By Amber Dance, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 24, 2007/ edited into better English by Alec Weston
Professional interpreter Sonja Elen Kisa of Toronto has created a simple language, consisting of only 120 words, to help clarify her thinking during a period of depression. The language is called Toki Pona – “good language”
"Ale li pona," she told herself. "Everything will be OK."
Kisa eventually sorted through her thoughts and, to her great surprise, her little language took off, with more than 100 speakers today, singing Toki Pona songs, writing Toki Pona poems and chatting with Toki Pona words.
It's all part of a weirdly Babel-esque boom of new languages. Once the private arena of J.R.R. Tolkien, Esperanto speakers and grunting Klingon fanatics, invented languages have flourished on the Internet and begun creeping into the public domain.
The website Langmaker.com lists more than 1,000 language inventors and 1,902 made-up languages, from `Ayvárith to Zyem.
The language inventors have, of course, created a word to describe what they do -- "conlang," short for constructed languages.
The awareness of invented languages has been driven in part by their use in popular films, such as Ku, a fictional "African" language spoken by Nicole Kidman in the 2005 film "The Interpreter."
Created languages may have no hope of supplanting the real thing, but for most conlangers, that is hardly the goal. Hobbyists like Kisa find it a fun or therapeutic practice. Linguists can use conlangs to dissect how real language works. For a select few who write fiction or work for Hollywood, conlanging can even be a moneymaker.
But to most linguaphiles, conlangs are simply art. Their palette holds not paints but the buzz of the letter "z," the hiss of an "s," the trill of an Italian "r."
And sometimes the howl of a Klingon scream: "Hab SoSlI' Quch!"
"Your mother has a smooth forehead!"
