Interlingue, originally known as Occidental, is a constructed international auxiliary language developed by the Estonian naval officer and linguist Edgar de Wahl in 1922. Designed to combine grammatical regularity with a naturalistic vocabulary, Interlingue draws primarily from Romance and Germanic languages, aiming for immediate intelligibility among speakers of Western European tongues. Its derivational system, notably featuring de Wahl's Rule, facilitates the creation of related word forms, enhancing both consistency and ease of learning. The language gained prominence in the interwar period, particularly through its official publication, Cosmoglotta, and maintained a dedicated following despite the disruptions of World War II. In 1949, to emphasize its neutrality and foster potential collaboration with the emerging Interlingua community, Occidental was renamed Interlingue. Although the introduction of Interlingua in 1951 led to a decline in Interlingue's usage, the advent of the internet in the late 20th century sparked a revival, with renewed interest and activity among language enthusiasts.
Background
De Wahl was first introduced to planned languages through Volapük, an international auxiliary language released in 1879. De Wahl ended up becoming one of the earliest users of Esperanto, which he encountered for the first time in 1888 during his period as a Volapükist and for which he was in the process of composing a dictionary of marine terms. He quickly became a fervent supporter of Esperanto for a number of years in which he collaborated with Zamenhof on some parts of the language's design and translated one of the first works into Esperanto: "Princidino Mary", published in 1889 originally under the name Princino Mary. He remained an Esperantist until 1894 when the vote to reform Esperanto failed; he was one of just two that voted neither for Esperanto unchanged, nor for the reform proposed by Zamenhof, but for a completely new reform. Occidental would not be announced for a full 28 years after de Wahl had abandoned Esperanto, a period in which he spent working with other language creators trying to develop a system that combined naturalism and regularity, a combination that became a frequently referenced selling point in the promotion of Occidental. De Wahl spent the years after abandoning Esperanto in collaboration with linguists such as Waldemar Rosenberger (Idiom Neutral), Julius Lott (Mundolingue), and Antoni Grabowski (Modern Latin for a time, before returning to Esperanto). The method sought after by these "partisans of naturalism" was the distillation of existing words into their parts to obtain the international roots within them (such as naturalisation to nat-ur-al-is-ation), then used in other words to keep root words to a minimum while maintaining a natural appearance. In de Wahl's opinion, it was always preferable to opt for a productive suffix than to be forced to coin new words from completely new radicals later on. In addition to this, de Wahl's rule developed later allowed for regular derivation from double-stem Latin verbs.
The Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language, a body of academics formed to study the problem of an international language and which recommended Esperanto with reforms (leading to the language known as Ido), occurred in 1907 before Occidental was announced. De Wahl thus chose to send a memorandum of principles on which to base an international language, a memorandum which arrived after the committee had already adjourned. The memorandum was only noted in passing by Louis Couturat, who was already familiar with de Wahl and his collaborators.
Beginnings Edgar de Wahl announced the creation of Occidental in 1922 with the first issue of the magazine Cosmoglotta, published in Tallinn, Estonia under the name Kosmoglott. Occidental was a product of years of personal experimentation under the name Auli (auxiliary language), which he used from 1906 to 1921 and which later on gained the nickname proto-Occidental. De Wahl, originally a proponent of Volapük and then Esperanto, began creating Occidental after the failed vote to reform Esperanto in 1894. During the development of the language de Wahl explained his approach in a letter to an acquaintance the Baron d'Orczy written in Auli:
"My direction in the creation of a universal language seems quite regressive to you [...] I understand that quite well, because I am starting it right from the other end. I do not begin with the alphabet and the grammar and then have to adopt the vocabulary to it, but just the other way around: I take all international material of words, suffixes, endings, grammatical forms etc., and then I work to organize that material, put it in order, compile, interpolate, extrapolate and sift through it." De Wahl also corresponded with Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano, creator of Latino sine flexione, gaining an appreciation for its selection of international vocabulary. "I believe the "Vocabulario commune" book by Professor Peano to already be a more valuable and scientific work than the entire scholastic literature of Ido on imaginary things evoked by the "fundamento" of Zamenhof", he wrote.
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