In recent years, it has become increasingly popular for fictional universes to feature fictional languages. From Elvish in Lord of the Rings to Klingon in Star Trek, these languages are not just collections of random sounds made to resemble languages. They are full-fledged, fully-functional languages complete with sound systems, grammars, and dictionaries containing thousands of words.
Constructed languages, or conlangs, are created to appear as if they evolved naturally over thousands of years, but in reality, they are made by one person in a few months. Conlanging has emerged as an art form in its own right, and it’s becoming more and more accepted for conlangs to be incorporated into films, TV shows, games, or other world-building projects.
To someone new to the concept, creating an entire working language may seem like a daunting task. However, it’s not that difficult if you know what you’re doing. In this series, we will assume you have absolutely no knowledge of linguistics or language creation and provide a broad overview of the language creation process.
Before we delve into the details, the first and most important thing we need to decide is: What are our goals for this language? Why are we making it in the first place? 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. To do this, we need 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, let’s say that the speakers are a culture of humans living on an isolated tropical island with no other cultures nearby for them to interact with and borrow words or concepts from. Now we have a set of goals that we can use as a template to create the language around.
In the next article, we will go into more detail about creating the sound system for our language. Stay tuned!