The Quest for a Global Language from Ogden's Project of Basic English

After the decline of Latin, philosophers and linguists started developing the idea of creating a new universal language for international communication. Many languages were developed, some of them were designed to be exclusively written, some others were created a priori, meaning that they tried not to draw upon already existing languages, and others a posteriori. These languages were either combinations of already existing word roots and language systems (e.g. Esperanto) or simplifications of languages. One example of the latter is Basic English, created by linguists Charles K. Ogden and Armstrong Richards. With a core vocabulary of 850 words, it aimed at being the first step to learn Standard English, the language that was becoming de facto the global language. The scope of this thesis is to give an overview of the quest for a universal language and analyse the political and linguistic implications of Charles K. Ogden’s Basic English.