July 21, 2026 by languagehat

About:

Alman is a simplified dialect of German designed to reduce the complexity of the language while maintaining mutual intelligibility with Standard German. 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

The English home page opens with a deadpan Mark Twain riff:

In 1880, an American author filed a detailed complaint about the German language, together with a proposal for its reform. He had studied it for nine weeks, under great difficulty and annoyance; three of his teachers died in the meantime. The file has remained open since.

Just keep scrolling; it’s presented with all the interactive frills Youth Today are accustomed to, and I find it impressive and mildly amusing. I can’t quite believe someone went to all the trouble to create such an elaborate site in the service of a joke language, and I can’t quite escape the niggling suspicion that they don’t think it’s a joke.

I got to it via MetaFilter, where (as expected) some people don’t understand language and others don’t understand humor; I enjoyed Bruce Ware Allen’s comment quoting his grandfather describing a talk by Robert Millikan (“Introduced with words of strong praise, Millikan spoke a language which I have rarely heard, except from our own children – a German which knows no dative, and in which genders are distributed by lot”) and one by adrienneleigh beginning “When i was 16 or so, i read Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17 (still one of the true books of my heart) and then, because of a tossed-off bit of trivia in it, set about to teach myself introductory Finnish.” Now, that’s my kind of reader!