This article is a companion article to Foundational Documents of the New World Order, linked. It addresses the language these first, foundational documents were written in, and the very first steps in the transition of Common from the in-group code speech of Globalist revolutionaries to the official and working language of the New World Order and the native language of hundreds of millions.

At the point of the Istanbul Conference, the Globalist movements in the participating countries were solidly capitalist, the anti-capitalist wing of the movement having been betrayed and dispatched in most countries prior to the organisation of the Conference. As collateral damage, the faction arguing for Esperanto as the global language of the New World Order were in disarray and this option was largely considered to be off the table.

The major competition, then, was between English and Common. However, Common had the advantages that English was tainted by association with the old United States, which at that time was discredited and widely hated, and the fact the Globalists saw Common as being uniquely Globalist and tied to their identity. Even Globalists who didn't speak Common had generally positive feelings towards it due to that association.

The Treaty of Istanbul

The Treaty of Istanbul was written in English, but having the sole language of the Treaty be English did not sit well with the delegates. At the same time, attempting to operate multilingually was viewed to be a step in the wrong direction in terms of global unification by many present.

In fact, the Treaty was translated into Mandarin, German, French, Turkish and Russian, but the first language it was translated into was Common, and the original English version had a statement committing the subsequent Seattle Conference to completely document its work in Common in addition to any other working languages selected.

The Common of the Treaty is very strange to read today, because it is Old Common, which at the time was considered to be the formal register of the language. Old Common was quite a bit different than the contemporary vernacular. It had archaic features like gender, it lacked contemporary features like noun definiteness, and it had a restrictive vocabulary. What was evident was that the Old Common language was under-powered to write an international treaty. No one was very satisfied with this translation.

The Seattle Conference

The Seattle Conference produced both the Seattle Declaration and the Global Charter. Before even the Seattle Declaration, the assembled Representatives saw themselves as having a serious mandate to produce all of their documents in Common translation, and there was a very strong sentiment that a new Global language was needed, that Common was the most fitting candidate for the job, but that it needed a lot of work to be ready.

One of the very first acts of the Conference was to authorise and disburse funds to found na Akkatemi na Xafen Zisse (AXZ), the Common Language Academy. The Conference wanted the AXZ to get to work immediately - specifically, they wanted a codified version of the language suitable for technical legal documents, and they wanted experts at their beck and call to produce documents in Common essentially in real time.

Because of the rushed and ad hoc nature of this exercise, the Conference took the approach of working with whatever was conveniently at hand, which meant the local Cascadian intelligentsia. This was a critical juncture for the Common language, because the decisions made at this time would influence the success of the language and its direction for generations to come by establishing its formal register.

David Chang and the AXZ

The Conference turned to a Linguistics professor, David Chang, at the University of British Columbia in nearby Vancouver who was well-known as an expert on the Common language and a staunch Globalist. Chang was allowed to purchase space in a run-down commercial mall in Burnaby to establish the Academy and hire a number of experts in relevant fields, especially law, to help him produce good, professional, legal language. He and his hastily-assembled team were at the Conference's disposal.

Chang left an indelible stamp on the Common language. He was a descriptivist, and he founded the AXZ with the philosophy that Common should be fully competent in all fields of knowledge, as consistent as possible globally, but above all, contemporary and as close to real speech as possible.

Where the Old Common of the Treaty was substantially different than the way people actually spoke and even wrote Common, the High Common grammar and lexicon that Chang was able to quickly assemble, partially using the body of work he had already assembled in his career prior to this point, was very fresh and contemporary. There were some contrarians, but the sentiment at the time was that Common speakers quite liked Chang's fresh, modernised literary standard.

Chang's approach to prescriptivism and the Common language has persisted as the AXZ's philosophy, working to maintain a unified standard and influencing the speech of the educated elite, while allowing that standard to stay up to date with the speech of the educated elite as it evolved.

While Chang operated from a generally descriptivist stance, in a real sense, the Common language was created twice, once by Peter K. Davidson, and again by David Chang, who made and codified decisions on the fly about how the language would be. Those decisions skewed strongly towards the Cascadian vernacular and created a formal register out of that vernacular which was not quite like how Cascadians or anyone else spoke the language informally. Chang got to watch generations after self-consciously try to mould their speech after decisions he made about how the 'good' language should look.

In particular, Chang tried to preserve older spellings more so than grammar, lexicon and semantics, and recommended conservative pronunciations. By Chang's day, there had been significant drift in the sound of the language, but educated speakers thereafter would work hard to affect a 'good' AXZ accent, and the education of the millions who would subsequently learn the language was based on that accent. Chang's rationale was that the pronunciation of the language was already subject to quite significant variation globally, more so than spelling, and that the process needed to be arrested and reversed somehow for the language to achieve its unifying goal.

Chang has been eviscerated by critics as a traitor to the field of Linguistics for working to make the Common language a viable global language, in light of the horrific damage that has been done to natural languages and cultures through the vehicle of Common. Of course, he is little-remembered today and would have few critics left in any case who dare speak out publicly. He certainly has left an outsized legacy for the entire human race via his work with Common.

Subsequent Work of the AXZ

David Chang's AXZ was responsible for translating the Global Charter and the first State Charters into Common. The version of the Global Charter ratified by the Senate was not the original English version but the AXZ Common translation, making this form the official, operative form of the Global Charter. Similarly, the Common versions of the State Charters were the forms ratified by the States and the Global Senate.

The AXZ was given an enormous budget and tasked with the job of growing Common to be a viable replacement for all technical fields, fully codifying the language, and providing key support to the overall effort to get Common out into the public sphere and promote the language. Fortunately or unfortunately, Chang, though known as an irascible man, proved a very able administrator, and the AXZ made rapid progress. Although the AXZ is far from solely responsible for the dominance of Common we see today, the work of the AXZ and David Chang were almost certainly essential for that eventual success.