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

Lingua Franca Nova (or Elefen) is an auxiliary constructed language originally created by 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 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 has more than 250 members. Group members have contributed significantly to the further evolution of the language. In 2007, Igor Vasiljevic began a Facebook page, which has over 200 members. LFN was given an ISO 639-3 designation (lfn) by SIL in January 2008. Find out more...