Pandunia

Background

The goal that IALs ostensibly exist to pursue has paradoxically always been the biggest thorn in their side, for the simple reason that it's essentially unachievable. Even Esperanto failed to become the whole world's second language, and that was at the height of its popularity. As such, most IALs nowadays tend to give up and shift to other pursuits, like Occidental's shift to being an artlang among modern speakers, or just kind of not think about it, like Globasa. Auxlangers in the 21st century like to get cozy in their Discord servers and tinker with their creations, believing that if they assemble a linguist's wet dream of a language, the popularity and adoption among the general public will come naturally. Or, as Paul O. Bartlett put it in his excellent essay, Thoughts on IAL Success:

Proponents must not simply assume that if they passively present their brainchild to the world, then it will take the world by storm. Advocates must use and promote the language vigorously... It is conceivable that this necessity for enthusiasm may be distasteful to some. They may regard the enthusiasm of some supporters of one or another IAL even to be quasi-political or quasi-religious. So be it. Without the enthusiasm to push against social inertia, I do not expect that any IAL will have much chance of success.

Your Interlinguas, your Globasas, your Elefens, they're all currently wallowing in this mire of sloth, and the subject of this page, Pandunia, is no exception. However, its creator Risto Kupsala wondered if there wasn't another way. What if his brainchild was specifically engineered to take the world by storm? What if it was so tantalizing, so simple to learn and use that even Joe Schmoe, who would ordinarily find planning dinner a more productive use of his time than thinking about pronouns and tenses, couldn't resist?

Pandunia used to look a lot like a Globasa with shorter words and simpler grammar, and despite predating Globasa, it was meeting less success because it kept changing, and people didn't like having to relearn it every few months. Risto realized it wasn't working out, so he took a step back and reassessed his approach down to the very fundamentals. He reasoned that if an IAL were to actually take hold with people, it would need to be at least somewhat intelligible to people who didn't already speak it. As such, the final version of Pandunia, Pandunia 3, released in April 2024 looking a lot like a simplified English, at least when it came to many bread-and-butter words and basic grammar.

The way Risto sees it, a Pandunia speaker can go traveling and speak Pandunia at their hotels and restaurants, and the hosts there, likely knowledgeable of English to at least some extent thanks to the Anglophone hegemony that currently pervades the world, could perceive the Pandunia utterances as broken English. But since Pandunia is many orders of magnitude easier to learn than English, it would be an attractive option for non-Anglophone tourists. If it's close enough to make themselves understood, why wouldn't they go with the vastly easier option? In this way, Pandunia would present a practical solution to a concrete problem, and as more and more people adopted it, it would eventually supplant English, the very language it apes, as the global lingua franca.

At that point, Risto muses, its initial English-looking vocabulary could perhaps gradually be phased out in favor of more international, or at the very least easier to pronounce, forms. It already contains plenty of vocabulary of non-English origin, particularly from Mandarin, but it's still designed at its core to be familiar-looking to English speakers. He doesn't see himself as the one to do this change in vocabulary, though; he imagines an international team of linguists would by then be holding the reins. Indeed, when discussing his thoughts on auxlang design, he has a particular fixation on how an international team of linguists commissioned to design the world language would approach the task, and I can't help but wonder if he has pipe dreams of handing Pandunia off to just such a team one day should it make enough of a name for itself.

There can be no doubt that Risto's approach with Pandunia 3 is a unique and intriguing way of attracting attention. However, I can't help but feel he's his own worst enemy. Globasa's creator, Ektor, was inspired to create Globasa in the first place due to differences in auxlang philosophy that he had with Risto in 2017, and it seems those creative differences are alive and well in March 2025, as the two of them are currently going back and forth about their thoughts on designing international vocabulary. Though frankly, it's pretty one-sided, as Ektor has the education, experience, and evidence to counter basically anything Risto throws at him. Some of the choices Risto makes in designing Pandunia are baffling, and his priorities in what to work on are, in my opinion, completely out of whack. We'll get to the latter issue in due time, but for now, I want to examine the pros and cons of various aspects of Pandunia's design.

Phonology

Besides /z/, which I think it could easily do without, Pandunia has a pretty good inventory of consonant sounds. It doesn't ask speakers to make too many difficult distinctions between sounds, and even if there's a sound someone can't make, their language usually has something they can use to fudge it without loss of clarity. Except /z/, though. Any other sounds someone might want to use to replace it already exist in Pandunia. Sorry, Spanish speakers; you're on your own!

But it's how Pandunia uses its consonant sounds that I take issue with. Take, for example, the letter <v>. In Pandunia, its recommended pronunciation is /w/, with /v/ as a backup. I'd say that's pretty good, since /v/, like /z/, can be notoriously difficult for people whose languages don't have it, like Mandarin. That's where the stereotype of Chinese people using a lot of /w/ sounds in English comes from. But then you see Pandunia words like "evri" and "hav." I'm not aware of any group of people who have an easy time making and hearing the sound /w/ right before an <r>, no matter how that rhotic is pronounced, or at the end of a word. It's presumably for reasons like this that /v/ is an acceptable alternate pronunciation of <v>, but in that case, you lose the advantages of making it /w/ in the first place, since you're asking most people to either learn a new sound or make a familiar sound in an unfamiliar place. And speaking of familiar sounds in unfamiliar places, Pandunia words and syllables have a tendency to end in plosive consonants, i.e. /p/, /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/, and /g/. That might not seem like such a big deal to us English speakers, but to other languages, that's a tall order, which is why most IALs restrict those sounds to the beginnings of syllables.

Learners of English solve this problem with what's called an "epenthetic vowel." When they have a hard time with consonant clusters or word-final consonants, they make them easier to pronounce by inserting a weak vowel, often a schwa, right after... which is why the stereotypical Italian accent of English has so many schwas in it. As you can probably surmise, epenthetic vowels are a very "break glass in case of emergency" kind of solution to a phonology that proves too difficult, and it's one that auxlangers tend not to rely on, since they might as well not make their phonology difficult in the first place.

Not Risto, though. While the epenthetic schwa isn't technically a phoneme in Pandunia, he loves the dang thing, seemingly using it as a get-out-of-jail-free card to put consonants wherever he wants. Recently, he's even gone on about making it the standard pronunciation of the letter <e> in certain contexts. When pressed about the difficulty of word-final plosives, he cheerfully replies that people can throw a schwa at them. I don't recall having seen him explicitly say so, but this is presumably his preferred answer to the "evri" conundrum I outlined above, too. What should be a last resort is, for some reason, an integral part of Pandunia's phonology.

I particularly worry about it supposedly being a canonical pronunciation of <e>, since Pandunia really doesn't need a formal sixth vowel. I don't talk about vowels on my pages for other IALs because they're a moot point. While people still debate what consonants are and aren't appropriate for an IAL, vowels are essentially a solved game: the optimal vowel system for an IAL consists of the five phonemes /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/. To clarify, those are the five vowels you'll find in languages like Spanish or Japanese. English has somewhere around twelve vowels, give or take a couple depending on your accent, and French and German have a whole lot too. But most languages only have somewhere around five, and more often than not, it's specifically those five. As such, those are the only five vowels you can reasonably expect everybody to be able to pronounce, the only possible exception being Arabic speakers, as their language only has three: /a/, /i/, and /u/. But with a vowel inventory that small, you tend to need a rather large consonant inventory to make up for it, and it's generally accepted that it's better to expect Arabic speakers to learn two new vowels than to expect everyone else to learn a lot of new, potentially difficult, consonants.

Every single IAL I talk about on this website has those five vowels as the only vowel phonemes, and for what it's worth, that's still technically true for Pandunia. But Pandunia seems a bit too eager to flirt with a vowel that plenty of people have trouble producing on command. It even played a role in a particularly spicy debate that occurred in February 2025... but we'll get to that. For now, I'd like to wrap up this section with a comment on stress. Risto claims stress is regular in Pandunia, falling on the vowel before a word's final consonant once you get rid of any suffixes, but that's a lie. Words like "seven" and "tauzen" are apparently stressed on their first syllables. So I guess stress is more about going with your gut? Great.

Grammar and vocabulary

Pandunia's grammar is so tiny as to be virtually nonexistent, and that's a good thing. It's one of the few redeeming qualities of English, and Risto was 100% right to mimic that. It takes a straightforward subject-verb-object order, and words don't inflect (i.e. change form) for any reason. Unless you count the clitic <'s>, which creates the possessive form of a noun, just like in English... and if the noun already ends in a consonant, there's a mandatory epenthetic schwa there. But other than that? No inflections. Not even for plural nouns; when plurality can't be implied, it's denoted with words like "meni." Heck, meni word can be freely used as noun, verb, or adjective without even applying a suffix.

But that means a word's role in a sentence has to be crystal clear so you don't interpret it as the wrong part of speech. Pandunia makes this distinction by separating the subject from the verb, and the verb from the rest of the sentence, with grammatical particles in case of ambiguity. Before the verb can go words like "no" (not), "did" (past tense), or "vud" (would), and after it can go words like "un" (one), "da" (that), or "mi's" (my). Admittedly, "un" and "da" kind of function like "a" and "the," which can be difficult concepts to wrap your head around if your language doesn't have them, but I think Pandunia just barely gets a pass because in a way, they're simple delineators between two distinct parts of a sentence, so they don't function exactly like those tricky words.

That being said, I would like to nitpick some of the particles that go before verbs. As you could probably guess based on the examples I gave in the last paragraph, there are particles for the past, present, and future tenses, but there are also particles for the progressive and perfect aspects, which denote ongoing and completed actions. Aspects are another tricky concept for languages without them, and I can't help but wonder if Pandunia couldn't have approximated them by combining tense markers. Like, "did nun" could approximate the past progressive as "a present action in the past," you know?

The biggest thing to note about Pandunia's grammar, in my opinion, is what Risto calls the "pivot construction," where the object of one verb can be seamlessly used as the subject of another one within the same sentence, as in "mi jete da bol bate da dika." The English translation, "I throw the ball to hit the target," doesn't quite capture exactly what's going on here: in reality, the two thoughts "I throw the ball" and "the ball hits the target" are being joined together at their common element. Taken literally, I suppose it could be "I throw the ball hits the target," which is nonsensical in English, but perfectly valid in Pandunia.

This is powerful. Risto gives a few examples of how it can be used to make requests, ask questions, and even express concepts like "want to," but I don't think that even scratches the surface of what the pivot construction can accomplish. It's such a simple and intuitive concept, yet so flexible that I could see it being useful for all kinds of purposes (and looking good while doing it). Risto's reluctance to produce writings or even learning materials for Pandunia is truly a shame.

Though to be fair, that's kind of hard to do when the language's dictionary is so dang small. How small, you ask? Shortly after he unveiled it to the world, I was waiting in the lobby of my dentist's office, idly wondering how I'd say "Today I went to the dentist" in Pandunia. So I pulled up the website on my phone and looked through the dictionary. I couldn't find a word for "dentist." Okay, fair enough; I'd just say "tooth doctor." But I couldn't find "tooth" either. I did, however, find an entry for "xylitol," so it's possible I could've translated the poster on the wall across from me. Oh, and as an added bonus, the dictionary had "yesterday," but not "today."

We're coming up on the anniversary of Pandunia 3's publication, and the dictionary hasn't meaningfully grown since my little anecdote. I've given Pandunia grief for all kinds of stuff so far, falling right into the trap Bartlett warned about, but those problems are nothing compared to this. So long as people can't express themselves in Pandunia, they can't promote it or create content in it no matter how much they might want to. As it stands, Risto is the only person who can use Pandunia, so building out its lexicon should be his one and only priority. Yet he spent the time following the language's release doing anything but. For several months, he worked on a crosslinguistic dictionary project called Panlexia, and his only work on Pandunia involved changing words that already exist.

A big example of that happened in late February 2025, when he decided the third person pronoun needed to change. Before, it was "da," which you might recall is also "that" and a grammatical particle. The word was simply wearing too many hats, so for the sake of clarity, one of its meanings needed its own word. Obviously a prudent move, but, uh, he tried to change it to "he," even though it's supposed to be a catch-all pronoun that can be used for literally any subject, whether male, female, or neither. Heck, it's even supposed to work for inanimate objects and abstract concepts. While it had support from some users, most facepalmed with the force of a thousand suns for obvious reasons. Risto's defense was, "Well, if you pronounce the <e> as a schwa, it sounds kind of like 'her,' so it evens out," and I think you can guess how I feel about that. When Risto sets his mind on something, little can deter him, and after a good deal of back and forth on the subject, he dismissed all the criticism out of hand and settled on "hi," which is apparently supposed to be better somehow. This is also when he turned the particle "se" into the aforementioned clitic <'s>, so don't worry. He still managed to squeeze his beloved schwa in there.

Final thoughts

I'm not just bringing this up to revive some drama. I say this because, well, the overloading of "da" was such an obvious problem with the language, one that should've been caught and fixed immediately after publication, if not during the design stage. I myself noticed it upon my first read-through of Pandunia's reference grammar. Yet Risto was so distracted from his own project that he didn't get around to fixing it until nearly a year into the language's life. This is not the kind of attitude an IAL's creator should have! The creator, if nobody else, should be the language's most zealous adherent, developing, expanding, and promoting it with the cultlike fervor Bartlett advocated. In all the other IALs I talk about on this website, their creators were deeply involved in them for the rest of their lives. If an IAL's own creator can't be interested enough to develop the language, why should anyone else be?

I want to love Pandunia. For all the criticism I levied at various aspects of it, it more than passes the "good enough" test. But until such time as anything but the most basic of texts can be written in it, I'm forced to sit on the sidelines and wait. It has the machinery it needs to be remarkably expressive while also easy to learn; now it needs the raw materials. If you're interested, you can explore its official website to learn more about it. Do note that a lot of the images are still relics from Pandunia 2, though, and don't reflect the current form of the language.