Is Loglan still alive?

Question

Loglan is a predecessor of the Lojban language. Is it still supported and actively used/developed, or is it a dead language?

Answer 1

Yes.

Loglan is continuously being developed and modified, as the website shows. There are new reports about changes to the language (and proposals to do so). The CEO of the Loglan Institute, Randall Holmes, has written periodic reports on the language; the one from 2015 shows that several speakers have proposed changes, including the addition of new words (see Appendix 9). For the most part, excluding specific major developments like the Great Morphological Revolution of 1989, the structure has stayed the same, but grammar and vocabulary continue to grow and evolve.

In terms of the total number of speakers, we have little to no data. My impression is that since the split, Lojban has become more popular than Loglan. The Lojban community is largely Internet-based, and perhaps 20-200 people use it in some non-negligible capacity. Loglan's userbase is probably smaller than that, although I don't know how small. It's clearly non-zero, but not by much - perhaps 10 or 20 people.

Now, the question of whether Loglan is dead or alive rests in part on how you define a "dead language". I don't think anybody has ever learned Loglan or Lojban as a native language; you could therefore argue that it was never alive in the first place. So I suppose the best answer to your questions is that yes, Loglan is still being used and changed, but it's not "alive" in the sense of most languages.

The Loglan Institute considers Loglan to be alive because of the constant grammar/vocabulary changes; they define a dead language as one that isn't evolving. Based on that definition, Loglan is indeed alive.