Esperanto is by far the most successful artificial language. However, some of those who learned it were not satisfied with it and changed it in various ways. Esperanto has also been modified to serve as an intermediate language in machine translation. In addition, designers of some other languages borrowed many elements from Esperanto. This book is a survey of artificial languages resulting from these processes. After an introductory chapter in which the languages are presented, there are chapters on phonetics and phonology (including orthography), the lexicon, morphology, syntax, and semantics.

At various points comparisons to Esperanto are made. The languages covered include Ido (the best known language of this type), Aiola, Arlipo, Atlango, the DLT Intermediate Language, Ekselsioro, La lingvo Esperantida, Esperloja, Farlingo, Hom-idyomo, Linguna, Modern Esperanto, Mondezo, Mondlango, Mondlingvo, Neo, Olingo, Perio, Zamenhof’s Reformed Esperanto, Romániço, Sen:esepera, and Virgoranto. Some of these languages are quite similar to Esperanto, while others are rather different in several respects. Some daughters of Esperanto involve simplifications in one or more areas of the grammar, but some have introduced greater complexity, e.g. more personal pronouns or more morphological cases.