Glosa is a constructed international auxiliary language based on Interglossa (a previous draft of an auxiliary published in 1943). The first Glosa dictionary was published 1978. The name of the language comes from the Greek root glossa meaning tongue or language. Glosa is an isolating language, which means that words never change form, and Glosa spelling is also completely regular and phonetic. As an isolating language, there are no inflections, so that words always remain in their dictionary form, no matter what function they have in the sentence. Consequently, grammatical functions, when not clear from the context, are taken over by a small number of operator words and by the use of word order (syntax). Being an a posteriori language, Glosa takes most of its vocabulary from Greek and Latin roots, seen by the authors as international in a sense by their usage in science.
History Glosa is based on the draft auxiliary language Interglossa devised by the scientist Lancelot Hogben in the empty hours of fire-watching in Aberdeen during World War II. Interglossa was published in 1943 as a draft of an auxiliary. Ron Clark came across the handbook of Interglossa: a draft of an auxiliary about 1960. Then he met Professor Hogben with the aim of developing the language. They worked to refine it, in order to make it more easily usable in all possible forms of communication. Wendy Ashby joined the project in 1972. When Hogben died in 1975, most changes had already been discussed. Hogben and Clark had agreed that the language should have a phonetic spelling (that is: each letter representing a single sound). This principle implied that the Greek CH, TH and PH now should be spelt K, T and F. Finally a few further changes were introduced by Ron Clark and Wendy Ashby, who then gave the language the new name Glosa (from the Greek word for tongue, language – “glossa” being the English transliteration), and thus founded a new auxiliary language. Until about 1979, Ashby and Clark tested the use of Glosa using local volunteers in the town in which they were living. During this period, the vocabulary and some details of sentence formation were developed and revised. They had moved to another town by the time they had published the first Glosa dictionary. From 1987, the charity-status organisation GEO (Glosa Education Organisation) has promoted the teaching of Glosa as a second language in schools worldwide. GEO's official website was set up by Paul O. Bartlett in 1996, and it is managed at present by Marcel Springer. It provides the Glosa Internet Dictionary (Glosa Inter-reti Diktionaria), as well as an introductory course, and other resources. A Wiki in Glosa was created in 2021. In January 2025, a new online magazine, called U Glosa jurnali, was published in Glosa. In March 2025, a YouTube channel called Mi Simpli Bio ("My Simple Life") started uploading short videos in Glosa. On 6 November 2025, the Glosa community decided to move the encyclopedic articles from Glosa Wiki from Fandom to Incubator Plus 2.0. On 10th November 2025, a new wiki, called Glosa Biblioteka ("Glosa library") was created to gather just literary texts in Glosa
Unclear history According to History behind Glosa, after Hogben's death “a few further and trivial changes were introduced”. But there is no precise information about them, so it's not clear exactly which changes were made by Hogben and Clark, and which were made by Clark and Ashby.
Overview In Glosa, words always retain their original form, regardless of their function in a sentence. Thus, the same word can function as a verb, noun, adjective or preposition. Glosa is thereby a completely analytic language: there are no inflections for noun plurals, verb tenses, genders, and so on – the words never change. Grammatical functions are taken over by a limited number of operator words and by the word order (syntax). Subject–verb–object order is the standard word order, and "adjectives" usually precede "nouns", and the "verbs" follow the tense particles and the "adverbs". Glosa is usually compared to two natural languages which are analytical in different degrees, Chinese and English. It is also similar to the auxiliary Lingua sistemfrater, also known as Frater, published in 1957 by the Vietnamese Phạm Xuân Thái. Frater is also isolating, has a similar vocabulary base, but a slightly different syntactical structure, and has no articles – where Glosa uses u/un for both “the” and “a”/“an”, or gendered pronouns. Glosa is written with the Latin alphabet without special characters. There are no double vowels or consonants and pronunciation rules are simple and regular. Most words in Glosa are taken from Latin and Greek roots. Glosa is thus an a posteriori language. While aspects of Hogben's Interglossa were explicitly inspired by the auxiliary Basic English, Glosa tends to work like normal English. Interglossa works with a small number of essential light verbs (up to 20), which Hogben calls “verboids” or “verbal operators”, like the 18 verb operators of Basic English. In Glosa words from this special class can be elided if the context is clear.
Spelling and pronunciation Glosa spelling is completely regular and phonetic: one spelling always represents one sound, and one sound is always represented by one spelling. With the sole exception of SC which represents the sound ʃ (as “sh” in short), every letter just represents one sound, and vice versa. Glosa is written with the Latin letters. The alphabet consists of the following letters (and digraph), and their upper case equivalents:
Unlike several other auxiliary languages, Glosa uses the letters Q and X. C makes the “ch” sound in church. The “sh” sound in short is represented by the letter combination SC – the only digraph. As in many languages, J makes the “y”-sound found in yell or yak. G and S are always "hard" (goat and, respectively, hiss and snake). R should be trilled or "tapped" (the tongue lightly taps the palate of one's mouth), never uvularized. The practice of pronouncing N before a velar sound (g or k) as ŋ is generally non-preferred but is used commonly in order to simplify pronunciation. X may be pronounced z at the start of a word but this is non-preferred. Some foreign names may include non-Glosa letters in order to retain original spelling.
Vowels The first pronunciation is the preferred one:
There are no diphthongs in Glosa. Where two or more vowels occur together, they are pronounced separately.
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