Weltdeutsch

In 1915, when World War I was still viewed with optimism and the outlook of a German Empire spanning vast regions of the world, someone decided that German needed to become a global language. The result was Weltdeutsch - World German.

It never caught on. But the story of how it came to exist, and the dozen other attempts to simplify German for the world, tells you a lot about the relationship between language and power.

What is Weltdeutsch?

Weltdeutsch wasn't one specific language. It was the name for several different projects aimed at creating an auxiliary language based on German. A simplified version of German, billed as "the language of all peoples," had already been published in 1913.

The language introduced some simplifications in spelling and pronunciation but was never fully developed. Its past tense dropped auxiliary verbs and used a conjugation based on German's imperfect construct.

The whole thing was heavily influenced by politics. Linguists quarrelled about which language to base their product on, and German linguists were eager to argue that early German success in the Great War meant German was the obvious choice - English would be somewhat obsolete, they claimed, as the British Empire was "in decline." History had other plans.

What was Wede?

After Nobel Prize winner Wilhelm Ostwald first proposed Weltdeutsch, a man named Adalbert Baumann published Wede - an auxiliary language solely based on German. It was widely simplified and drew from several German dialects.

Baumann created it with the intention of making German more accessible to foreigners. He believed the widespread use of French and English was hurting the Central Powers during WWI. He pointed to Turkey's positive relations with France during the war, attributing it to the use of French in Turkey, as an example of how language shapes international relations.

In 1916, he published an even simpler version. His basic idea: write exactly as you speak. The conjugation was limited to the use of tun (to do) and a new article de replaced the former German articles der, die, and das.

One article for everything. That alone tells you how frustrated foreigners must have been with German grammar even back then.

Wede had its foundation in deeply nationalistic beliefs. Baumann was convinced of German superiority, so it's not surprising that his work resurfaced in the Third Reich. In 1928, he reworked Wede into the more internationally labelled Oiropa Pitshn. The reception was bad. Soviet Esperantist Ernest Drezen described it as "incomprehensible" and remarked that "for the Germans, it is nothing but a caricature reminiscent of their own mother tongue."

What was Kolonialdeutsch?

Also in 1916, colonial officer Emil Schworer developed Kolonialdeutsch (Colonial German) - a pidgin language designed for use in the German colonies, specifically in German South-West Africa, the territory now belonging to Namibia.

Schworer incorporated his knowledge of African contact languages from the region and proposed a specific vocabulary. He thought it was necessary to "organise" the German language for its use in the bright German future - meaning he was quite sure there would be more colonies and more international exchange. He wrote that German was simply too hard for other people and, despite its untouchable status, should be simplified.

His pidgin language was never more than a proposal and was never implemented in the German colonies.

Kuchendeutsch in Namibia

What did develop naturally was Kuchendeutsch (Kitchen German) - a pidgin that grew out of the relationships between African servants and their German employers. There are still about 15,000 Namibians who speak a kind of pidgin German today. But most speakers are past 50, so the language will most likely die out.

I happened to spend 24 hours in Windhoek, Namibia's capital, and ran into two guys who spoke fluent German. One claimed he was a teacher at the local Waldorfschule (Steiner school). Quite an encounter.

What is a pan-Germanic language?

Not all auxiliary languages aimed at global domination. Some were designed to make communication easier among speakers of related languages. These are called zonal auxiliary languages.

The oldest known example is a Pan-Slavic language written in 1665 by Croatian priest Juraj Krizanic. For Germanic languages, projects like Tutonish (1901 by Elias Molee), Folkspraak, and others tried to unite speakers of English, German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian under one simplified system.

None gained any traction. Turns out, speakers of related languages would rather just learn each other's actual language than adopt an artificial one nobody recognizes.

What is an auxiliary language?

An auxiliary language is a language - often constructed - designed for communication between people who don't share a native language. English and Spanish function as natural auxiliary languages today. Greek and Latin did the same in the ancient world.

The 19th and 20th centuries saw a spike in constructed auxiliary languages as colonial powers competed to turn their language into the global standard. The most successful by far was Esperanto, developed by L.L. Zamenhof between 1873 and 1887. It borrowed word stems from Romance, West Germanic, and Slavic languages, and used a productive system of word formation that let speakers derive dozens of words from a single root.

Esperanto worked because it wasn't tied to one nation's ego. The German attempts failed precisely because they were.