Languages, by cultural definition, seek standardisation and mass-adoption; the command of language is one axis on which the ability to participate in all what society has to offer revolves around. It’s to this domain of human culture that OnlyOneNativeSpeaker seeks to add parallelism, diversity and heterogeneity. It will do this by creating thousands of new artificial languages. Languages with deliberately just that: Only One Native Speaker.

A language is a collaborative effort to conceptualise place and time. At the most fundamental level languages reflect the environment of, and the social agreements between, the community it belongs to. The study of languages from other cultures is of direct important to us, as it shows us the boundaries of our own culture, and refutes claims of cultural universality.

OnlyOneNativeSpeaker excludes no possible line of enquiry. Every artificial language, independent of medium, origin and intent helps to display the horizon of possibility, in ourselves as well as in others. But creating a language from scratch is not the only option, finding languages where nobody did before: in crowds, in amoeba, or in the shape of rocks, is of equal interest to the scope of OnlyOneNativeSpeaker.

How can you participate in the Babylon bonanza that is called OnlyOneNativeSpeaker? That’s simple, develop a language! While doing that, send us an e-mail with a link to the website containing the purpose and details of your language. If necessary we can host this information for you. At the same time OnlyOneNativeSpeaker will try to facilitate the exchange of ideas between all people involved as far as language permits.

http://socialfiction.org/onlyone/

–Language Quotes–
“Language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is”
George Steiner, 1975

“Thinking itself is in a language – in English, in Sanskrit, In Chinese. And every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyses nature, notices or neglects types of relationships and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of consciousness.”
Benjamin Lee Whorf

“Man acts as if he were the shaper and master of language, while it is language which remains the mistress of man. When this relation of dominance is inverted, man succumbs to strange contrivances… Language is the highest and everywhere the foremost of those assents which we human beings can never articulate solely out of our own means.”
Martin Heidegger, 1954

“If one could find the characters or symbols to express all our thoughts as cleanly and exactly as arithmetics expresses numbers, or as analytic geometry expresses lines, one could do the same as one can do with arithmetics and geometry, as much as they are subject to reasoning. This is because all investigations that depend on reasoning would take place through the transposition of these characters, and by a kind of calculus.”
Leibniz

“There is a kind of gossamer web, woven between the real things, and by this means the animals communicate. For purposes of communication they invent a symbolic language. Afterwards this language, used to excess, becomes a disease, and we get the curious phenomena of men explaining themselves by means of the gossamer web that connects them. Language becomes a disease in the hands of the counter-word mongers.”
T.E. Hulme, 1924

“In looking at objects of nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking for, a symbolic language for something within me that already and for ever exists, than observing anything new. Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling as if this new phenomena were the dim awaking of a forgotten or hidden truth of my inner nature. It is still interesting as a word – a symbol”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from ‘Anima Poetae’, 1804

“Coleridge suggested before Freud, that a certain universal symbolic language might be employed in the “Night World”; and speculated that there were several levels of human dreaming. (See Notebooks III, 4409, “The Language of Dreams”.) Though sadly he never produced the systematic treatise “On Dreams , Vision, Ghosts, Witchcraft” promised in the Friend, my narrative shows him recording and carefully classifying various “genera and species” of them… ”
Richard Holmes in ‘Coleridge, Darker Reflections’, 1998

“Blake’s language evolved from an original state of pre-intentionality in which he intuited some sort of relationship between language and thought, to a conscious awareness of the fact of intentionality, through a reflexive analysis of the concept underlying the material language system, and culminating, ultimately, in what amounts to an attempt to create a new language system, through which he might apprehend the “ultimate” referent.”
http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeV/Reviews/Spector.html

“Language is fossil poetry”
Emerson

“The impression I get from TV snow images is that they may form a consistent language with a specific vocabulary of images due to limited parameters of TV (as opposed to structures of dreams) and the repetitiveness of images…”
Genesis P-Orridge, 1988

“There is for every thought a certain nice adaptation of words which none other could equal, and which, when a man has been so fortunate as to hit, he has attained, in that particular case, the perfection of language.”
James Boswell, 1791