Viossa and venting about Etymology Nerd
The first half of this post is a vent about recent events I have to get out of my system. Below is some hopefully actually interesting content about the constructed conpidgin Viossa.
If you are interested in languages & linguistics and, like me, are not immune to the draw of short-form video content, you are probably familiar with the creator Etymology Nerd. He makes shorts on TikTok and other platforms about all things linguistics, usually pointing out some cool facet or etymology. The videos are, due to the their length, often very surface level, but they’re informative and fun, and for the most part, accurate enough – at least as far as I can tell. However, two days ago, he posted this short on TikTok and then a bit later to YouTube: conlangs are so back. It points the spotlight on a constructed language by the name of Viossa: A collaborative con-pidgin, that is, a conlang created by users attempting to establish communication despite speaking different languages. This is rather meaningful to me, as I was one of the original co-creators of Viossa – more on that below. At first, I was quite happy about this, until I went to check out the Discord server and found it effectively on fire. While there were about 1700 members on the discord server, the number of active members was much smaller, certainly less than 100.
In the first day after the TikTok video, over 1000 users sought out the discord server and joined it.
Etymology Nerd didn’t ask for permission, he did not even give a heads-up. He found and joined the server on the 27th, asked a few questions, and then posted his short on TikTok two hours later. And while he learned that the server’s moderation was getting overwhelmed, he reposted the video to YouTube unchanged the next day anyway, merely leaving a pinned comment asking people to be respectful. The Viossa discord is currently on lockdown (invites paused) until things settle down. In the meantime, the short has amassed close to two million views on TikTok & Youtube combined. While I don’t think this can be called malicious, it speaks of a lack of care of the impact it can have to shine a spotlight on a small community when you have such a big following. Who cares what happens to them, I got my clicks, right?
But that’s enough venting. Time for some history. As I mentioned above, I was one of the people who started this whole thing. Back in 2014, before Discord, there was a Skype group for people interested in conlangs. I was in high school at the time, as were most other members – reddit demographics. We realized that many of us spoke at least one language other than English, and decided to conduct an experiment: Could we establish communication through those other languages by finding common grounds and learning each other’s words for things? So on Christmas Eve that year, six of us hopped into a video call and tried to communicate without using English. Each of us would contribute with one or two languages: Norwegian, Finnish, Japanese, Irish, Albanian&Greek and Swiss German. Within the first night, we had a few words and could ask simple questions. Within the first week, we had a few hundred words and were able to hold uninterrupted, if simple, conversations. We had some other people join the project over the course of the first year, and presented the results on reddit:
Things continued quietly from then on. The number of members grew slowly, while others got bored and dropped out of the project. At some point, Discord rolled around and the community moved there – a far easier platform to join than Skype. Some copycat projects sprung up, but to my knowledge, sadly none really persisted. In 2017, I held a talk at the Language Creation Conference about this style of language creation, and on Viossa in particular. The conference was livestreamed, so you can watch it on Youtube here (ca. 30 minutes):
A major influx of new members came in 2020, when Jan Misali made a video on the language as part of his Conlang Critic series. His video is extremely well put-together, and created in close collaboration with many regular members of the community, and it really is the best showcase of what Viossa had become in the six years since its inception. You can find it here:
This video put the project on the radar for many more people, and it has definitely changed the language. When you get many learners in a short amount of time, the things they pick up tend to reinforce each other, and you get sudden drastic shifts. I’m finding that I struggle with understanding a lot more of the language used by people who joined after this video than from other oldtimers. Then things settled again, until the etymologynerd post two days ago.
And that’s the history of, weirdly, one of the more successful constructed languages, built on just two rules:
- If you can understand it, it’s correct Viossa.
- Learn Viossa through Viossa, no translation.
I like the “if you can understand it, it’s correct,” aspect. There’s often significant focus on grammatical functions in conlangs that don’t really reflect how communication is achieved (which is fine: often it’s in worldbuilding contexts).
I'm curious what types of grammatical functions you're talking about that conlangs focus on that don't reflect how natural languages work! While there are definitely some conlangs out there that try to come up with grammatical functions in a way that's detached from how natural language is actually used, the current trend in conlanging is towards pseudo-naturalism that takes at least heavy inspiration from features that exist in real-world languages. Real world natural languages that are used for real communication tend to have far more complex and seemingly unintuitive grammatical features than even most conlangs that deliberately try hard to be weird -- within the conlanging community it's common to come across the term "ANADEW", which stands for "a natlang already did (it) except worse", because even the weirdest things you can come up with are almost always dwarfed by the weirdness that already exists in natural languages.
The part that makes Viossa's "if you can understand it, it's correct" rule important, I think, is that it's by design a pidgin. Natural pidgins have no native speakers and thus tend to have simplified grammars compared to non-pidgins, since their only purpose is facilitating necessary communication between groups that don't speak the same language. As soon as a language has native speakers, those native speakers will have an innate sense of what's grammatical (even if they don't consciously know they do) in a way speakers of a pidgin don't. This is why pidgins who end up being passed down to future generations become creoles with more complex grammars. When a language has no native speakers, though, your only real options are to have some sort of top-down litigation of what's grammatical (which is what most conlangs do to a greater or lesser extent) or to allow for a fluid community consensus solely defined by how people use the language. Viossa goes for the latter, but because it's principally used by conlanging nerds who do share at least one common language as opposed to, for instance, traders trying to communicate without a common language, something explicitly saying that anything that's understandable is correct is needed to prevent individuals or groups within the community with strong opinions from trying to impose their own ideas of what's correct on others (which, to be fair, people absolutely do with natural languages, but those communities of native speakers existing prevents that from actually being all that effective in terms of changing a language's grammar).
I interpreted Paris's statement to be more about the process - while any naturalistic language could be learned, focusing on codifying all the minutiae of grammar is somewhat obstructive to learning to actually speak it
Ah yeah that's definitely true. I think my perspective in linguistics and language learning spaces colors my perception of that side of things somewhat.
I've always felt kinda sad I missed out on being part of Viossa in the early days (for context, I'm close friends with OP and many/most of the original creators, but joined the friend group after Viossa). There's a certain something to that style of conlanging that just isn't captured by the more common top-down type language creation. You can much more quickly reach a stage of actually using the language with other people that's otherwise something only experienced if you join a community for a big, established conlang like Esperanto or Toki Pona. But creating a conlang this way is also something that requires a lot of time hanging out together to make, and that's something that's really only possible in certain stages of one's life -- it's a lot harder to spend hours upon hours in discord calls with your conlanging buddies as an adult with a job. Which is a shame, really. Maybe once we're all retired we'll have the time to try something like this again.
I used to be in the Viossa server, but I must've left at some point bc I don't see it in my server list. Shame, because I would kinda like to see what happened with such a huge influx. Maybe I'll join once things have quieted down again to see the aftermath.
I literally saw the YT short a few hours ago and went like "oh no, the Discord will be on fire".
Viossa is such a cool thing, and looking in from the outside (I've been too shy to participate when I first heard of it, and still am), it seems like it needs a delicate balance between new people keeping it alive and veterans helping new people get acquainted with it - too many new people will probably drain you guys out.
So I totally get your frustration, and locking the Discord is probably for the best.
I'm super excited to learn about Viossa and am actually glad there's an external stopgap to keep me from joining the discord and then not participating in any way for the next six months. I'll check out some of the other things you linked. It seems neat!