Sambahsa

Sambahsa
Sambahsa-Mundialect
Created by	Olivier Simon
Date	2007
Purpose	Constructed language Sambahsa
Language codes
ISO 639-3	(sph code proposal was rejected in 2018[1])
Glottolog	None
IETF	art-x-sambahsa

Sambahsa (IPA: [samˈbaːsa]) or Sambahsa-Mundialect is an international auxiliary language (IAL) and worldlang devised by French linguist Olivier Simon.^[2] It is based on the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) and has a relatively complex grammar.^[3][4] The language was first released on the Internet in July 2007; prior to that, the creator claims to have worked on it for eight years. According to a study addressing recent auxiliary languages, "Sambahsa has an extensive vocabulary and a large amount of learning and reference material".^[5]

The first part of the name of the language, Sambahsa, is composed of two words from the language itself, sam and bahsa, which mean 'same' and 'language', respectively. Mundialect, on the other hand, is a fusion of mundial 'worldwide' and dialect 'dialect'.

Sambahsa tries to preserve the original spellings of words as much as possible and this makes its orthography complex, though still kept regular.^[6] There are four grammatical cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive.^[7]

Though based on PIE, Sambahsa borrows a good proportion of its vocabulary from other language families, such as Arabic, Chinese, Indonesian, Swahili and Turkish.^[2]