Portal:Constructed languages/Language of the month/April 2012

Lingua Franca Nova (abbreviated LFN) is an auxiliary constructed language created by Dr. C. George Boeree of Shippensburg University, Pennsylvania. Its vocabulary is based on the Romance languages French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. The grammar is highly reduced and similar to the Romance creoles. The language has phonemic spelling, using 22 letters of either the Latin or Cyrillic scripts.

Boeree began working on LFN in 1965, with the goal to create a simple, creole-like international auxiliary language. He was inspired by the Mediterranean Lingua Franca, a pidgin used in the Mediterranean in centuries past, and by creoles such as Papiamento, Haitian Creole, and Bislama. He used French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan as the basis for his new language. LFN was first presented on the Internet in 1998. A Yahoo! Group was formed in 2002 by Bjorn Madsen and today has more than 250 members. Group members have contributed significantly to the further evolution of the language. Stefan Fisahn created a wiki for the language in 2005. A few issues of a journal called Orizones Nova (New Horizons) were published online by David MacLeod in late 2006 and early 2007. Also in 2007, Igor Vasiljevic began a Facebook page, which now has over 70 members. LFN was given an ISO 639-3 designation (lfn) by SIL in January 2008. Find out more...