Novial was an artificial language devised by
Otto Jespersen, a Danish linguist who had previously been involved in the
Ido movement. It features a vocabulary based largely on the
Germanic and
Romance languages, and a grammar heavily influenced by
English. The first introduction of Novial was in Jespersen's book
An International Language in
1928, with an update in his dictionary,
Novial Lexike, published two years later. Further modifications were proposed in the
1930s, but with Jespersen's death in
1943, it became dormant, although in the
1990s interest in Novial was resumed by many people.