Conlanging 101: An introduction
Greetings and spintrians! …Okay, not my cup of tea, even in erotica, but hey if you like it, good for you! As some might have noticed if you’re a patron of mine, I have started doing some conlanging once again after a long ass hiatus! If not, 👉 become a patron if you want. So I figured now is the time to start doing it for the blog as I revive my knowledge! I hope this will help some eager people.
A conlang what is?
Great question! What is a conlang? The word is a portmanteau of “constructed” and “language”; I hope how is sufficiently self-evident. It is a language that, rather than having naturally arisen through aeons of evolution or rapid emergence from necessity of people’s need for communication, was intentionally made by one or several people.
You might as well ask then, what is a language? It is a difficult thing to define such that it fits everything we want and excludes everything we want, but commonly we have this definition:
A language is a system of communication between individuals that consists of individual units of meanings that are put together according to a set of rules to form larger units of meaning and has the ability to express anything in infinite variety.
What a mouthful! Essentially, it says there are words (kind of), grammar of some sort, and that you can form infinitely many different sentences. This differs from the vast majority of communication in the animal kingdom which has only a finite set of things to express and cannot come up with new expressions.
Is necessary a conlang?
The short answer is, NOPE!
The long answer is… well, longer. In the strictest sense, you never ever ever need a conlang. But then again, if you only needed what is baseline stuff, you wouldn’t be at this blog reading, now would you? If you want to add depth, then a conlang is… absolutely not necessary still. It is a huge amount of work on its own; it is like a worldbuilding project within a worldbuilding project.
But if you want to add a lot of fun details to your world, a conlang is a great way to do it! It gives your world more life, it makes it feel alive, and you can demonstrate culture and what a total nerd you are! A conlang can be expanded a lot and made huge, but it can serve to name your characters, name places, items, and much else if you don’t want to do boring old English derivations.
Of Conlang types
Before we go into how one makes a conlang, which will be a multipost effort, I have to explain what different types there exist as they do very different jobs and for very different purposes. I will start with the one that is likely to be of least interest for most worldbuilders. Be aware I will use the suffix -lang to refer to a language type and -langer as someone who makes that type.
Natlang
Natural language; they just exist already, nothing big here. They are natural ones in life: English is one, German is one, I am not entirely certain French is one but linguistically it still counts as one 😜
Auxlang
Another portmanteau: “Auxiliary Language”. Auxlangs are languages that have the intent of easing communication between groups and peoples. The exact people and scope can vary a lot. Some auxlangers want very local ones, for example between only Germanic people, or some other family groups, and thus create an auxlang that is very heavily Germanic. A natural consequence is that it is not easy for outsiders, who don’t speak a language in the group, as they are not taken into consideration.
Why would the ease matter? Well, an auxlang is intended to be easy to learn and easy to communicate for those within the desired groups. The point is to help communication for certain people by giving a common language that all people or groups have an easier time learning than learning either of their mother tongues. International auxlangs are often the most familiar where it is meant to be easy for every language. Which, given the wide range of grammars and phonologies, is a daunting task to make anything simple for everyone. So as you can imagine, very small scoped auxlangs tend to have greater success in terms of achieving their goal in design.
It is easier to get something all Germanic speakers find easy to speak and understand than something that speakers of Chinese, Japanese, Germanics, Romance languages, Nahuatl, Navajo and more agree is easy; after all, everyone has a very different perspective on what is “normal” to them in a language. But humorously enough, international auxlangs tend to have the greater success in terms of numbers because there are more people that might learn the language than for very localised auxlangs.
Artlang
Artistic language; you could guess this one, couldn’t you? Of course you could, you devilishly smart reader! These are the ones we want. They are made for artistic purposes! Which worldbuilding definitely fits! And if you disagree, 🔪
But for these types of conlangs, there still exist a few subtypes which are important to pay attention to.
Namelang
This is the simplest one to create with little to no grammar, and it is because its purpose is to name things. Usually towns, people, areas, lands, etc. For these, you usually need a few things: phonology, phonotactics, word order, and words. I will go into what all those mean in one bit, except maybe words, you know those.
Spokenlang
This is not formally recognised in the conlanging community, but I find it is good when contrasting with the previous namelang. The purpose of this is still for worldbuilding purposes often, but the main point is that they are currently, or going to be, sufficiently developed that a person can actually speak it. I will mostly be dealing with this throughout the series, but as namelang is a smaller version, you can apply what you learn from me to make a namelang.
A conlang part of
I already started speaking about it in the namelang part, but I will go through it here. Namely, the parts that make up language and thus are necessary for a functional conlang. These parts are phonology, phonotactics, morphology, vocabulary, syntax, and pragmatics. I will go into each of them here slightly, and future blogposts will dive more into each one.
Phonology
Phonology literally means “study of sounds.” And in linguistics and languages, it refers to the sounds that a language has; that is, what is made by the mouth. But when it comes to phonology, there are three important words to keep in mind. The first is phones, which means any sound that is used within the language in normal speech. It doesn’t matter what, but if it is made whale speaking, it is a phone. I realise the humour in that the word is the same as the handheld device, don’t know why that is the case, not like both of them deal primarily with sound or something.
The second word is phoneme. How does it differ from a phone? Well, a phone is just a sound, but a phoneme carries meaning. That is, in the language, speakers perceive it being a different word, in at least some instances, if you change the sound to another. For example, in English, /b/ and /p/ (I will explain what the // mean in my post on phonology) are phonemes because you have the word “bat” and the word “pat,” two very different words to English speakers! That means /p/ and /b/ are phonemes and thought of as different sounds to the speakers. “Bat” and “Pat” are called a minimal pair of words for those phonemes, too, which are words that differ by one sound only but are considered different words.
The last of the trio is allophones. As phonemes carry meaning when you change them, allophones do not. You have all experienced this scenario: you talk with someone, and there is something off in their speech. I don’t mean like a foreign accent, but there is something different or odd in how they pronounce things. The sounds are right, but there is something different about how they are pronounced, and you don’t know what. This is often because what they are doing is a different way to express the same phoneme. That is an allophone. Allophones are different sounds that do NOT carry meaning. If I say “bat” with more aspiration on the /b/, or rounded lips, or many other things, you will just think I say bat weirdly, but you still register it as “bat”, same as if I do that for /p/. That is because phonemes can have different pronunciations depending on other sounds around them, but these differences carry no meaning to the speaker or listener. These differences are all allophones of one sound.
When deciding sounds, you generally go for phonemes, for what I hope are obvious reasons, namely that these are what carries meanings. Different weird ways of pronouncing sounds doesn’t change that. Keep in mind, though, that what are allophones in one language can be phonemes in another and vice versa. There are languages where b is an allophone of p, for example.
Phonotactics
You being the smart 🍪s that you are can figure this one out! Something with sounds, maybe the tactics of them? Kind of! These are the rules of how sounds are combined! Not every combination is legal or allowed in a language. For example, “struningiple” is not an English word, but if you pronounce it out, it doesn’t sound like it could not be in the English vocabulary. But if I do “vliktni,” you will instantly think, “Those are weird consonant clusters!” Because English does not allow the initial syllable “vl,” and “ktni” is not allowed either. These are phonotactics: the rules of how syllables are allowed to form. Speakers will adapt any words that they borrow to fit this, most of the time at least.
There are three components to a syllable: the nucleus, listed first because it is the core and always present, which is usually a vowel even though some languages allow nasals and other phones–for now, we will say vowels; the onset, an optional element which comes before the nucleus; and the coda, another optional element that comes after the nucleus. Some languages are very strict and simple; for example, in Japanese, The syllables can be any consonant + vowel + maybe n. That is it for them. Then we have English that has (C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C), where C is consonant and V is vowel, and () means it is optional, but there are rules about which come in which order and when. English is a little syllable slut!
Morphology
Words are wordy things that do word things. Alright, that isn’t a good example of what I’m about to explain, but it is stupid and… I don’t know what my point was, really. But morphology has to do with how words change. Though it isn’t unlimited, words can change in many ways! You can cram them together and get compounds like “fireplace.” You can stuff them together and get “smog”, smoke+fog. You can use derivations and make words like “annetastic”.
But in all of these above, you have one thing in common: these change the fundamental meaning of the word. A fireplace is not a fire, smog is not a fog, annetastic is not an anne. This is called derivational morphology, or compounding, which will be useful for the next part. In pure morphology, however, it often means changing the word without changing the core meaning of the word. Morphological changes are often done by affixes–where you put syllables before, after, in, around, etc, the word–and they are called inflections. If it is for the verbs only, it is called conjugation. If it is for nouns or adjectives, it is called declension. These inflections of words do not change the core meaning of words but the details of the word in the sentence itself.
English has very little of it, but it does have them! “Cat” vs “Cats,” for example, changes the word without changing the core meaning. Both refer to the animal that meows and eats wet food–and, Anne, do we have a dance by Lily here?
Inflection song created using ChatGPT and Suno, arranged by Anne Winchell
So the meaning has not fundamentally been changed, all we have done is go from ONE cat, to MANY cats.
English verbs have some too: for example, “walk” vs “walked.” Same action, but in the past. “Walking,” used to describe someone in the action of doing the verb. Again, I will go into greater details later, but morphology refers to these changes.
Vocabulary
This is the part that requires the most work, and it is also the most important. This is where you can show off your conculture (constructed culture) the most. How do they see the world, how do they arrange it, or how DID they view it? You will need about 1500 words for most everyday conversations, but there is so much that can be done here!
You will be making so many words it is unbelievable; this is the part that honestly kills me most as it can be so tedious! This is also the part that is the absolute easiest to royally bollock it up. How, you ask? Words just mean words! Well, to anyone who is bilingual, which is 95% of humans throughout history, you know how one word does not neatly map into another word. For example, “like” and “love” are different words in English, in French, they’re the same! In Swedish, “att finnas” and “att vara” both mean “to be”.
This is why people often talk about “semantic fields” where all meaning exists in a huge field, and you can cut it up and say “this is what this word means.” If we look at ChatGPT’s architecture, there seems to be about a 50 thousand dimensional space where all semantics exist. But we are not going to do this mathematically. If you want to see how insane it is, just look up any preposition on wiktionary, then check out the translations, and see how languages have different ones. Prepositions carry so much meaning and are all so weirdly split.
In a future blogpost, I will come up with ways to help on this topic, but when making words, be aware that words have MANY meanings, and you can split them up into new words or you can even take two English words’ semantic meanings that you like and slam them together into one word with both meanings and let context carry the rest.
Syntax
These are the rules of how you put sentences together in terms of their words and also affixes, as defined in the morphology section. This is also called grammar. As you may have noticed, my multiword headings have all… looked weird. This is why! To show that word order can shift, but you still can make sense of it. Do not think that just because English or any other language has one type of syntax that is the only one. Where are adjectives put? What comes first: the subject (the doer of the verb) or the object (the doee of the verb)? Maybe it is the verb that is first?
Is it my dog or dog my? Or maybe you only do dog of me? Or me of dog? Do you even have a genitive? Do you have adjectives? Some languages don’t! There are a lot of moving parts here, and the rules decide how you set it up and how it sounds right.
Pragmatics
All is done! You can put sentences together, you got the wordy words, and why is this here? Well, imagine yourself going into a store in a mall in the US and one of the workers goes “What do you want?” You will be flabbergasted and wonder what the fuck is going on? You see, as much as sentences and all make you understood, it is not how you speak! You do a lot of weird things in speech for various reasons, including politeness. For example, it is “salt and pepper,” not “pepper and salt,” but why? It just is.
One example I love that trips up many other cultures here is that, for example, in Anglosaxon cultures, you would address me as “Mdr. Sayan,” (Madir), because it is polite! Well, here in 🇸🇪 if you do that, you are extremely rude! Here, it is polite to call someone by their first name! The pragmatics of the language are all these things: how politeness, honour, face saving, and many other factors are handled in conversation that are not done directly by the language itself.
This is another great part to show your culture and what they value and focus on.
Summa Summarum
Alright, I couldn't switch this title’s word order, I love it too much! But what have we learned? That languages are complicated beasts, and if you want to do a conlang, it is going to be a lot of work. If all you want is a namelang, then what you need is phonology, phonotactics and basic syntax. Which order do the words go? The vocabulary needs to be very basic: “stone”, “shore,”, “sea”, etc. Those words that all languages will have, more or less, and then you put them together. People are very literal in how they name places, so it can be “treelaketown” for a place except now in your conlang.
For the larger projects, I will go into more detail on each and every section. But this blogpost will give you a start if you wish to search for more about these terms on the intertubes. I will slowly provide my own conlang’s developments, too! Happy worldbuilding and conlanging!
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Copyright ©️ 2024 Vivian Sayan. Original ideas belong to the respective authors. Generic concepts such as Conlang, Natlang, and their derivatives are copyrighted under Creative Commons with attribution, and any derivatives must also be Creative Commons. The music video was created using ChatGPT and Suno, and is copyrighted under Creative Commons as well. However, all specific wording is copyright to the author. Contact them for information on usage and questions if uncertain what falls under Creative Commons. We’re almost always happy to give permission. Please contact the authors through this website’s contact page.
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