Conlanging

Last update: 7 November 2007

[With humble apologies to people whose pages I used to link to; I prefer to keep this page short.]

Conlanging is the gentle art of making up languages for fun, pleasure, or occasionally profit; it comes from the abbreviation conlang for "constructed language". Here is a good FAQ on the subject; this will, of course, strike some as insufferably geeky or pointless; but it's no less valid an artform than painting or writing purely for one's self.

The patron saint of conlanging is J. R. R. Tolkien, whose interest in creating languages eventually led to him writing The Lord of the Rings, and whose Quenya is probably the most beautiful conlang ever created; the languages are described in detail at Ardalambion. Aside from these and Klingon, the conlang most people have heard of is Esperanto; this is however, properly speaking, an auxlang: an auxiliary language intended to facilitate international communication. Auxlangs are functional rather than beautiful, and the debate over their merits is acrimonious; Rick Harrison's eloquent Farewell to auxiliary languages leads me to think that the search for the ideal auxlang is ultimately fruitless. I used to have a page about my opinion of Esperanto.

Conlanging resources

On my website you can find:

My guide to lazy conlanging. This page describes how to create a bogolang, i.e. a conlang from an existing language. Bogolangs derived from Latin are called romlangs; Brithenig is the original and best of these, showing what you can do with a simple premise and a bit of ingenuity.
A short survey of vowel systems, which might provide inspiration if you're stuck.
How to transcribe a conlang using the Roman alphabet. Maybe someone might like to try Greek or Cyrillic?
Geoff's Sound Change Applier, which might be of use if you're deriving a conlang from another language.
A collection of sound changes.
The Conlanger Test, for light relief.

Elsewhere on the Internet:

Mark Rosenfelder's excellent Language Construction Kit. Start here if you want to create a conlang yourself.
Zompist's Bulletin Board, the best conlanging forum.
Pablo Flores' equally useful language creation pages.
Jeffrey Henning's conlang page, which includes a very long list of links to conlangs and further conlang resources.
Justin Rye's page about languages in science-fiction and fantasy, with plenty of stereotype-busting.
Tommaso Donnarumma's site with articles on conlanging and several conlangs of his own.
The archive of the conlang mailing list.
The Intelligent Person's Guide to Latin.
Did you know that, despite what is suggested by the evidence and painstaking work of numerous scholars of Indo-European, many of the world's major languages, including English, have in fact been cleverly constructed out of a language "identical to Basque"? We have Edo Nyland's tireless research with dictionaries to thank for this earth-shattering discovery which shows that Sanskrit is not perfect after all (another page). Who would have thought that "Stalin" really means "In a brutish way he kills people any way possible"?

My own conlangs

Most of my conlangs are described on the Internet. Liotan, Rachovian, Mossian, Athomine, Devrian, Aneric, Kimbar, and Cluza are all descended from a common source, which you may try to reconstruct if you have nothing better to do :-) From Liotan are similarly descended the Liotic languages; together with Dekavurian (a bogolang derived from Gothic) and its descendants they are all spoken, or have been spoken, in my conworld, of which more details will be available Real Soon Now.

The remaining conlangs are nothing to do with my conworld: Breathanach, a romlang inspired by Brithenig, and - for amusement only - what I can remember of my first ever conlang.

End

Finally, by analogy with the Geek Code, someone came up with the conlang code. Mine is:

CCS v1.1 !lh:m:p:v cN:R:N:H a+ y n3d:2d !B A-- E---- N4 Id/m/p k----
ia p- s m++++ o P* S* Ivrien