On Christmas Eve 2014, a Skype group of conlang enthusiasts from the /r/conlangs community on reddit - people who invent new languages for fun - devised an idea which had not previously been explored with any seriousness in conlanger communities online: a constructed pidgin, or "conpidgin," with language features emerging naturalistically through the usage of the group's participants, rather than by deliberate design.
Most conlangs are formed a priori, with the syntax, phonology, and other characteristics of the language being determined long before even one word of the conlang's lexicon is created. Some conlangs, such as auxiliary languages (auxlang) like Esperanto, are formed a posteriori by conlangers who already know what they want the language to sound like, or who already have a preselected vocabulary from a large mix of natural languages, which retroactively define the rules of the language.
In the case of a conpidgin, however, none of the speakers know what grammar rules or vocabulary will emerge. They simply attempt to have conversations with each other, using exclusively the conpidgin, as though they were visiting a foreign territory where nobody knows any English at all. When participants arrive at a missing word, or even just a word they have not previously encountered in the conpidgin, they select whatever combination of sounds they please, to fill that niche, and that is how the language gains new words.
According to the user saltfish, one of the founding participants in Viossa, the rules of the conpidgin are as follows:
- If we can understand it, it's correct Viossa. There are no standardized grammar or spelling rules. Everyone should write and speak in a way that makes sense to them.
- Absolutely no translating allowed, except in personal notes and the like. Not to explain new words or grammatical concepts—those have to be acquired naturally.
The rule "no translating allowed" extends both to publicly posted dictionaries and to personal interactions - one may not ask, "what does djin mean?" and expect an answer in English. Instead, the querent would be given an explanation using other Viossa words, emoji, and other gestural communication that avoids literal word-for-word translation of djin into any other language. There is a Viossa wiki, written completely in Viossa, called Vikoli, and there is also a DuoLingo lesson series composed entirely in Viossa. The current active social environment where Viossa is being used is the ViossaDiskordServer, which at the time of this writeup has a standing open invitation to new participants.
New learners of Viossa are given four translated words to learn up-front, from which they may attempt to learn the rest of the language by observing other participants and asking them questions with Viossa. These words are ka "what," fshto "understand," nai "no, not," and akkurat / akku / ak "yes."
The original creators of Viossa primarily used video and voice conferencing over Skype to form the early vocabulary and grammar of the pidgin, and a wide variety of idiosyncratic spelling conventions emerged. For this reason, any word in Viossa may be spelled in potentially a dozen different ways, including with the hiragana and katakana of the Japanese language, or the Cyrillic alphabet used by many Eastern European languages. Likewise, because any understood usage is considered valid, many words in Viossa have a very large number of synonyms, as new participants re-invent the wheel for a given word or idiom.
Viossa has faced a number of unexpected setbacks, in the form of excessive sudden popularity. In 2020, jan Misali, a YouTube conlanger and populariser of the conlang Toki Pona, posted a YouTube video discussing Viossa, and the Discord server was overwhelmed by several hundred new participants, many of whom transgressed the community's rule against posting a public dictionary or other translated learning materials. In autumn of 2024, the YouTuber Etymology Nerd posted a short video telling his viewers about Viossa, and the Discord server was flooded with thousands of new members in just a few hours, before the server's moderators could be made aware of the abrupt popularity of the conpidgin. The server was temporarily shuttered against new members for several weeks, and then it had graduated intervals of allowing new members to join in batches of twenty or fifty at a time, to orient each cohort before the next one arrived. By mid-October, the server was finally habituated to the mass influx of new members, and it permanently re-opened.
During the second major closing of the Viossa Discord server, many reddit conlangers grew impatient with waiting for it to re-open and admit them for participation, and instead they attempted to create their own conpidgin groups on Discord. In my observation, at least thirteen of these groups formed in the space of a week, and while most of them have since been abandoned in favour of the re-opened Viossa server, the obnoxiously abundant spam posting on /r/conlangs about conpidgin collaborations caused the entire topic of conpidgins to be banned from /r/conlangs. At this point, Viossa has at least 600 active participants who are daily contributing to its continued development, and it has at least 4300 overall server members. This number - up from a founder group of fewer than 20 members - is the most rapid rate of growth observed in any conlang to date, though many other conlangs certainly have more competent speakers worldwide.
Iron Noder 2024, 01/30