The linguistic situation in Elynesia is rather complex. Though its laws are published in Latin and official translations are provided in the working languages of the UN (primarily for reasons of international relations and business) the country has no official language.
Like many other issues language was a heavily debated topic when the country was formed and many proposal have been made for the official language of Elynesia, varying from Esperanto to German and from Interlingua de IALA to Elamite. However, the only thing the founders of Elynesia could agree upon was to exclude English.
The Association of Lagrangian States
For some time Interlingua was seen as the most likely candidate. But when the Association of Lagrangian States was formed, this organization adopted Interlingua as its own working language while prohibiting its members from adopting this language as their own official primary language.
Though this might seem strange, there is a clear rationale for this rule. By prohibiting the use of Interlingua as a national language it sought to prevent that some member states could gain any advantage by having its population consisting of native Interlingua speakers.
Europanto as solution
During one of the many debates about the linguistic question a surprising proposal was put forward by Atrahasis. What if we would not chose any language at all? Instead he proposed to encourage multilingualism by requiring that any new immigrant to Elynesia should have some working knowledge of three of the following languages:
- German
- French
- Dutch
- Spanish
- Russian
According to Atrahasis controlled multilingualism would be beneficial for several reasons. One would be that multilingual people would have increased cognitive functions and hence promote the nation’s intellectual level. Also the more languages one would know, the easier it would be for one to be able to talk to a random stranger.
Further Atrahasis argued that if enough people would know other languages, it would simply not matter what language people spoke as most of the words used, would be understood by others. As an example to support his idea was Diego Marani’s “Europanto” experiment.
Eventually, so he believed, a common Elynesian language would emerge naturally. Yeah, Atrahasis admitted, there would be many different dialects and sociolects but that would not be different if any other language would be chosen.
Elynesian Phonetic Alphabet
One thing the Elynesian government actually did in regard to its language policy was to fix orthography. It did so by establishing the Elynesian Phonetic Alphabet – essentially an expanded version of the Latin Alphabet – that included about 40 letters to represent to most used sounds in human languages.
Source
This text is based upon Julio Martino’s “Die Evolution der Lingua elynesienne desde die Onafhankelijkheid der Respublika” (University of Ilium Novum Press, 2089).
Fascinating Future 