Universal language

A language intended or expected to serve as a common means of communication across peoples, either by deliberate design or through widespread adoption.

Lingua franca: A language used for communication between people who speak different native languages. This broader category includes languages that become common through use rather than deliberate design.
John Wilkins: An English clergyman and natural philosopher who proposed a systematic philosophical language in the seventeenth century. His language project joined universal communication to an orderly classification of knowledge.
Natural language: A human language that develops and changes through use within a community. Universal-language projects contrast with languages whose forms emerge through ordinary communal history.
Linguistic diversity: The variety of languages spoken across human communities and regions. A universal language can ease communication while placing pressure on the diversity it is meant to bridge.
Esperanto: An artificial international language created by L. L. Zamenhof and first published in 1887. It is the best-known planned language designed for international communication.
An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language: John Wilkins’s 1668 work proposing a symbolic system and constructed language based on a classification of ideas. It is a major early blueprint for a language intended to express concepts universally.
Interlingua: A constructed international auxiliary language designed to be readily recognizable to speakers of Romance languages. Its strong Romance-language basis offers a different route to international intelligibility than Esperanto.
Language death: The loss of a language when no community members continue to use or transmit it. A dominant common language may contribute to language shift and, in some cases, language loss.
Volapük: An artificial language published by Johann Martin Schleyer in 1879 as an international auxiliary language. It was an early organized attempt to build a shared language across national communities.
Ramon Llull: A thirteenth-century Catalan philosopher and missionary who devised combinatorial methods for presenting religious and philosophical ideas. His systems helped inspire later hopes that formal methods could make ideas universally intelligible.

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