Sona is a worldlang

Worldlang

A worldlang is a type of international auxiliary language that derives its roots, phonology, and possibly grammar from different language families in order to avoid perceived European bias...

 created by Kenneth Searight

Kenneth Searight

Kenneth Searight was the creator of the international auxiliary language Sona. His book Sona; an auxiliary neutral language outlines the language's grammar and vocabulary. Encounters with Searight also influenced English author E.M...

 and described in a book he published in 1935. The word Sona in the language itself means "auxiliary neutral thing

Object (philosophy)

An object in philosophy is a technical term often used in contrast to the term subject. Consciousness is a state of cognition that includes the subject, which can never be doubted as only it can be the one who doubts, and some object or objects that may or may not have real existence without...

", but the name was also chosen to echo "sonority" or "sound".

Searight created Sona as a response to the Eurocentricity

Eurocentrism

Eurocentrism is the practice of viewing the world from a European perspective and with an implied belief, either consciously or subconsciously, in the preeminence of European culture...

 of other artificial auxiliary languages

International auxiliary language

An international auxiliary language or interlanguage is a language meant for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common native language...

 of his time, such as Esperanto

Esperanto

is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto , the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887...

 and Ido

Ido

Ido is a constructed language created with the goal of becoming a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds as a language easier to learn than ethnic languages...

. At the same time, Searight intended his language to be more practical than most a priori

A priori (languages)

An a priori language is any constructed language whose vocabulary is not based on existing languages, unlike a posteriori constructed languages. Examples of a priori languages include Ro, Solresol, Mirad, Klingon, and Na'vi...

languages like Solresol

Solresol

Solresol is an artificial language devised by François Sudre, beginning in 1827. He published his major book on it, Langue musicale universelle, in 1866, though he had already been publicizing it for some years...

 or Ro, which were intended to be unbiased by any particular group of natural languages. Thus, Sona sacrificed familiarity of grammar and lexicon for some measure of "universality", while at the same time preserving basic notions common to grammars around the world such as compounding as a method of word formation. Searight used inspiration from many diverse languages, including English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

, Arabic

Arabic language

Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...

, Turkish

Turkish language

Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...

, Chinese

Chinese language

The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...

 and Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

, to create his eclectic yet regular and logical language.

Sona is an agglutinative language

Agglutinative language

An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphological point of view...

 with a strong tendency towards being an isolating language

Isolating language

An isolating language is a type of language with a low morpheme-per-word ratio — in the extreme case of an isolating language words are composed of a single morpheme...

. The language has 375 radicals or root words—based on the terms in Roget's original thesaurus

Roget's Thesaurus

Roget's Thesaurus is a widely-used English language thesaurus, created by Dr. Peter Mark Roget in 1805 and released to the public on 29 April 1852. The original edition had 15,000 words, and each new edition has been larger...

. Ideas and sentences are formed by juxtaposing the radicals. Thus, ra "male" plus ko "child" makes rako "boy".

Searight's book, Sona; an auxiliary neutral language (London, K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1935, LCCN: 35016722) is the only example of this language. There is a small community on the Internet interested in reviving and using Sona.

External links

• Sona: an auxiliary neutral language - Web Version
• Sona Meetingplace - includes an HTML version of nearly the entire Sona book, originally published in 1935.
• Sona Conlang Profile
• IALS - links to Sona
• Sona Mailing List
• A Sona Message Board
• English-Sona dictionary
• Sona-English dictionary
• Sona Rads
• Online Sona/English dictionary and translation aid