UMI).

The number of Interlingua speakers has grown consistently over most of the past half-century. As previously noted, Interlingua is the most widely spoken naturalistic auxiliary language. Interlingua's greatest advantage is that it is the most widely understood International Auxiliary Language (IAL) by virtue of its naturalistic (as opposed to schematic) grammar and vocabulary, allowing those familiar with a Romance language, and educated speakers of English, to read and understand it without prior study.

Interlingua has active speakers on all continents, especially in South America and in Eastern and Northern Europe, most notably Scandinavia, as well as in Russia and the Ukraine.

In Africa, Interlingua has official representation in the Republic of the Congo. There are many Interlingua web pages, as well as editions of Wikipedia and Wiktionary, and a number of periodicals and magazines of the national societies allied with it. There are several active mailing lists, and Interlingua is also used in certain Usenet newsgroups, particularly in Europe. Interlingua has also been presented on radio and television, as well as on CDs. In recent years, samples of Interlingua have also been seen in music, manga and anime.

Interlingua is taught in many high schools and universities, sometimes as a means of teaching other languages quickly, by introducing the International Core Vocabulary (ICV). The prestigious University of Granada in Spain, for example, offers an Interlingua course in collaboration with the Centro de Formación Continua.