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An artificial language is a language created by a person or a group of people for a certain purpose, usually when this purpose is hard to achieve by using a natural language. Such a language can be based on an existing vocabulary or can create a new vocabulary.
If an artificial language does not serve the purpose of general-purpose communication (as natural languages do), then it is necessarily a second language.
Examples of artificial languages include:
- Constructed languages ease inter-human communication, bring realism to fictional worlds, and allow for linguistic experimentation. Esperanto, Tolkien's Quenya, and Lojban are examples of these three broad types.
- Formal languages are tools in the field of mathematical logic and computer science where meaning (semantics) and grammar (syntax) are very precisely defined.
- Computer languages are formal languages used by humans to communicate with computers or for communication among computing devices. Programming languages and markup languages are subtypes.
It should be noted that the above categorization is not exclusive; for example, it is reasonable that a computer language can be constructed for a fictional work or that a linguistic experiment can be used to instruct a computer.