Constructed Languages: A Look at Linguistics in Conlangs and How to Make Your Own

Charles M. Descamps
Northern Arizona University
ENG 105: Critical Reading and Writing in University
Ms. Caroline Wrenn
September 19th, 2021

What I Know and What I Want to Find Out

Conlangs or constructed languages are artificial languages that are made by hobbyists, worldbuilders, and creative people. I’ve even found a Reddit community on conlanging, where people go to post their idea of a language or what features a language should have, and even translations of sentences in their new conlang. Conlangs are sometimes used in books, movies, and the like to help the world feel like it’s existed for a long time. I want to learn this skill in order to help my own worldbuilding and become more creative. It is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time ever since I’ve found this new creative way to express myself. I’ve wanted to learn how to make my own language, because it’d be a neat way to make my creativity become more versatile for my own outside of class writing.

My overall goal is to find out what the process of creating my own conlang entails. I also want to figure out new terms and find out how to make my own from start to finish. Linguistics is a complex subject, after all it is the study of language and how we formulate, make and improve language. I want to know how I can learn enough linguistics to actually define my set of rules to have a fully functional language. My experience with language, through English, Chinese, and Japanese(to a somewhat lesser extent), will hopefully guide me to my answer that I’m looking for. I really want to make a hybrid of these three languages, taking the best parts and hopefully combining them to make a language that mirrors the complex languages that these are. Hopefully allowing for easy learning, with a set of rules that aren’t too hard to learn. As it stands, I really need to learn about these languages and how they function as well. While I have a general understanding of English, and a little bit of Chinese under my belt, I haven’t really done much to further my understanding of Japanese. Even though I feel like I’ve learned some of the basics, I might make a foolish attempt at recreating a language that reflects the best parts of all three languages. I want my research to yield some good answers to my questions, and hopefully I get to learn about processes, and just good tips in general when trying to DIY a unique language.

My Research Process

Firstly, I’ve had some books that have been sitting on my bookshelf forever and have never got around to. These two namely: The Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder and Advanced Language Construction by the same author, I bought to one day hopefully read, but as schoolwork came around, I never got to read them. I didn’t really center my research around these books, but they are what I’ve had for quite some time. Now I can read them as an excuse for an assignment, assign my own reading to myself to motivate myself to read. After reading the first pages of The Language Construction Kit I found that the book has a lot of information packed into quite a few pages, but it had some good recommendations, like alternating reading the book’s chapters and then applying them. Each chapter focuses on different parts of language like sounds, word building, grammar, semantics, and writing systems. After starting to read the two books, I went online to search for supporting material because I couldn’t just base my answer off two books. While the author has lots of experience with conlanging, I wanted a new angle, to see if anyone else was doing conlanging and if they had any new ideas or things that could help further my answer.

After a few google searches about conlanging, I came across a few websites, and even a YouTube channel that had information about conlanging. I decided to diversify my sources and go with these, because information in different formats usually helps me learn something new, or even reinforce my existing knowledge about a topic.

Firstly, the YouTube channel, which I found to be the most exciting, Artifexian(the channel) has a whole playlist on conlanging, and Edgar(the person) who has a lot of experience conlanging, says “There are arguably six steps one must go through in order to create a constructed language, or conlang for short. One, select the sounds your language uses. Two, create a lexicon. Three, create grammar. Four, design an alphabet. Five, modify it for handwriting. Six, begin writing and translating text in your language”(Grunewald, 2015). Edgar, who has experience making conlangs and even made three of his own; he goes on and explains that this process isn’t exactly concrete, and that it can be modified to suit your language, you don’t necessarily need to start with sounds, you can start with the alphabet, and then decide the sounds that those pieces make(Grunewald, 2015). I really liked his videos, they are short enough that it gets the point across, but also are enough that it doesn’t feel like brain overload. After watching a few videos from the playlist, I looked at my last sources, the websites.

The two websites that I had found on conlanging, Friday Night Linguistics and Omniglot have really good detail on filling in some of the previous parts of the explained process. Omniglot has a lot of source material on writing systems only though, so it wasn’t very helpful until later in my research. Friday Night Linguistics has a whole different process on how to create a language, and is super detailed. Friday Night Linguistics even compares it’s process to real world languages, in order to show the reader the differences in how languages do things. It also gives the reader some helpful advice, like “Someday, someone might find your work; your goal is to have that reader convinced that your language is real and that you are its describer rather than its creator”(Friday Night Linguistics, 2011 January 13). This gave me an idea, if there was no known knowledge of your language’s existence, and someone just happened to find your work, then what is stopping them from learning your language and it becoming something in the future. I think that it should be written like the language was going to be around for quite some time.

Reading the two sources and trying to understand each one, was a challenge altogether, and there are a few places that you can go to define and learn about linguistic terms, The Language Construction Kit had a good source to rely on, a website called Linguist List. I didn’t use this as an official source to start with, but it’s nice to rely on when defining a term that I or someone else might not necessarily know about, especially since I’m no linguist, and don’t have much experience in that field. The book basically said to google a linguistic term, and then add Linguist List to the end to get the website, and in the event that Linguist List didn’t have them, then default to Wikipedia, as bad as it seems. As I read through The Language Construction Kit I used google to search unfamiliar terms using their search method. Unfortunately, the Linguist List didn’t turn up results for “semantics,” but Wikipedia did, so I regrettably had to use Wikipedia for that term.

Watching more Artifexian videos had turned up some more things that I didn’t exactly think about, like phonotactics, or how words are structured. Phonotactics are how we can basically tell if a word does or doesn’t belong to our language, “phonotactics sets restrictions on the possible sound sequences and syllable structures in a language”(Grunewald, 2016).

Finding a process and sticking with it is probably the hardest part, and so far, I was introduced to three different stances. Rosenfelder’s stance, which basically was following the chapters of his book, outlines a whole process from start to finish but you can start in almost any order. Grunewald’s stance, which is a bit different than Rosenfelder, follows the structure of his videos although each video pretty much builds on one another which doesn’t really help to jump around the videos and pick bits and pieces. Friday Night Linguistics’ stance, follows the website’s format, and doesn’t really allow for much piece picking. These three stances allowed for little to much flexibility, each process doing similar things, starting with basics, and eventually working up to bigger parts of the language.

Overall though, each source had different varying amounts of information that helped me find the best process. In addition, I found that since each source had differing information, I could theoretically combine the sources together, although I would have to start with the most restricted source and work my way through it, combining multiple bits and pieces to create the process. In fact, if I did it this way, I would even go so far as to write down the process that I took, from start to finish, and maybe write something for others to follow the same or similar process I took.

The next step I took was building my ideal process, after all, if I am going to eventually DIY my own language, I want to do it well the first time, and not have to redo parts, although I know that it will be inevitable, because I’m not perfect, after all, who is? I started with the most restrictive source, which is the Friday Night Linguistics process. First, Anthropology, or basically, who will this language be spoken by, where, and who speaks it. In example, English has speakers from all around the world, and English is supposedly universal. At least, I feel like it has some universality, since so many people speak English and it’s variations. As for who speaks it, right now, all we know is that the human race speaks it. I don’t know if there is anyone who has the evolution to speak human, for example, dogs do not possess either the correct knowledge or physical parts to speak English. Second, Friday Night Linguistics goes with phonology as it’s next step, in order to establish a set of sounds that the language will use. I think that I will bundle their steps with Artifexian’s Selecting Sounds video and The Language Construction Kit’s Sounds chapter, which deals with most of the same things. In my overall process, I will combine these and add details where needed to fill in gaps or incontinuities within the process. Third, I’m going to combine Friday Night Linguistics’ Word Morphology & Phonology Variation & Verb/Verbal Morphology & Adjectives & Neologisms since they are all words that need to be built at some point, Artifexian’s WORDbuilding video, and The Language Construction Kit’s Word building chapter are the ones that will be put together here. Fourth, I’m taking Friday Night Linguistics’ Syntax page, Artifexian’s “Tense : English Has No Future, Verbal Aspect & Navajo Madness, Word Order | This Video Enjoyed You, and Consonant Harmony” videos, The Language Construction Kit’s Grammar, Semantics, and Pragmatics chapters. I think that these pieces will make for a good process, and the resultant will be a conlang. Fifth, Writing Systems, I’ll combine the entirety of the Omniglot website, and The Language Construction Kit’s writing systems chapter, as well as Advanced Language Construction’s logographic writing chapter. I like that these sources focus on how we write. Rosenfelder acknowledged that I could either choose to make a more Latinized script, or create something artistic, or maybe even create something that resembles Japanese or Chinese(Rosenfelder, 2010, pp.176-190). I was hoping that with whatever language I come up with, will take this process, and make some what I would call successful language, or one that would be usable by someone, who say found it like 300 years down the road on some sketchy website somewhere, and decided to learn it, and maybe even further the language, evolving it into a real language. I’ve created this combined process in hopes that it would be the answer to my research, or at least, getting close to it, enough that I can improve whatever I come up with.

What I Concluded and How This Search Matters

This new process that I’ve ‘made’ takes parts from my sources and creates a new process that I think will work. I have come to the conclusion after all the research and reading I’ve done, that the process I’ve found seems to be the most logical way to create a conlang. Starting with Anthropology, then moving to Phonology and Sounds. After, create a lexicon, or word list by building words from either translating or otherwise, then deciding the syntax and other features of the language. Create a writing system for your conlang, either choosing from scratch, or even basing it on a system that already exists, after all that, change anything or add anything to the conlang. This process would allow me to modify things that I don’t like, although the further up I had modified something, the harder it would be to change later, like sounds. If you change or get rid of a sound, all the words that utilize that sound would have to be modified or somehow changed to an evolved sound or cut out entirely. I don’t think that means it’s impossible, just more difficult to change a feature that I might have already used. My entire research has yielded my process, since I feel like taking the best parts of these sources will yield the best results.

I’ve in fact, started to test my process, and found that starting with anthropology has helped with a previous attempt I had made at conlanging, knowing who would speak this, is a great step towards figuring out how the rest of my language would fall into place. I decided that my language would be spoken in a hot region, influenced by cultures that go beyond their knowledge, similar to aliens helping jumpstart their civilization. It’s what this civilization calls: ‘The Beyond People,’ and my proto-civilization isn’t exactly technologically advanced, but is slowly going through a process of improving their technology, a process that this civilization would come to know as: ‘The Improvement of All Peoples.’

After the decision of finding out who speaks this constructed language, I had to figure out sounds, and I decided that their inspiration came from Japan, China, and America, the civilizations from ‘The Beyond’ that had influenced their culture. I took some sounds that occurred in English, and mixed them with sounds that occur in Chinese and Japanese, including vowels, consonants, and their sounds.

The decision of vowels and consonants had me thinking, how would this civilization decide the structure of their language, how do they interact with each other, say hello, goodbye and such. I devised a system that takes each of the consonants and gives it an idea or concept attached to it, like for example, technology, people, places, and objects. After deciding this would be the fundamental system, I decided how they get more specific, using either vowels or consonants to decide how deep the word gets. For example: /Nai’i/, is a technological advancement that focuses on farming, and the last ‘i’ is the very specific thing that names the word, in this case /Nai’i/ pronounced like ‘na yi’ with a space in between the syllables, and the little apostrophe creates an effect that stretches out the last syllable, so it would be pronounced like ‘na yiiii,’ which means 'plow,’ a technological advancement that is focused on farming and is specifically for field work. It’s a bit tedious because the learner would have to memorize the topics and learn how to construct words to get across meaning, but with enough practice anyone could get their point across in this language.

Creating words is now simple, because you would need to be as specific as possible, and when not specific, I could just get as close as possible, and take a guess by context clues, or just describe the object from the ground up, kind of like spelling out a new word, but using the system to create the word. Next, I had to decide on how words get to interact with each other, or word order.

Not surprisingly, I decided to take a sort of complex approach to the word order. Depending on the sentence, the word order is either SVO(Subject, Verb, Object) or SOV(Subject, Object, Verb) or VSO(Verb, Subject, Object). Using English, this would be like: The brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. (SVO) The brown fox and the lazy dog jumped over. (SOV) Jumped over the brown fox, the lazy dog. (VSO) This is only an approximation, because English doesn’t seem to use the second or third one all that much, a rarity, so I’ve had to bend English a bit to make this work, and to show the effect using English, I’ve had to flaunt some rules that one would usually follow. Lastly, creating the writing system, I’ve decided to take a Korean type approach to this system, where I combine the syllables into one character type thing to make the word, which allows for anyone to read the word, if one at least knows the basics on how to structure the character.

References

Addendum

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My font choices mirrored that of both my original essay I pulled from as well as some from Homework 3. I wanted the font size to stay similarly to how it already looked, as it was legible for my essay. My color choices were similar to that of the NAU Style Guide. My headers being 'NAU True Blue', while my title page's content was put in 'Summer Shade.' I decided that the headers should be centered, since that's how it was in my original source material. However, I had to use some padding for the paragraphs, but it did make the text more readable.