Quick tl;dr on auxiliary languages before I begin: they are languages made to foster international communication by virtue of being easy, and the most well-known is Esperanto. Besides that there are a few others that have a large enough user base to call them alive, and the language Occidental is one of them.
It was published for the first time in February 1922 ([first issue here](https://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno-plus?aid=e0g&datum=1922&page=1&size=45)) so in just a few days it will turn 100!
The creator [Edgar de Wahl](https://et.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_von_Wahl) was a Baltic German who spent his whole life in Tallinn. He [began creating languages as a child](http://interlingue.pbworks.com/w/page/5627079/Interlinguistic%20reminiscenties) when he put a secret language together for playing cowboys and Indians, in which he “started with Indian names taken from the books, then completed it with words from various other languages and had a mixed Ancient Greek and Estonian grammar”. It never got used because his friends refused to learn it. Later on he learned Volapük and then Esperanto, and was friends with Zamenhof (Esperanto’s creator). Later on he released Occidental. His life took a turn for the worse after WWII started and ended tragically. During the war he refused to follow the [Heim ins Reich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heim_ins_Reich) policy and stayed in Tallinn, house got burned down during the air raids on the city, his wife was taken off to a camp somewhere, and he ended up in a hospital where he lived for another three years after the war ended but out of contact with other users of the language as all of his letters got intercepted. His library was destroyed except for a bit of poetry and he spent his last years in the asylum sharing a room with some random guy. To quote from a letter from a former coworker of his who visited him in the asylum:
“By chance he had with him the still unpublished poems in his language. That was everything he managed to save (after the bombardment), and he asked me to tell that to you. He is calm and resigned, but profoundly sad and solitary. He no longer feels anything to live for. And despite that he believes that he work he did during his life was not in vain.”
The language was very popular in the 1930s and 1940s, later went into decline and has been saved by the internet and is very much alive again. For more info [see here](https://occidental-lang.com/).
And on the off chance that you feel like learning it using the direct method, [here’s the 100 chapter course I created to learn it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-JUKminTRc&list=PLfllocyHVgsQJDLBEshG0Oe6YOBA7Y0Ob) It’s a full book (actually a translation of a famous novel) that starts out as easy as possible and becomes progressively more and more complex until you end up understanding it with very little effort. (But a lot of concentration)
I’m emailing some places to let them know about the anniversary! I wonder who I should let know besides the municipal and national government? Postimees perhaps?