<p>Most of what are generally considered languages, whether natural or constructed, are in fact two languages, one written and one spoken. We usually learn the two together, and thus learn the mapping between them. These can vary in how obvious they are. At one extreme are languages that use a very standard mapping. It is virtually impossible to be able to read the Roman alphabet - in English or French, say, and to be able to speak Portuguese, but not to be able to read Portuguese, as a friend of mine found out. She had these skills but had never learnt to read Portuguese. Her mum was shocked to find her reading a book in Portuguese and asked where she learnt to do that. She had not learnt - she could just do it.</p>

<p>The next step is English or Gaelic (and not many other languages) where the mapping is so poor that it is possible to be fluent in the spoken language, and not to be able to read the language, even though you can read another language in the same alphabet. 100 years ago there was a famous disaster involving a ship called the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMY_Iolaire" rel="noreferrer">Iolaire</a>. Virtually everyone on board, and the bereaved relatives, had Gaelic as a first language, but they could not read Gaelic and so had no idea the ship's name was Gaelic - they pronounced it as an English person would and had no idea what the name meant.</p>

<p>Next come languages like Chinese, which is in fact several spoken languages, with one written language. The symbol 米 means rice. How you pronounce it varies according to whether you speak Mandarin or Cantonese, or even Japanese which sometimes uses Chinese symbols (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji" rel="noreferrer">Kanji</a>). Thus you can learn written Mandarin (you now know one word) with no clue as to how to pronounce it.</p>

<p>We use some logograms in English. Some, such as ☏, are pictographic in origin, and so have no inherent pronunciation - we just translate them to English as we read them. Others, such as &amp;, are alphabetic in origin. This one is a fancy way to write <em>et</em>, which is Latin or French for "and". We ignore this and just pronounce it "and". Of course other people, such as the Germans, will pronounce these symbols differently.</p>

<p>You could always learn a natural or constructed language from a book that had no pronunciation guide, if it was written in Cyrillic, using Chinese characters, or using its own made-up logograms. But of course, you could find out how to pronounce it.</p>

<p>Next, a language could be constructed without a vocal form. I am not aware that this has occurred. The problem here is that there is no way stop someone inventing a vocal form for each symbol. This is a bit like learning Old English or Ancient Greek. We do not know exactly how they were pronounced, and so we use what is basically a modern guess.</p>

<p>The only examples I can think of where there is no vocal form is the sign languages used by deaf communities. They are genuine languages, unlike signed English, and usually have no accepted spoken or written form.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-10-09T07:49:07.640Z
Hi David, and thanks for your thoughtful answer. I like the connection you make to the language users' experience. So, if one were to construct a language, for example, that was entirely pictorial and meant to be understood by anybody, it would have to have a set of easily recognisable pictograms of objects from the shared experiences of humanity at its core, and an obvious way of composing concepts - a grammar of sorts, probably based on how close and in what sequence they occur in directions away from the central object. Sorry, I'm getting carried away here :-)
j4nd3r53n
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-10-09T12:57:37.257Z
There have been many attempts at making languages easy to learn like this. They usually start well but soon run out of symbols/sounds/gestures. And the existing words develop new meanings, form bahuvrihis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahuvrihi) and so on and the original meaning  soon becomes irrelevant. In fact, 米 represented a sheaf of rice
 https://es.dreamstime.com/imagenes-de-archivo-gavilla-del-arroz-despu%C3%A9s-de-la-cosecha-en-el-campo-image35200104 but few people know or care as they write Chinese. So in the long run I think you would be just as well off with arbitrary symbols.
David Robinson
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-10-09T01:10:17.843Z
2018-10-09T01:10:17.843Z
David Robinson
<p>Yes, there are. There is a language called Silbo that is whistled and not spoken. There are around 70 whistled languages in the world. They're mostly for conveying words long distances. </p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-02-19T15:35:56.353Z
That's an interesting idea, but there are a few issues. Firstly, isn't whistling a variety of speech in the linguistic sense? I put my mouth parts in a certain position and I blow - that makes a whistle a pretty standard pulmonic phoneme. Such a phoneme, [s͎ in Shona](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%CD%8E) exists. Whistled languages attach different meanings to the sound at different pitches, but this also is not unusual in speech - the Chinese do it all the time.
David Robinson
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-02-19T15:45:09.807Z
I was just going by the question of being "unspeakable" as asked. If that wasn't the question, then my answer doesn't apply, and I'm not sure what's being asked. Other than signs/symbols, then aren't they all spoken?
Krakoom
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-02-19T15:47:13.140Z
The second issue is whether it is a different language if you just take Spanish and replace the sounds, keeping the grammar and vocabulary. Each sound is just an allophone of an existing Spanish phoneme. Is it any more a separate language than Morse Code, where you take an existing language (say English) and just replace the graphemes? [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language) thinks that 'whistled languages use whistling to emulate speech and facilitate communication', and I can't find any references to whistled languages that aren't based on non-whistled languages.
David Robinson
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-02-19T15:52:14.533Z
I think your point is quite valid. It is just that I am not sure if whistling should be counted as speaking. In normal English we regard speaking, singing, shouting and so on as different, but I think it is all speech to a linguist. I am quite happy to accept that, using normal terminology, Silbo is unspoken. But if it is just phoneme alteration, then it is people choosing not to speak, rather than being unable to speak.
David Robinson
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-02-18T17:31:21.420Z
2019-02-18T17:31:21.420Z
Krakoom
<p>Take a look at <strong><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_language" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Computer Languages</a></strong></p>

<p>Programming Languages and any computer language made to be understandable by humans is based on an already existent language (mostly english). Just to make things easy. But computers do not understand human languages, at least not directly. Machines still "communicate" and interpret information, but they do it in a language <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_code#Readability_by_humans" rel="nofollow noreferrer">we don't understand</a>.</p>

<p>Another thing you should consider, is <strong>Braille</strong>, since it's a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_system" rel="nofollow noreferrer">writing system</a>, but not a Spoken Language, as you say.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-10-05T16:12:48.890Z
OP asked for a language that "doesn't have its roots in spoken language". Computer languages are - as you say - based on a spoken language and can often be directly translated to it.  Also, since Braille is just a writing system, it's neither a spoken language nor an unspoken language.
Cecilia
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-10-06T07:16:32.947Z
Computer languages and braille are not conlangs in the sense that this site concerns.
curiousdannii
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-10-07T01:40:16.277Z
Are programming languages even actual *languages* in the ordinary sense of the word?
elemtilas
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-10-05T12:12:17.990Z
2018-10-05T12:12:17.990Z
scrp
<p>The answer is a definite <em>Yes, there are</em>.</p>

<p>The example that comes immediately to my mind is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols" rel="noreferrer">Bliss symbolics</a> (also known as <strong>Semantography</strong>) by Charles Bliss from 1942–1949. As an additional bonus, it is still used and developped further, and may even be included into Unicode at some date.</p>

<p>EDIT: The term to look for is <em>pasigraphy</em>. There were lots of pasigraphies (Blanke, Internationale Plansprachen, gives the number 60) mainly in the 19th century, but the most successful ones were created in the 20th century. There were both philosophical pasigraphies (often using digits or abstract symbols) and naturalistic ones (starting from pictograms).</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-09-25T12:48:24.703Z
I've accepted your answer, but is this the only one? I have some reservations, though; Bliss still seems strongly bound to things like European concepts of grammar and the time-sequential delivery of speech, and I would like to move beyond this - the ideal (admittedly naive) would be a language or writing system that would somehow be self-explanatory, so that anybody could look at a 'text' and begin to work out what it means. As you can see, I have wild ideas, but wouldn't it be great to have such a tool?
j4nd3r53n
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-09-25T13:38:26.467Z
Wait for other answers to come in, I am pretty sure there are others around, although I don't have information about them at hand. It is not necessary to accept an answer quickly; as a rule of thumb *upvote quickly, wait with acceptance a day or two* to encourage other answers.
Sir Cornflakes
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-09-25T13:41:34.993Z
Yes? I'll follow your suggestion, then, and 'un-accept' for now :-)
j4nd3r53n
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-09-25T12:09:16.980Z
2018-09-27T12:28:50.103Z
2018-09-27T12:28:50.103Z
Sir Cornflakes
<p>Sorry, my title is slightly misleading; what I'm after is more like a written language that doesn't have its roots in spoken language, and has no definitive translation into speech, but is none-the-less concise and clearly understandable. Tall order, I know - perhaps something similar would be cave-paintings: they seem to have a strong meaning that one could imagine was clear to people at the time, and which may convey a narrative of some sort; but the actual recital might have many variations. Or a more modern example: when you see a red circle around a drawing of a cigarette, with a red line across, you know it means that you are not allowed to smoke (so the meaning is clear and concise) - but the equivalent wording depends on the viewer, and could include phrases like "Don't smoke", "No smoking", or many others,</p>

<p>It seems achievable, at least, that one could construct such a language, which might even be universally understandable; but has it already been done in the form of a full language?</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-09-26T00:30:58.753Z
Well, there are sign languages, which are signed, rather than spoken - do they qualify?
Luís Henrique
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-10-19T08:10:03.440Z
Emoji? http://this.deakin.edu.au/society/is-emoji-the-language-of-the-future
AnthonyC
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-01-07T02:51:00.370Z
@j4nd3r53n Interesting that you mention in a comment that your ideal is to produce a written language that is self-explanatory and could be universally deciphered. I'm actually working on the same thing. It's rather a shame that SE doesn't allow PMs, otherwise I'd get in touch.
Arkenstein XII
<conlang-creation><writing-systems>
Are there any "unspeakable" languages?
# Are there any "unspeakable" languages?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2018-09-25)

Sorry, my title is slightly misleading; what I'm after is more like a written language that doesn't have its roots in spoken language, and has no definitive translation into speech, but is none-the-less concise and clearly understandable. Tall order, I know - perhaps something similar would be cave-paintings: they seem to have a strong meaning that one could imagine was clear to people at the time, and which may convey a narrative of some sort; but the actual recital might have many variations. Or a more modern example: when you see a red circle around a drawing of a cigarette, with a red line across, you know it means that you are not allowed to smoke (so the meaning is clear and concise) - but the equivalent wording depends on the viewer, and could include phrases like "Don't smoke", "No smoking", or many others,

It seems achievable, at least, that one could construct such a language, which might even be universally understandable; but has it already been done in the form of a full language?

**Tags:** conlang-creation, writing-systems

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: Well, there are sign languages, which are signed, rather than spoken - do they qualify?  
> **username_2**: Emoji? http://this.deakin.edu.au/society/is-emoji-the-language-of-the-future  
> **username_3**: @username_0 Interesting that you mention in a comment that your ideal is to produce a written language that is self-explanatory and could be universally deciphered. I'm actually working on the same thing. It's rather a shame that SE doesn't allow PMs, otherwise I'd get in touch.  

---

## 4 answers

### Answer by username_10 on 2018-09-25. Score: 15 | Accepted answer

The answer is a definite *Yes, there are*.

The example that comes immediately to my mind is [Bliss symbolics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols) (also known as **Semantography**) by Charles Bliss from 1942–1949. As an additional bonus, it is still used and developped further, and may even be included into Unicode at some date.

EDIT: The term to look for is *pasigraphy*. There were lots of pasigraphies (Blanke, Internationale Plansprachen, gives the number 60) mainly in the 19th century, but the most successful ones were created in the 20th century. There were both philosophical pasigraphies (often using digits or abstract symbols) and naturalistic ones (starting from pictograms).

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: I've accepted your answer, but is this the only one? I have some reservations, though; Bliss still seems strongly bound to things like European concepts of grammar and the time-sequential delivery of speech, and I would like to move beyond this - the ideal (admittedly naive) would be a language or writing system that would somehow be self-explanatory, so that anybody could look at a 'text' and begin to work out what it means. As you can see, I have wild ideas, but wouldn't it be great to have such a tool?  
> **username_10**: Wait for other answers to come in, I am pretty sure there are others around, although I don't have information about them at hand. It is not necessary to accept an answer quickly; as a rule of thumb *upvote quickly, wait with acceptance a day or two* to encourage other answers.  
> **username_0**: Yes? I'll follow your suggestion, then, and 'un-accept' for now :-)  

---

### Answer by username_4 on 2018-10-09. Score: 9

Most of what are generally considered languages, whether natural or constructed, are in fact two languages, one written and one spoken. We usually learn the two together, and thus learn the mapping between them. These can vary in how obvious they are. At one extreme are languages that use a very standard mapping. It is virtually impossible to be able to read the Roman alphabet - in English or French, say, and to be able to speak Portuguese, but not to be able to read Portuguese, as a friend of mine found out. She had these skills but had never learnt to read Portuguese. Her mum was shocked to find her reading a book in Portuguese and asked where she learnt to do that. She had not learnt - she could just do it.

The next step is English or Gaelic (and not many other languages) where the mapping is so poor that it is possible to be fluent in the spoken language, and not to be able to read the language, even though you can read another language in the same alphabet. 100 years ago there was a famous disaster involving a ship called the [Iolaire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMY_Iolaire). Virtually everyone on board, and the bereaved relatives, had Gaelic as a first language, but they could not read Gaelic and so had no idea the ship's name was Gaelic - they pronounced it as an English person would and had no idea what the name meant.

Next come languages like Chinese, which is in fact several spoken languages, with one written language. The symbol 米 means rice. How you pronounce it varies according to whether you speak Mandarin or Cantonese, or even Japanese which sometimes uses Chinese symbols ([Kanji](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji)). Thus you can learn written Mandarin (you now know one word) with no clue as to how to pronounce it.

We use some logograms in English. Some, such as ☏, are pictographic in origin, and so have no inherent pronunciation - we just translate them to English as we read them. Others, such as &, are alphabetic in origin. This one is a fancy way to write *et*, which is Latin or French for "and". We ignore this and just pronounce it "and". Of course other people, such as the Germans, will pronounce these symbols differently.

You could always learn a natural or constructed language from a book that had no pronunciation guide, if it was written in Cyrillic, using Chinese characters, or using its own made-up logograms. But of course, you could find out how to pronounce it.

Next, a language could be constructed without a vocal form. I am not aware that this has occurred. The problem here is that there is no way stop someone inventing a vocal form for each symbol. This is a bit like learning Old English or Ancient Greek. We do not know exactly how they were pronounced, and so we use what is basically a modern guess.

The only examples I can think of where there is no vocal form is the sign languages used by deaf communities. They are genuine languages, unlike signed English, and usually have no accepted spoken or written form.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: Hi username_4, and thanks for your thoughtful answer. I like the connection you make to the language users' experience. So, if one were to construct a language, for example, that was entirely pictorial and meant to be understood by anybody, it would have to have a set of easily recognisable pictograms of objects from the shared experiences of humanity at its core, and an obvious way of composing concepts - a grammar of sorts, probably based on how close and in what sequence they occur in directions away from the central object. Sorry, I'm getting carried away here :-)  
> **username_4**: There have been many attempts at making languages easy to learn like this. They usually start well but soon run out of symbols/sounds/gestures. And the existing words develop new meanings, form bahuvrihis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahuvrihi) and so on and the original meaning  soon becomes irrelevant. In fact, 米 represented a sheaf of rice  https://es.dreamstime.com/imagenes-de-archivo-gavilla-del-arroz-despu%C3%A9s-de-la-cosecha-en-el-campo-image35200104 but few people know or care as they write Chinese. So in the long run I think you would be just as well off with arbitrary symbols.  

---

### Answer by username_5 on 2019-02-18. Score: 2

Yes, there are. There is a language called Silbo that is whistled and not spoken. There are around 70 whistled languages in the world. They're mostly for conveying words long distances.

> **Comments:**
> **username_4**: That's an interesting idea, but there are a few issues. Firstly, isn't whistling a variety of speech in the linguistic sense? I put my mouth parts in a certain position and I blow - that makes a whistle a pretty standard pulmonic phoneme. Such a phoneme, [s͎ in Shona](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%CD%8E) exists. Whistled languages attach different meanings to the sound at different pitches, but this also is not unusual in speech - the Chinese do it all the time.  
> **username_5**: I was just going by the question of being "unspeakable" as asked. If that wasn't the question, then my answer doesn't apply, and I'm not sure what's being asked. Other than signs/symbols, then aren't they all spoken?  
> **username_4**: The second issue is whether it is a different language if you just take Spanish and replace the sounds, keeping the grammar and vocabulary. Each sound is just an allophone of an existing Spanish phoneme. Is it any more a separate language than Morse Code, where you take an existing language (say English) and just replace the graphemes? [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language) thinks that 'whistled languages use whistling to emulate speech and facilitate communication', and I can't find any references to whistled languages that aren't based on non-whistled languages.  
> **username_4**: I think your point is quite valid. It is just that I am not sure if whistling should be counted as speaking. In normal English we regard speaking, singing, shouting and so on as different, but I think it is all speech to a linguist. I am quite happy to accept that, using normal terminology, Silbo is unspoken. But if it is just phoneme alteration, then it is people choosing not to speak, rather than being unable to speak.  

---

### Answer by username_6 on 2018-10-05. Score: 0

Take a look at **[Computer Languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_language)**

Programming Languages and any computer language made to be understandable by humans is based on an already existent language (mostly english). Just to make things easy. But computers do not understand human languages, at least not directly. Machines still "communicate" and interpret information, but they do it in a language [we don't understand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_code#Readability_by_humans).

Another thing you should consider, is **Braille**, since it's a [writing system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_system), but not a Spoken Language, as you say.

> **Comments:**
> **username_7**: OP asked for a language that "doesn't have its roots in spoken language". Computer languages are - as you say - based on a spoken language and can often be directly translated to it.  Also, since Braille is just a writing system, it's neither a spoken language nor an unspoken language.  
> **username_8**: Computer languages and braille are not conlangs in the sense that this site concerns.  
> **username_9**: Are programming languages even actual *languages* in the ordinary sense of the word?  

---

