“What English accomplished by accident, German shall have by regulation: a gender-equitable world language, and an alternative path to fluency for the millions learning it.”
It systematically eliminates several complex grammatical features:
- Gender System: Uses a single article form for most contexts
- Case Markings: Removes most case-based inflections
- Noun Declensions: Simplifies noun endings across cases
- Job Titles: Eliminates gender-specific forms in occupational titles
While Alman reduces grammatical complexity, it preserves:
- Core vocabulary
- Basic word order
- Verb conjugations
- Essential syntactic structures
This project seems quixotic, especially given the prevalence of English as an L2 language for so many Germanic language speakers, including Standard High German, and so many Europeans. I can understand the urge for Europeans to displace English as a lingua franca, though.
Pretty neat! Some details from the Spezifikation:
The indefinite ein is also invariant, and adjectives always take -e, so you get things like: ein alte Frau.
Put simply, it’s still highly inflected, but various idiosyncrasies have been removed, and inflectional categories have been flattened.
Fascinating as an exercise, though I suspect it won’t get much real application.