Vabungula is an artificial language invented by Bill Price in 1965.

Vabungula is a language I started inventing in 1965.  Back then I wasn't very sophisticated in my knowledge of languages, and so the language itself is very simple and easy to learn.

There are other constructed languages out there that are more clever and glamorous. Vabungula, however, is something that has grown with me throughout most of my life, and I am happy with it the way it is.

Why Vabungula? Since childhood I have been fascinated with foreign languages. Growing up in rural Iowa didn't provide me with much opportunity of learning real ones, and so I found myself inventing several of my own. At age 15 I started Vabungula while playing out in the woods, never expecting it to survive any more than a single summer. But the next spring I continued it, and within a year or two it matured into a full-grown language. Having built it step by step over the period of several months, I was of course able to speak it fluently.

Vabungula has been more than just a linguistic experiment. It is, so to speak, a part of my own personal heritage. Living in an impersonal urban environment so foreign to the simple rural life of my boyhood days on the farm, I have found Vabungula to be a kind of refuge. For me the core of the language still reflects the images of the world in which it was born, images of soft green grass, fragrant wildflowers, singing birds, and quiet moonlit nights.

The vocabulary currently has over 4000 words. I invented an alphabet for it in 1966, and a cursive form in 1973. In the early 1980's I wrote a grammar.  There is an online Vabungula dictionary available, as well as a page of basic vocabulary. In 1984 I translated the gospel of John into Vabungula (directly from the original Greek text, of course). More recently I translated the Story of Peter Rabbit and The Three Little Pigs, which are short enough for me to present here on my website.