Most constructed languages aim to be easy. Ithkuil is the opposite: it is an engineered language (an "engelang") whose explicit goal is to express, in the fewest possible morphemes, the maximum possible amount of cognitive information — to be, as its creator puts it, "an idealized linguistic engineering experiment".
The creator is John Quijada, an American linguist and former DMV employee in California, who began sketching what would become Ithkuil in 1978, after earlier attempts he called Mbozo and Pskeoj. He published the first complete version in 2004 on his personal site, then a simplified reworking called Ilaksh in 2007, then reverted and expanded it as Ithkuil III ("Ithkuil 2011") in 2011, refining that through 2020, and in February 2023 he replaced it outright with a successor language, New Ithkuil (TNIL, "The New Ithkuilic Language"). He has never claimed Ithkuil should be a community language. He calls it a thought experiment.
Some of the design parameters are vertigo-inducing:
- The 2004 phonology used 82 phonemes — 65 consonants and 17 vowels — including ejectives, uvulars, pharyngeals, tone, and length contrasts. The 2011 revision trimmed it to 45 consonants and 13 vowels — far more than most languages, though not a world record: Taa (ǃXóõ) of Botswana is credited with 58 to 87 consonants and 20 to 31 vowels, depending on the analysis.
- Nouns inflect for around 96 cases in some counts (versus Hungarian's 18 or Finnish's 15).
- Every word encodes simultaneously: configuration, affiliation, perspective, essence, extension, context and several other categories that have no real equivalent in English.
- Verbs carry obligatory marking for validation — how the speaker knows the information (direct observation, inference, hearsay, intuition, etc.) — in a system far more elaborate than any natural evidentiality system.
A famous example sentence from Quijada's grammar:
Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx.
"On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point."
Two words. A full English sentence. That density is the entire point.
Ithkuil shot to wider fame in December 2012, when Joshua Foer published a feature in The New Yorker titled "Utopian for Beginners". Foer reported that a Russian-speaking following had grown up around the language among adherents of "psychonetics", a self-development movement: Quijada was flown out to a conference in Elista, capital of the Russian republic of Kalmykia, in July 2010, and to a second one in Kiev in May 2011. At the Kiev conference, Oleg Bakhtiyarov — the psychologist who led the movement and directed a small private institution called the University of Effective Development, and no linguist — announced that from the following semester Ithkuil would be a mandatory part of that school's curriculum in Kiev and at three satellite campuses. Quijada, increasingly unnerved by the group, declined Bakhtiyarov's next invitation.
Quijada himself has admitted that he cannot speak Ithkuil fluently. Generating a single sentence in real time requires consciously choosing among dozens of grammatical categories before opening one's mouth. He has said in interviews that even after thirty years he sometimes needs minutes to compose a single sentence in his own language.
Is Ithkuil a failure? Only if you measure conlangs by community size. As a piece of linguistic architecture — a sustained, decades-long demonstration of how much meaning the human articulatory tract can be made to carry per second of speech — it has no peer. It is to Esperanto what a Saturn V rocket is to a bicycle: nobody commutes on it, but it shows what is physically possible.