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Welcome to the Koolaŋ website! Koolaŋ, or Koolang, is a constructed language based on English, designed to regularize its many irritating irregularities. The name is a shortened form of "kool laŋguaje" (cool/awesome language), as it's not only intended for international communication, but also for English speakers to simply have fun learning a more awesome and regularized version of their infamously cumbersome language.

Use the navigational buttons at the top of the page to learn more about Koolaŋ! You can also click here to read this page in Koolaŋ.

Why learn Koolaŋ?

In modern times English has become a de facto international language. Fortunately English is a comparatively easy language to learn: its vocabulary is very internationally recognizable having both Romance and Germanic roots, and its grammar is quite tame when it comes to declensions and conjugations, unlike most other European languages.

But of course, English is far from perfect: there are many irregular verb conjugations (like "see" → "saw") and noun plurals (like "tooth" → "teeth"), and worst of all, its spelling is so horribly irregular that even native speakers struggle to get it right.

Koolaŋ solves all of these problems. Past tense verbs and plural nouns are formed with regular suffixes ("see" → "seed", "tooth" → "tooþs"). The orthography of Koolaŋ is strictly one letter per sound, one sound per letter. No irregular spellings, and no digraphs like "th" or "sh". One way Koolaŋ accomplishes this is by reviving old and long forgotten English letters that only died out because of the outdated technological restrictions of printing presses, such as þ (thorn), ð (eth), and ȝ (yogh).

Many people have attempted to fix English spelling by changing the written language to match the spoken language. The main problem with this is that the way English is spoken depends heavily on dialect, especially the vowel sounds. This means that such a spelling reform has to either tailor to one specific dialect of English, or let everyone spell words their way and fracture the written language.

Koolaŋ takes essentially the opposite approach, by pronouncing words in a way that (to a certain degree) matches how they are already written. Since written English is quite standardized even across different dialects, this erradicates most of the issues regarding English dialectal variation, and means that Koolaŋ works for everyone regardless of their dialect.

Lastly, Koolaŋ has a reduced vocabulary of around 1400 root words. This makes the language easy to learn while still being able to comfortably express many common concepts. Minor additions/changes may be made to this vocabulary, but only if deemed necessary. More complex ideas can be described using circumlocution or compounding, instead of coining new roots.