Portal:Constructed languages/Language of the month/February 2015

Ithkuil is a constructed language created by John Quijada, designed to express deeper levels of human cognition briefly yet overtly and clearly, particularly with regard to human categorization. Ithkuil is notable for its grammatical complexity and extensive phoneme inventory. The name "Ithkuil" is an anglicized form of Iţkuîl, which in the original form roughly means "hypothetical representation of a language".

Ithkuil is presented as a cross between an a priori philosophical and a logical language. It strives to minimize the ambiguities and semantic vagueness found in natural human languages.

The many examples from the original grammar book show that a message, like a meaningful phrase or a sentence, can usually be expressed in Ithkuil with fewer sounds, or lexically distinct speech-elements, than in natural human languages. Quijada deems his creation too complex and strictly regular a language to have developed naturally, but nonetheless a language suited to human conversation. No person, including Quijada, is known to be able to speak Ithkuil fluently. Find out more...