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 <ae>. of course,
this letter isn’t actually necessary, since it produces the same sound as the letter <e>,
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...
