Volapük

alternative Volapuk

1. An artificial (or constructed) language created in 1879 by Johann Martin Schleyer.

   ...some authors have claimed that the slang of the criminal was a kind of international language for thieves, a Volapük of crime.

   1897 April 28, A. F. B. Crofton, “The Language of Crime”, in Popular Science Monthly, volume 50, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 834

   2 more examples

   The first practical constructed language was the south-west German Pastor Schleyer's Volapük from 1879; its complicated grammar and irregular vocabulary made learning difficult, however. The most successful has been Esperanto, devised by the Warsaw ophthalmologist Ludwig Zamenhof in 1887, that today can count some one million speakers.

   2004, Steven Roger Fischer, A history of language, Reaktion Books, →ISBN, page 180

   Other auxlangs of this period include Joseph Schipfer’s Communicationssprache (1839), a simplified version of French; Jean Pirro’s Universalglot (1868), one of the first fully developed auxlangs to integrate linguistic features from multiple languages; and Johann Martin Schleyer’s Volapük (1880), which was the most successful auxlang until Esperanto supplanted it.

   2026 June 28 (last accessed), Nathan Sanders, “A primer on constructed languages”, in University of Toronto, archived from the original on 01 Nov 2025, page 7