In recent years, it's become more and more popular for fictional universes to feature
fictional languages.
Elvish (and the black speech!) from lord of the rings,
Klingon from Star Trek,
Na'vi from Avatar
Dothraki and High Valyrian from Game of Thrones
And the list is only growing...
These aren’t just a collection of random sounds made to resemble languages,
they’re not ciphers or codes to reorganize English into something that seems more foreign,
these are actual full-fledged fully-functional languages complete with sound systems, grammars,
and dictionaries containing thousands of words.
What separates them from a language of the real world is that rather than being evolved
by millions of speakers over thousands of years, they were created to appear that way,
when, in reality, they were made in a few months by one person.
These languages are often referred to as constructed languages, or conlangs,
with their creator being a conlanger.
Conlanging has been around for quite a while, but it’s only relatively recently that it
has emerged as an art form in its own right.
It’s becoming more and more accepted for conlangs to be incorporated into films, tv
shows, games, or other world-building projects.
It’s becoming just as much a world-building tool as any other art-form, and it adds a
whole new level of richness and complexity to make a fictional world feel so much more real.
To someone new to the concept, it may seem like a huge or outright impossible task to
create an entire working language.
But believe it or not, it’s actually not that difficult if you know what you’re doing.
Over the years, I’ve created over a dozen conlangs, some I’m rather proud of, and
some I hope never see the light of day again.
I’d like to share my knowledge and experience to help those looking to create their own
languages start their conlanging journey.
This series will assume you have absolutely no knowledge of linguistics or language creation.
This is going to be a fairly broad overview of the language creation process, just to
give you an idea of what’s involved.
Every step of the way I’ll be adding links that provide more information if there’s
a particular aspect of the process you’d like more detail on.
Also, throughout this series, I’m going to be creating a sample language to illustrate
how to implement the steps we go through.
Here’s a basic rundown of what we’re about to do: We’ll decide what sounds we want
to include in our language, then create a small cache of words for our proto-language,
then we’ll use those words to generate a basic grammar and lexicon, and then evolve
the modern form of the language from the proto-language.
But before we do any of that, the first and quite possibly most important thing we need
to decide is: What are our goals for this language?
Why are we making it in the first place?
There are lots of valid reasons for making a language, but this series will focus on
creating languages for a fictional population of speakers for world-building projects.
In other words, languages that are evolved naturally within the context of their fictional world.
Creating a language in this way imposes some constraints that don’t exist in other types
of conlangs.
Our job will be to simulate natural linguistic evolution as closely as possible to make the
language seem more plausible and realistic.
So, having decided that we want a naturalistic language, we now have to think about who is
going to speak this language.
Where do they live?
What kind of technology do they have access to?
Are there any other nearby cultures that they can borrow words or concepts from?
The more fleshed out your culture is, the better you’ll be able to reflect the culture
in their language.
For the sake of simplicity, I’m essentially making this language in a vacuum.
Let’s say that the speakers are a culture of humans living on an isolated tropical island.
Again, to be as simple as possible, let’s just say there are no other cultures nearby
for them to interact with and borrow words or concepts from.
Alright, now we have a set of goals that we can use as a template that we can create the
language around.
Join me next time, when we’ll create our language’s sound system.