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.
Including a picture of Ithkuil in a video about naturalistic conlangs is an odd choice...
Hello everyone. I recently finished making an 8-part YouTube series on the basics of naturalistic conlanging, and, for my first ever Reddit post, I thought I’d share it for anyone interested. It assumes no prior knowledge of conlanging or linguistics and covers everything from choosing sounds for a phonetic inventories and basic word order to evolving new tenses and the emergence of irregularity.
Very cool videos! +1
I'm doing Ithkuil-level non-naturalism, but this was probably the best introductory guide I've come across for getting an understanding of whence linguistic features actually come. Every other text I've come across always seems to assume that grounding and then goes into much more specific detail and I always end up kind of skimming over it. Now I know what they are actually getting at and if nothing else this series was hugely helpful for that alone.
And, of course, just because I'm not doing a naturalistic language right now, linguistics is still interesting and I learned a lot.
Oh, I'll also applaud how you managed to make linguistic evolution such a concrete and very... doable. It's easy to get scared of the idea of such a process that seems so laborious, and I think it's very valuable to see how if you do it right, it really doesn't add much work to the process and yet gives much stronger results.
I watched the series and it's very helpful for me!
Sup, ty for cool videos