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Neo Patwa is a pidgin-like international language that is used by people around the world to communicate when they do not share a common language.
In the world of today, English is often used as an "auxiliary international language," but it is not ideal for a number of reasons. The sounds are difficult, and the grammar is complicated and irregular. There are many words that have almost the same meaning, but are used in different situations. And in addition, the use of English tends to give native speakers of English an unfair advantage over others in international situations.
Because it emerged from interlanguage communications, Neo Patwa appears to overcome these problems. Neo Patwa seems to be easily spoken and understood by people around the world with different language backgrounds. It does not use sounds that are difficult to pronounce by people of different language backgrounds. The grammar seems to be based on Creole languages, a form of contact language which tend to be simple and regular. The forms of words never change (there are no inflections), making it easy to learn. The vocabulary is small but versatile. And the words appear to be chosen from real languages, such as English, Chinese, Hindi, Swahili, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Indonesian, Korean, and Japanese. So learning Neo Patwa means learning words that are already in use by people from different cultures around the world.
Finally, an important point about Neo Patwa is that it is an evolving language, shaped by the users. It appears to have started from basic communications, and little by little seems to be gaining complexity. It can be interpreted as a "creative synthesis" of the people of the world, taking the best of various languages. The basic ideas are universal, but there is room for it to grow within that framework. Neo Patwa seems to be an evolving blueprint of what the eventual world language will be. Building the world language is something that we can do together as speakers of the many languages of humanity.
The name "Neo Patwa" is something I (Jens Wilkinson) coined myself, but the evolving language itself was discovered by my cousin, Tarquin Anwar Wilkinson, though he called it simply "Neo" at the time. On this page, I'll keep updates on what is happening to the language, and try to keep older files as documentation.
2009 Materials
This is the most up-to-date information on the Neo Patwa language. Though not necessarily complete, I have started a page to track changes.
(Starting Materials)
Older Versions
The pdf dictionaries are easiest to use, but you can't search them, so if you plan to use search, I would recommend downloading the database. If you would like anything in a different format, please let me know.
(Other Things)
Just as a note, these are genearlly outdated materials. I will try to keep them up-to-date, but please use the information in (Starting Materials) primarily.
Questions
1. Isn't it limiting to have such a small vocabulary?
2. Wouldn't it be easier for people just to learn English?
3. Is 400 words really sufficient for communication?
Links
The two following projects are of special significance to Neo Patwa: the Mulivo international vocabulary project, organized by Risto Kupsala, and the LangX project, organized by Antony Alexander.
Acknowledgements
A lot of people helped me with this project, but in particular I should acknowledge the many contributions of Risto Kupsala, who (in addition to providing a lot of impetus through the Mulivo project) also helped a lot through our discussions while working on another language project together (Gaja/Pangaia). Florent Garet also gave valuable suggestions during that project. And I also have to acknowledge the contribution of Antony Alexander, who gave me a lot of encouragement at the beginning and introduced me to what is going on in the auxlang community. And more recently Lenadi Moucina provided some valuable insights. In addition to many people who helped through advice, discussions, and suggestions, I would like to mention those who helped with other languages: Dimitry Ivanov (Russian), Florent Garet (French), and Zeinelabidin Elhassi (Arabic).
Comments / Learning More
If you have comments or criticisms, send them to this author.
If you are interested in learning more, please join the Google discussion group and feel free to try out Neo Patwa or ask questions.
There are also three blogs in Neo Patwa. One is my blog here. There is also another here. And Larry Sulky, the creator of Konya, has a blog here, with some ideas for modifications. A new blog is also here. And here is an article about a presentation I gave at Waseda Hoshien concerning IALs and Neo Patwa.
In addition, I have a number of pages that are tangentially related to this. One is a world etymology dictionary, in progress. Another is a dictionary of semantic primes in Japanese. And I also have a list of words with mnemonic value for a global IAL. I also created a page giving an outline of the global pidgin used in the movie Code46.
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