Widmann’s Language Creator

In 1995, Russian emigrant artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid visited Denmark as part of their Most Wanted Paintings project. Invited by the Danish newspaper Politiken, they had conducted a national telephone survey the previous year. Based on this, they created Denmark's most and least wanted paintings. Here they are:

 

Komar & Melamid's work is a unique exploration of public taste in art. By conducting surveys in various countries, they identified the common aesthetic preferences of different populations and created artworks reflecting those desires. Their project blends social science with fine art, providing a fascinating commentary on cultural tastes and the universality of artistic appeal.

A group of linguistics students – Anette Nielsen, Søren Harder, Sebastian Adorján Dyhr and myself – decided to do the same for languages. (I'm a bit surprised Jakob Ladefoged didn't take part; he was possibly abroad at the time.) We named this endeavour Poll Language.

Initially, we created a questionnaire (PDF) and distributed it to everyone in the linguistics department.

We then crafted two languages based on the responses. Sadly, they have been lost, like tears in the rain. I do recall that the most wanted language was very exotic, brimming with full of rare and wonderful features, whereas the least wanted language resembled a simplified form of Danish.

Widmann’s Language Creator is an attempt to recreate this project, by automatically generating the grammar for a language based on a questionnaire. Of course, there's no opinion polling involved, but anybody can do that and then input the results into the questionnaire.