Sambahsa

1. What Sambahsa is

Sambahsa, or Sambahsa-Mundialect, is an international auxiliary language (IAL) devised by the French linguist Olivier Simon. Its name is built from two of its own words: sam 'same' and bahsa 'language'; Mundialect blends mundial 'worldwide' with dialect.¹

Unlike most auxiliary languages, Sambahsa is a ‘worldlang’ rather than a purely European one. Its grammar is based on the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language (PIE), and much of its core vocabulary descends from PIE roots, but it also draws words from Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Indonesian, Swahili, Turkish and other families.¹

The language was first published on the internet in July 2007; Simon says he had worked on it for about eight years beforehand. It has an unusually large lexicon for an auxlang — the Sambahsa–English dictionary passed 19,500 entries by April 2021 — and a substantial body of learning and reference material, including full translations of works such as The Little Prince and Alice in Wonderland.¹ One caution: an application for an ISO 639-3 code was rejected in 2018, so Sambahsa has no official language code.¹

2. Sounds and spelling

Sambahsa keeps the original spelling of borrowed words as far as possible — bureau is written as in French, point as in English — so its orthography is complex but, its author insists, still regular: every word spelled a given way is always pronounced and stressed the same way.¹ It uses only the 26 letters of the basic Latin alphabet, with no diacritics. A simplified respelling system, the Sambahsa Phonetic Transcription (SPT), exists to help learners.¹

The phoneme inventory has 22 consonants and nine vowels (not counting long variants). Words tend to be short and consonant-heavy, reflecting the consonant-vowel-consonant shape of many PIE roots. Stress is fixed by rule and tends to fall as in German or Italian; because a final -ent never takes stress, president is stressed on the i, which also lets it double as the verb form 'they preside'.¹

3. Four cases, four genders, two numbers

Sambahsa has four grammatical cases — nominative, accusative, dative and genitive — but, crucially, full declension is compulsory only for the pronouns. Nouns and adjectives normally stay in their dictionary (nominative) form; there are optional ‘free endings’ used mostly for euphony in literature or poetry, an idea borrowed from the euphonic endings of Modern Standard Arabic.¹

The nominative marks the subject. The accusative is the direct object; notably, every preposition triggers the accusative, and even a whole reported-speech clause counts as a direct object.¹ The dative marks the indirect object (the recipient). The genitive marks possession and follows adjectives that introduce a dependent clause.¹

There are four genders: masculine, feminine, neuter and an ‘undetermined’ gender — an innovation on PIE — used when the gender of a referent is unknown, and in the plural for mixed groups. Gender follows the ‘true nature’ of the thing referred to, much as English speakers choose he, she or it. As in PIE, the neuter has identical nominative and accusative forms, and there are two numbers only (singular and plural; the PIE dual was dropped).¹

4. Personal pronouns

Because the pronouns are the one place declension is required, they are the heart of Sambahsa grammar. The tables below follow the Verda Stelo tutorials, whose forms were checked and corrected in the comment thread by Olivier Simon himself.³ A neat economy of the system: the third-person pronouns double as the definite article ‘the’ in every case except the genitive.³

Note the two words for ‘you’: tu is singular and familiar, yu is plural or polite. And note the extra third-person forms: separate ‘they’ pronouns for groups of males (ies), females (ias) and objects (ia), plus el for a being of unknown gender.³

The reflexive is se in the accusative and sib in the dative; the reflexive possessive sien always points back to the subject of the clause and never appears inside the subject group itself.²³

5. Verbs: one stem, regular endings

Sambahsa dictionaries list verbs not by an infinitive but by their bare stem, because the whole conjugation can be predicted from it. Only three verbs are irregular: ses 'to be', habe 'to have' and woide 'to know' (as in French savoir / German wissen).¹

The two core tenses are present and past; other tenses are built with affixes or auxiliaries. The person endings are close to those of many Indo-European languages:¹

Taking the stem bah- 'speak', the present runs right through the pronoun set:³

Sambahsa is unusual among auxlangs in using a predictable ablaut (vowel change) for the past tense and past participle: eh in a stem turns to oh, for example. Verbs that cannot ablaut may drop a nasal infix or apply an improved form of De Wahl's rules; the rest simply add the past endings, which for the ablaut/infix verbs are optional.¹

6. ‘To be’ and possessive sentences

ses 'to be' is irregular. som is 'I am', es 'you are', est 'he/she/it is'. Its forms combine with the possessive pronouns of §4 to make simple ownership sentences:²³

7. A first phrasebook

These greetings are given in the Wikipedia overview of the language; the Min-Nan-derived greeting Sellamat is a good example of Sambahsa's non-European borrowings.¹

8. Putting the pieces together

A basic statement is subject (nominative) + verb (stem + person ending) + object (accusative), with the dative recipient after the direct object. Because the verb ending already shows the person, the subject pronoun is often dropped unless it is needed for clarity or emphasis — Som John and Io som John both mean 'I am John', the second stressing the 'I'.³ Every preposition puts its noun in the accusative, and a reported-speech clause introduced by od 'that' behaves like a direct object.¹

9. Where Sambahsa lives

Sambahsa is an auxiliary language with an active author and a small community rather than a native-speaker culture, so its ‘literature’ is chiefly translation. Olivier Simon and others have rendered a striking range of texts into Sambahsa — The Little Prince (Is Lytil Prince), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Ia Aventures as Alice in Daumsenland, published by Evertype), Camus's The Stranger (Is Gospoti), Hesse's Demian, the Gospel of Matthew, and several of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories.¹ These are the natural next texts once the grammar below is in place.

• Sambahsa (Wikipedia)Overview — Origin, phonology, cases, the verb-endings table and the vocabulary sources summarised in this guide.
• The Grammar of Sambahsa-Mundialect in English (Olivier Simon)Reference — The author's full reference grammar — the authoritative source for the declensions and conjugation.
• Understanding Sambahsa Pronouns 1 & 2 (Verda Stelo)Beginner — A gentle, example-led walk through the pronoun system; the tables here were corrected by Olivier Simon in the comments.
• Sambahsa–English dictionaryReference — The large (19,500+ entry) lexicon; verbs are listed by bare stem.

Honest limitations

This is an orientation, not a course. Sambahsa has a genuinely complex grammar, and only its outline is given here — the demonstrative and relative/interrogative pronoun paradigms, the full past-tense ablaut classes, the compound tenses and the derivational system are all left to the reference grammar. Most of the account rests on the author's own materials (the grammar, primer and dictionary) plus the Wikipedia summary; the one independent-feeling source, the Verda Stelo tutorials, is reliable precisely because the author corrected it in public. The attested sentences and phrases above were read in those sources; the exercise items are editorial, built from attested tables rather than copied from a text. No independent speaker-number estimate could be sourced.