#stealthlang

You know, I used to scoff at stealthlangs. I believed the idea of making up an entire secret language to be incredibly stupid. For one thing, your friends are not going to put in the effort to learn a new language just to speak with you. Secondly, speaking amongst yourselves in weird gobbledygook is a surefire way to draw attention to yourselves. Lastly, it’s just an embarrassing idea.

However, that’s not to say that language can’t be effective in hiding secrets. In foreign countries, people speaking in their native languages can definitely pass commons around each other without your notice. In movies, characters speaking languages that the audiences can’t understand is used to varying effect.

In fact, using obscure languages to hide information is a military practice known as code talking. In WW2, the US army used Navajo words for animals as codewords. The Japanese found the code impenetrable, because a language doesn’t have a pattern the way a cypher might. You’d first have to listen and transcribe speech without knowing what was phonemic and what was not, and then you’d have to try and translate it without knowing anything about the grammar.

And that’s not even counting that fact that codewords were used to describe military equipment. You’d have to have learnt this obscure language to even get a hint.

Of course, with the advent of the internet, and with the continuing decline of native languages, using native languages is less feasible. But that’s where conlanging comes in. You can construct a language your own language from scratch so you can talk to the people you choose.

The disadvantages are as follows:

You don’t have a community of native speakers. The strengths of Navajo lay in its devilish phonology, filled with all kinds of strange sounds non-speakers couldn’t pronounce, at least without much training. Your language will need to be fitted to the capabilities of who you want to teach it to. However, this can become an asset. You can intentionally design your phonology to be easily spoken, so that whoever is let in the circle.

Either way, it takes a long time to learn. However, this means it isn’t easy for someone to share it. You need the practice of using it, which can only be provided by being in the group.

And of course, knowledge of the language has to be kept secret. Any knowledge of even basic words or names could crack the secrecy. The language also has to be limited in where it is taught. Preferably it should be passed down face to face, without any recordings. Evolving the language through expressions and euphemisms can help to avoid this problem.

The big advantage is that, without a key, no computer algorithm can ever decrypt your messages. To my knowledge, there is no machine that could figure out if you’ve been using an ergative-absolutive alignment this whole time. Or if you’ve been using Lojban’s grammar this whole time. And if you master it to a certain degree, you can mess with it and make games only humans can play, lk hw y cn rd nglsh wtht rdng th vwls.

But the thing about secrets is that there’s a reason why you’d want to keep things secret. Very few people will ever get so motivated to hide what they want to say among people. After thinking about it, the only real uses I see in this are from drug-peddling crimelords, crazy cults and hate groups going incognito.

But I just have a fascination with foreign language websites. When I tried to find some Chinese websites, I was struck by the difference in culture between the English internet and the Chinese side of it. You’re not missing much but there’s an allure in it’s foreignness.. And Esperanto websites show the potential in online language communities. I’ve yet to see Latin websites, but boy to I want to.