Kalusa
Kalusa is an unplanned constructed language initiated by Gary Shannon and developed further by a community of contributors.
Origin of Kalusa
Gary Shannon is known for his innovative projects involving language and web technology. Examples include the creation of Piktok, the Assertion Based Language Experiment, the conlang by mutation idea, the 30-minute conlang challenge, a listing of the only six verbs you'll ever need, the entertaining SOALOA, and a system for using the Roman alphabet as a syllabary. These projects are documented on his main page. One notable project was an accidental conlang created by Gary and a friend, leading to his desire for a "collaborative conlang created by a group without any 'planning' whatsoever." This idea resulted in the conlang game Madjal, which, while generating interest, did not gain the traction hoped for.
The Kalusa Language
Kalusa began on May 22, 2006, with four simple sentences posted on the Kalusa homepage:
- Ma vito es John. ("I see John.")
- Ira vito es palu. ("He sees the cat.")
- Ira vito es teku kia ruba. ("He sees the red book.")
- Ma vito es da ruba. ("I see the red one.")
With no initial grammar or grammatical information, Kalusa was open to contributions from anyone. Within a week, the corpus grew from four sentences to over a thousand.
Kalusa as a Collaborative Effort
Kalusa's strength lies in its collaborative nature. Creating a language from scratch can be slow and painstaking, but Kalusa allows the community to build grammar incrementally. Contributors constantly add new sentences, expanding the language by proposing new structures and grammatical patterns.
Kalusa and Language Evolution
Kalusa resembles a naturally evolving language, similar to a pidgin. Pidgins arise in contact situations where multiple languages are spoken, leading to the creation of a compromise language. Like pidgins, Kalusa features competing structures and lexical items, and its grammar remains in flux. From a linguistic perspective, Kalusa models the early stages of a pidgin. Despite the users' familiarity with linguistic theory, the language's growth mirrors that of a pidgin, with constant competition between structures and lexical items.
Factors Influencing Kalusa's Evolution
The evolution of Kalusa is influenced by four main factors: innovation, augmentation, analogy, and misanalysis.
- Innovation: New structures and words are created ex nihilo.
- Augmentation: Established patterns are expanded and built upon.
- Analogy: Users generalize patterns to create similar forms.
- Misanalysis: Users interpret structures differently, leading to new grammatical rules.
For example, the first biclausal structure was created spontaneously:
Jesus ira dun wepan. ("Jesus wept.")
This led to the creation of sentences like:
Ma wepan, ma ziresh. ("I want to weep.")
Despite initial expectations, such structures became integrated into Kalusa's grammar. Users adapted and expanded these patterns, contributing to the language's continuous growth. Kalusa's evolution demonstrates the collaborative and dynamic nature of conlanging within its community.