Many have heard of Esperanto. Not as many have heard of Afrihili, but they should have. Afrihili was a pan-African auxlang created by K. A. Kumi Attobrah of Ghana in 1970.
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A lot of people have been asking me about the use of Xhosa (as opposed to a conlang) for the Wakandan language in
#BlackPanther
. The thing to remember is it wasn’t their decision—or, rather, it wasn’t their idea to use *Xhosa* for Wakandan.
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This was a decision made by
#CivilWar
(a decision I disagreed with).
#BlackPanther
’s decision was whether to honor what had been established as canon by
#CivilWar
. They could have done something different, but it makes sense to me to go with what has been established.
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After all,
#CivilWar
is a recent movie, uses several of the same actors, etc. I probably would’ve made the same decision for
#BlackPanther
, even though I would’ve made a very different decision for
#CivilWar
.
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Rather than dwell on that, since I think the decision made for
#BlackPanther
specifically is fine, I thought I’d use the time to talk about some amazing conlangs by black conlangers throughout history.
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When it comes to using a language (which is what auxlangs are about), there’s functionality, of course, and practicality, but there also has to be something appealing in using the language, and Afrihili knocks it out of the park.
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Afrihili has one of the most amazing morphological features I have ever seen in a conlang. It’s called the Hili Triangle, and it’s used for all kinds of derivational stuff.
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Basically, you’re always looking at the vowel *opposite* on the triangle. Nouns, for example, are indicated with a vowel prefix *opposite* of its final vowel. To pluralize it, you change the final vowel to match the first.
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I was absolutely blown away by this. I’d never imagined anything in a language like that. I used the same idea in my own Irathient language for
#Defiance
simply because I loved it so much.
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I took a class in Esperanto, but it never really grabbed me. Afrihili grabbed me. It’s a language I wish had gotten more attention—a language I’d be happy to learn and use.
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If you want to see a writeup of the language,
@WmBlathers
did one for Fiat Linguage. You can read it here (it’s where I got the screenshot):
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@WmBlathers
For a modern take on a pan-African auxlang, you can take a look at Guosa. Guosa was created by Nigerian Alex Igbineweka:
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@WmBlathers
Unlike Afrihili, Guosa leans into the tonal nature of Bantu, meaning its got more potential word shapes (i.e. you can have the same phonological string differentiated by tone only).
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@WmBlathers
Also unlike Afrihili it’s still around. You can take a look at the almost 700 page dictionary on the site I linked to:
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In fictional conlangs or artlangs (as opposed to auxlangs), one of the best I've seen is David Bell's ámman îar.
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Everyone, of course, has heard of Tolkien’s conlangs. Tolkien was one of the first artlangers, and he did some amazing work. Unfortunately, his conlanging was the victim of his success. Much of his work is fragmentary at this point.
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You really can’t blame him. Basically, his books were so successful that he spent more time focusing on his fiction than on his conlang work, since the latter wasn’t getting the attention it deserved.
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So now we have a good chunk of Quenya, a lot of Sindarin, and then as you look at Tolkien’s other conlangs, less and less and less.
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David Bell was a HUGE Tolkien fan, and a big fan of his languages. He decided to create a language that would be in the family tree of Tolkien’s Elvish languages. He called it ámman îar.
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What resulted was probably one of the most complete Tolkien-derived languages ever.
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Much of it (but not all of it) was eventually documented on his website, which we preserved after David passed. I mean, just look at the beginning of the A section of his website’s dictionary:
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This is information he was copying over from his own documents. I’ve never actually seen the stuff he has on paper. The language was HUGE.
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Not only that, it was brilliant. This bit is going to take a lot of linguistic knowledge to appreciate, but here goes. Ergativity is a thing that caught the conlanging community by storm in the 90s.
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It’s a marking strategy seen in languages like Hindi in the past tense that’s alien to most Western languages, because rather than marking subject and object differently, you mark AGENT differently and subject/object are the same.
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If that isn’t enough, there are many languages that are split-ergative—like Hindi, in fact. That is they only use this marking strategy sometimes. In the case of Hindi, it’s only in the perfect (derived from an old passive).
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Many conlangers try to do split-ergative, but do it in kind of a nonsensical or arbitrary way (e.g. “It’s split-ergative because I say it is, and the split is…I don’t know, here, I guess”).
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David Bell’s ámman îar did something I have never seen in my entire life. He combined what we know about animacy and merged it with split ergativity to create one of the most beautiful tables I have ever seen in my entire life.
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This is it: The animacy-based split-ergativity of ámman îar:
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I should’ve talked about animacy too in order to appreciate this… Basically, many languages are sensitive to the animacy of a noun for some reason.
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Spanish is a good example. In Spanish, you have to mark animate direct objects with “a”. So something like “Miré la pantalla” is “I looked at the screen”, but for a person you have to say “Miré a la niña”, “I looked at the girl”.
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Basically, if a noun falls on some spectrum of animacy, the grammar does something different with it.
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David Bell did with split-ergativity! And so with three different animacy distinctions, you get three different marking systems: full accusative, full ergative, and tripartite. It. Is. BRILLIANT.
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It’s really hard to appreciate if you don’t know how these systems work, but dammit, take my word for it. It floored me when I saw it.
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I wasn’t able to show David the appreciate he deserved in his lifetime, but I did award his ámman îar the Smiley Award in 2010 (an award I give out to conlangs). You can read that write up and more on the language here:
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Finally, even though he wasn’t a conlanger before, I wanted to mention something cool I discovered a while back, to tie this back into
#BlackPanther
.
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