Objects

Continuous collecting for over eighty years has led to the creation of the world’s largest technical library on planned languages. About 500 planned languages are documented, of which Esperanto and Interlingua are the most important.

Our institute also documents totally unconventional attempts to solve the language problem, such as the revival of classical languages. Modern communication technology gives small groups a new chance. For example, Latin as an international means of communication is experiencing an unexpected resurrection in the internet. Something similar is true of classical Greek, which has never really ceased being a living language. It has a literary tradition going back 2,800 years and hence is Europe’s oldest language.

As well, the newest languages are not missing; for example Klingon, the universal language from the TV cult series “Star Trek”, or Romanisch by Stefan George, an artificial language that reminds us of Spanish, into which George translated some of his poems to achieve aesthetic effects. The joke language Starckdeutsch is represented, as is New Slavic, a seriously intended project whose goal was to reduce the language chaos in the Danube Monarchy.

The Department is in possession of several important lifetime and posthumous estates, such as that of Eugen Wüster, the founder of international terminological work, and of the Catalan-Portuguese author Manuel de Seabra.

Divided into document types, the library has over 35,000 volumes, 2,500 magazine titles, 3,000 museum items, 2,000 hand-written and printed manuscripts, 23,000 photographs, 1,100 placards, and 40,000 flyers.