Frequently Crawled Questions

Lingua Franca Nova (“Elefen”) is a language designed to be particularly simple, consistent, and easy to learn for international communications.

What is the relation between Elefen and the original Lingua Franca?

Basically, it was a matter of inspiration. I started the process of creating Lingua Franca Nova in 1965. At that time, I had no access to information about Lingua Franca other than a few lines of Molière. The original Lingua Franca was more analytic (i.e. like other creoles and pidgins, or like Chinese) than Elefen, but only slightly. It was designed for quick and easy communications among sailors and merchants, not for the broader purpose of providing an international communications tool for the twenty-first century!

Because I selected a similar set of languages, and because I was also interested in developing a simple and consistent grammar, Elefen and Lingua Franca often do overlap, especially in vocabulary. But that was not intentional.

What is so special about creoles?

A creole is a language that began as an effort at communication between two groups of people, and over time became a language in its own right. The study of creole languages around the world has shown that they display remarkable similarities in grammar, possibly reflecting the universals in all languages. Most words in creoles, for example, are unvarying, and the grammar tends to be indicated by simple particles and word order.

It should be understood that creole languages are not baby-talk versions of major languages. Kreyòl in Haiti, Papiamento in Aruba, or Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea are full-fledged languages, capable of expressing anything that can be expressed in French, Spanish, or English.

What languages did you use to create Elefen?

Elefen is based on French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. Other Romance languages were considered but omitted for various reasons, most often the limited speaking population and, in the case of Romanian, the strong influence of non-Romance neighbors. Catalan was included because of its centrality, both physically and linguistically.

Why not English or Latin or Greek?

I honestly did not feel they were necessary: Most of the international vocabulary of English comes from French or Latin, and the vocabulary of the Romance languages is itself derived from Latin.

Latin and Greek have, of course, supplied us with innumerable scientific words. Elefen uses the Romance derivations of Latin words, plus phonetic versions of Greek technical terms and affixes, very much the way that Italian or Spanish do.