thank you to A Duck, Folkmann, and probably others for requesting this episode.
welcome to Conlang Critic, the roughly annual show that gets facts wrong about YOUR favorite
conlang! I’m jan Misali, and in this episode, we’ll be looking at the language of the
people, Folkspraak. Folkspraak is a Germanic zonal auxlang that started its development
in 1995 by market research consultant Jeffrey Henning, the creator of the now defunct website
langmaker.net. in 1999, Jeff created a Yahoo group for Folkspaak, and it became a collaboration.
however, as the project continued, the collaborators began to disagree about what exactly the language
should be like, and Folkspraak split off into various quote unquote “dialects”, notably
including Frenkisch, which was created by David Parke. the specific version I’ll be
looking at in this episode is called Digisk Folkspraak, as described by Daan Goedkoop
in 2009, which I selected for its accessibility and because it’s one of the only members
of the Folkspraak family that calls itself Folkspraak.
Folkspraak’s consonants are:
or maybe it’s /ʁ/? it’s kinda unclear what the rhotic is supposed to be.
anyway, one thing that stands out right away for this version of Folkspraak is the lack
of dental fricatives. since they appear in a handful of Germanic languages, a few versions
of Folkspraak also include them, for recognizability’s sake. this version chooses to leave them out,
which is the right move in my opinion.
it’s worth noting that there’s also a marginally phonetic palatal fricative, [ʃ],
which exists as an alternative pronunciation of the sequence /sk/. this makes some sense
as most Germanic languages don’t actually have the /sk/ cluster outside of loanwords,
but in my opinion it would’ve been better to just go with a normal /ʃ/ phoneme.
another strange inclusion is the voiced alveolar fricative. as you may know, the phonemic distinction
between /s/ and /z/ is somewhat uncommon, and, as far as I can tell, is absent from
several North Germanic languages, including Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and
Faroese.
oh, and of course, there’s the distinction between the velar and glottal fricatives.
while the majority of Folkspraak’s source langs have at least some sort of /x/-like
sound, it’s a marginal phoneme at best in English, which is by far the most spoken Germanic
language. of course, these things can also go the other way, like in Flemish, which has
a /x/ sound but no /h/ sound.
the other nitpicks I have for this inventory are probbo the result of Daan writing the
proposal for English speaking non linguists. like, the velar nasal there is probably allowed
to be pronounced as a nasal plus stop sequence, and that labiodental approximant may or may
not actually just be a regular voiced labiodental fricative. I mean “between English v and
w” sure sounds like a labiodental approximant to me, but it could also be saying that it
could be pronounced as either of those sounds in free variation. so like, I dunno. most
other versions of Folkspraak just have a regular /v/ sound.
the vowels are:
Digisk Folkspraak suffers from a severe case of not-defined-using-the-IPA-itus. I mean,
I’m sure Daan has gotten better at linguistics in the past decade since writing this, so
I’m not gonna dunk on him too hard here, but like this is pretty inexcusable. *ahem*,
The sound [y] can be difficult to pronounce for English people. Linguists call it a ronded
front vowel. To pronounce it, start with the short [e]. Then round your lips, as if you
would make the sound [o], but keep your tongue in the same position. If you do that, you
should hear yourself producing a proper [y] sound. like, hey buddy! that’s not [y],
that’s [ø]! it’s a completely different sond I mean sound! just for fun, here’s
what this vowel chart would look like if I took these helpful pronunciation guides completely
at face value.
goofing aside, this is a rather straightforward Germanic vowel inventory. the schwa there
only exists in unstressed syllables, which makes sense based on its distribution in Germanic
langs. a couple of those long vowels are actually just allophones of their corresponding short
vowels, specifically /yː/ and /uː/.
in terms of compatibility, this system is fully compatible with languages like German,
Swedish, and Danish. other Germanic languages might not work perfectly, but most of them
at least work okay enough that they can get by.
that front ronded vowel there is absent from English, which is a problem but like, not
that big of a problem. it’s a pretty distinctive sound and it’s not too difficult to learn
how to make. its commonality in other Germanic languages means it gets a pass. English speakers
are fine, we can manage.
the biggest compatibility issue across the board is the vowel length distinction. speakers
of languages like English, Icelandic, and Flemish can handle most of the long vowels,
but don’t really have a good equivalent for the long/short /a/ distinction. fortunately,
the long /aː/ isn’t actually a very hard sound to learn how to make, but it can in
some cases be a hard sound to learn how to hear, which is just as important.
Digisk Folkspraak’s orthography is relatively straightforward. it’s meant to be intuitive
for speakers of Germanic languages, and I think it works okay for that. it avoids diacritics,
sticking entirely to the plain Latin alphabet, with the exception of <ä>, which can also
be written with the digraph . of course, this letter isn’t actually necessary, since
it produces the same sound as the letter , so all it actually does is make it so you
can’t determine how a word is spelled from its pronunciation alone. oh well!
speaking of pronunciation of loans, loan words from non Germanic languages are more or less
written and pronounced the same as they are in their sources, even if the source language
has sounds not present in Folkspraak. this could cause problems, but it does help to
preserve recognizability.
the grammar is, predictably, similar to how Germanic langs tend to work, but, also predictably,
heavily simplified.
in general, Folkspraak uses the subject-verb-object word order, but there are exceptions, such
as for question marking. for example, "Du skall de bok morgen op de berg muten finden." means
“tomorrow you’ll have to find the goat up the mountain”, and "Skall du de bok morgen
op de berg muten finden?" means “tomorrow will you have to find the goat up the mountain?”.
nouns work in a relatively simple way which should be very familiar to English speakers.
Folkspraak nouns have no grammatical gender, which is for the best, and unlike many Germanic
languages, there are only two cases: nominative and genitive.
other noun cases do exist, but they’re only used for pronouns, which we’ll get to later.
adjectives are pretty standard. they go before nouns and don’t inflect for case or number
or anything like that.
Folkspraak has two articles, definite de and indefinite en. just like adjectives, they’re
completely regular and don’t inflect for anything, which is a huge relief to anyone
who’s tried to learn German.
unlike other parts of speech, verbs are relatively complex, though they are still simpler than
those of a typical Germanic lang. the bare form of a verb is used as the simple present
and imperative form, and suffixes exist for the infinitive, simple past, and participle
past, the participle past being used for the perfect aspect.
I personally don’t think that it was completely necessary to have two separate suffixes for
simple past and past participle, since that’s not universal among the source langs. it really
would’ve been fine to have the perfect aspect just be marked with the auxiliary verb alone,
just like how all the other aspects are handled. for example, the auxiliary verb skall, which
is primarily used for the future tense,
can be inflected to be used in the conditional mood.
it’s worth noting that a handful of verbs are irregular in order to make their different
forms more recognizable. most notable is the copula, ar.
while these irregularities could be confusing, I think it’s fine for Folkspraak since its
source languages consistently have these same inconsistencies.
unfortunately, Digisk Folkspraak’s full wordlist has been lost to time. fortunately,
as a native English speaker with a decent level of familiarity with multiple other Germanic
languages, this means that reading through its medium sized corpus is a pretty good test
of how recognizable its words are for its target audience. my verdict is that yes, these
words are pretty recognizable.
for example, a word like wordbuk can be easily compared to its corresponding words in German, Dutch,
Swedish, Danish, Afrikaans, and Norwegian, all of which mean, well,
“wordbook”- dictionary.
okay, let’s talk pronouns.
the pronouns are grammatically more complicated than the nouns, which is to be expected. some
of the borrowed asymmetry kinda bugs me, like how there isn’t a distinct genitive form
of the first person plural pronoun and how the accusative and dative are only distinguished
by the third person neuter pronoun. disregarding that, this is an okay set of pronouns. it’s
pretty intuitive which one is which, with the strange exception of hen and hem, which
sound very similar.
all in all, I think Folkspraak is okay. at least, the version I looked at is okay. there
are many, many Folkspraaks I could’ve made this episode about instead, and they’re
all as different from each other as the Germanic languages they’re based on. Digisk
Folkspraak met, but didn’t exceed, my expectations. if the Folkspraak community was still active
and decided to set a standard, I’m sure a more formalized form of this Folkspraak
would serve the purpose of a Germanic zonal auxlang just as well as the other Folkspraaks
I didn’t look at as closely.
now, actually comparing it directly to the other interlangs I’ve reviewed is a little
strange. unlike the other international languages I’ve ranked, Folkspraak has a very limited
scope. within this limited scope, I think it more or less achieves what it set out to,
but no aspect of it really stands out as being exceptionally elegantly designed. that in
mind, I’d say that I like Folkspraak more than I like Ido, but not as much as I like
Lingua Franca Nova, making it the third best interlang reviewed so far.
thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time, where I’ll be reviewing...
oh! looks like we’ve gotten through the small list! dang, it’s been almost two years
since the last time that happened. well then, without further ado...