TikTok is helping an obscure language find its new voice
@orlophe_vauchertres/TikTok
If you’re one of the billion people who speak a Romance language—be it Spanish or French, Italian or Portuguese, Romanian or anything else that evolved from Vulgar Latin between the third and eighth centuries—it’s extremely possible that you understood this question. Even if you may have never even seen the language it is written in.
You may think it’s one of the major ones listed above, but it isn’t. It asks “Have you ever imagined a world where everybody speaks the same language?” in a tongue that’s only spoken by a few hundred people scattered around the globe: Interlingua.
Interlingua was developed by the linguists of the International Auxiliary Language Association between 1937 and 1951 to bridge the gap between people from different nations who don’t share a common tongue.
Today, though, you can easily find it on TikTok, as the modern app is giving it a new life. Videos under the hashtag #interlingua have been watched more than 1.3 million times. All of the posts under the hashtags point back to a single profile: that of professor Carlos Valcarcel Riveiro, aka @orlophe_vauchertres.
