“What English accomplished by accident, German shall have by regulation: a gender-equitable world language, and an alternative path to fluency for the millions learning it.”
It systematically eliminates several complex grammatical features:
- Gender System: Uses a single article form for most contexts
- Case Markings: Removes most case-based inflections
- Noun Declensions: Simplifies noun endings across cases
- Job Titles: Eliminates gender-specific forms in occupational titles
While Alman reduces grammatical complexity, it preserves:
- Core vocabulary
- Basic word order
- Verb conjugations
- Essential syntactic structures
This project seems quixotic, especially given the prevalence of English as an L2 language for so many Germanic language speakers, including Standard High German, and so many Europeans. I can understand the urge for Europeans to displace English as a lingua franca, though.
First time I’m hearing of this. As a German, I approve. I can’t imagine to be taken serious when taking like that, though.
Warning: I don’t think the subject is interesting to [non-linguists] don’t know German and who haven’t dipped their toes into the struggle of learning it.
Pretty neat! Some details from the Spezifikation:
- for non-genitive cases (nom, acc, dat), the article is always die
- for genitive, the article is always der, with no additional morpheme on the noun
- no suffixes for what would usually be dative plural
- no weak noun endings (thus no weak noun category)
The indefinite ein is also invariant, and adjectives always take -e, so you get things like: ein alte Frau.
Put simply, it’s still highly inflected, but various idiosyncrasies have been removed, and inflectional categories have been flattened.
Fascinating as an exercise, though I suspect it won’t get much real application.
I’d be interested (if this is a real thing)! As a dummy from country-that-shouldnt-be-named, I’d love to learn a new language, but I really struggle with the ones with “gender systems”.
That’s really neat. It would be interesting to hear how it’s perceived, what it sounds like, etc
To me (a German) it sounds like “broken” or entry-level German, like how a foreigner with only basic German skills might talk, while making some “mistakes” (compared to standard German). Not toddlers, but immigrant vibes. When talking to certain immigrants or tourists, you would kind of expect some of these “mistakes” because they are simplifications after all. It is indeed highly intelligible, but it might subject you to racist reactions or make you appear as unprofessional (compared to talking standard German).
Cool, thank you for that. Is the existence of this language a well-known thing?
