How To Make A Conlang: A Very Serious Article

How do you make a conlang? Firstly, what even is a conlang? A conlang, or constructed language, is a language that doesn’t really exist and is simply fabricated into existence by one person or a group of people. Most well-known conlangs fit into two main categories of conlangs: naturalistic languages and auxiliary languages, or auxlangs, such as Esperanto or Toki Pona. A naturalistic language is created out of nothing but is simulated to have had growth over time and a rich history, such as Klingon or Elvish from Tolkien’s books. An auxlang is also created out of nothing, but with the idea that this language should be easy to speak, and is meant to be a common language for those who don’t have a real language in common. The type of language that I’ll be helping you create is a naturalistic language since I’ve had the most experience with those.

Step One: Come up with an idea. Since the aim here is to make a language with history and variation, it would benefit you to come up with some backstory for the people who speak this language. What sort of climate are they from? Who are their neighbors? How do they view family? These are all important questions you need to ask yourself before and as you begin to create your conlang.

Step One Point Five: Start researching. Even though this article may help you, it is not the end all be all of conlang help. There are lots of resources out there to help you build your language! If this isn’t your first rodeo, or if you’re familiar with some linguistic concepts, jumping straight to an IPA chart may be for you. If not, I would recommend YouTube channels such as Artifexian and Biblaridion. Both channels are really great for getting into the nitty gritty of creation. Artifexian has lots of world-building videos (including a spreadsheet on how to make your own solar system from scratch) and Biblaridion has a playlist on how to create a naturalistic conlang. Another great resource could be Wikipedia articles. If you want your language to sound similar to a real-world language, look up that language’s Wikipedia article! These articles feature a history of the language, what sounds are included in the language, and for those that don’t use a Latin alphabet, what the writing system looks like!

Step Two: Pick Your Sounds. Now that you’ve got your backstory and your resources, we can move on to picking sounds. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a chart that has every sound that is currently known to exist in a language. And, in a handy video from your friend and mine Tom Scott, it is noted that there are some sounds that aren’t filled in on the chart that are still possible to make. I guess, if you wanted to make your life incredibly difficult, you could pick some of those sounds. Just pick some consonants you like, and a few vowels while you’re at it, and throw them in a Google Doc while we do this next bit.

Step Three: Orthography. Now, you don’t have to do either of this step and Step Four in any particular order, you could do your grammar before you figure out your orthography, but it might be a bit difficult. If you’ve chosen to have your language use the Latin alphabet (A-Z), then you can skip this step. If you have decided to create your own, then great! Now you get to design your very own writing system! Speaking from experience, I will say it is very difficult to not accidentally create “Greek 2” when working with an Aramaic base. I would recommend starting from scratch, or a different language. What may help as a starting point for orthography is thinking about what sort of material your people are writing on. Clay and stone allow for more pointy letters (as seen with Cuneiform and Latin) while writing on leaves allows for more loopy letters (such as old Javanese and old Thai). This is probably also the stage where you may want to decide which direction your language is written in.

Step Four: Grammar. I’m including syntax alongside grammar because it’s taught in grammar class in school. This is my formal apology to the linguistics community. In this step, you’re going to want to figure out what type of sentence order you have, and how your language deals with plurals and tenses, among other things. If you get stuck here, I would recommend doing some more research into real-life languages to see how they deal with these concepts. This would probably be the place to add in your grammatical particles if you would like to have them.

Step Five: Lexicon. Finally, you can start coining words! If we’re sticking with the idea that this is supposed to be a naturalistic conlang, instead of just coining words willy-nilly, it’s better to do a few simple words and work from there. If you want to translate a complex word, first try breaking it down into its bare bones. Let’s take the word “universe” for example. That could break down in a few ways. It could be “star place” or “sky place” or “big land place” or any number of things. In fact, it could even be “outer-space place” which could come from “planet place” which could come from “big land place” which could come from “country place” and then even “city/tribe place”. Everything can and should be reduced in these earlier stages of creating the language.

Step Six: Evolution. When you feel that you have enough words (and you’re going to need a lot of words), you can start evolving your language. Basically what this means is you’re going to simulate the passage of time and the gradation of your language. Certain sounds are going to get dropped, certain phrases will get smooshed together into words, and some words may become obsolete in favor of new words, et cetera et cetera. This is a step not many get to; in fact, usually, most people skip over this step and go straight to step seven.

Step Seven: Pause… This is the place where languages go to die. It’s a graveyard full of half-dead languages that are still alive in someone’s head but haven’t been touched in months if not years. Many of the languages that live here only have a few words and basic grammar. Very few languages make it to the end. So few, in fact, that most conlangs that live here don’t even believe there’s such a thing as “reaching the end” for conlangs. Most are resigned to the idea that they were created simply to be forgotten.

And that’s it! It seems pretty simple when it’s laid out like this, but it can be deceptively difficult. It took me a great deal of research in the grammar section to even know what concepts I was trying to create! If I could ever meet Tolkein or Marc Okrand, I would probably ask them how they did it; and how they had the mental willpower to make it to the end. Then again, when being creative is your job it makes all of this a lot easier… Anyway, I wish you all much luck in your conlang-ing endeavors!