League of Lost Languages

The League of Lost Languages is a collaborative project about the survival of languages that existed or could have existed in the world we live in, but disappeared without leaving any living descendants. The idea is that in the LLL world, some languages survived that died out here, without changing the world more than necessary to accomodate the languages in question. The LLL world is essentially our world with the same history and geography, just with a few extra languages.

Examples include European languages of pre-Indo-European origin, modern East Germanic languages, fictional branches of Indo-European, sister groups of real-world families and isolates, etc. Of course, this is not limited to Europe. An LLL language could be yet another of the many diverse languages of the North American Pacific coast, a modern-day descendant of Sumerian or a pre-Bantu language in the Congo basin. It is also not ultimately necessary that the languages are spoken today; they might be extinct but having left written records.

The participants would contribute their conlangs, say where and when they are spoken, and write fake scholarly papers and similar stuff about them.

A language contributed to the LLL must fulfill the following criteria:

1. It is naturalistic, i.e. it is plausible as a human language.

1. It is spoken by humans; non-human races (even Neanderthal survivals etc.)

 are out of bounds. (The Elves and Dwarves
 speaking Albic and Pictic are no exception to this:
 they are humans, not the usual fantasy races.) 

1. Its history is consistent with the known history of the real world.

 This means that all the major events are the same as in our
 world. This rule puts limits on conculturing, but it also helps
 avoiding awkward political and religious debates, and concentrating
 on the languages. 

1. It is either extinct (having left behind written records) or

 spoken by a community small enough not to make a difference.
 (This is pretty much an implication of the criterion above.)

The LLL has a mailing list whose home address is

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