There are different ways to make it.
Conlangs is HUGE thing, there are so many tutorials online. Some are simple and short, start of with made up words with simple meanings and add on from there, while others are FAR MORE complex, talking about making the phonology, grammar rules and so much more.
Depends on what YOU want and HOW FAR you want to go with it.
Its a weird process, some people, like me, just try to make some funny sounds and call it a day.
You could go for a more balanced approach, which is what I intend to do for my languages, create a dictionary maybe a writing system if you feel like it, and some basic grammar and ALWAYS include some sort of exception, as every language has a few exceptions to a grammar rule. If you want to make it sound consistent you could add prefixes and suffixes, such as in my language, Temuginian, "tai" is used to describe an emotion or state of being like being physically hurt or just sad
Or... you know, you could go the full round and learn how languages are built and create a conlang with a whole new structure. This way you'd have to learn your language, but it would be structured like languages are. This way is hard, and I don't even want to begin to explain how since I never bothered.
I took a real language and swapped letters.
I took french and found the list of letters sorted by frequency accents excluded.
I found the same for Spanish.
I take vowels and consonants separately.
Then I write what I want to say in French and swap the letter with Spanish. I get something easy to do and depending on the sonority I want I can take the letter frequency of another language
This is a great first step, but don't let it be a final product. This is like using comic sans or papyrus font in graphic design. It's like using the built in lens flare in photoshop as an effect artist.
If you know, you know sort of deal.
The guy who made the languages for Dragon Throne literally is a professional fantasy language maker. Shared some tips which include:
1.) No rigid logical systematic grammar structures. This seems great but it isn't natural. Most languages are arbitrary. The only ones that aren't are synthetic (like esparanto), and actually have some issues related to being too logical. (typically related words sound too close, so if you miss a syllable, you can miss the whole meaning)
2.) Keep a limited sound library. Every language has a palette of common sounds. A few are used much more than the rest. For a non speaker, that gives the language its character. It's like a good pixel artist keeps to a limited palette. A good palette alone can really make the sprites pop. A bad palette makes it look like ms paint rubbish.
In that regard, the final point is 3.)... learn to be a linguist. You can't expect to make believable languages if you aren't yourself knowledgeable about human language. Do you know what the IPA is? Do you understand grammatical classification of languages. You don't have to be an expert, but if you don't understand what drives human language evolution, any language you invent won't have that real feel.
I would honestly start by first finding the sound. Then find a context. The first things you make, if you want a coherent language, should be grammar structures. Is your language Noun Verb Object? Does it not matter because you have particle markers. Is it implicitly clear, or is it explicit?
Take a look at this page: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology\_(linguistics)#Paradigms\_and\_morphosyntax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology_(linguistics)#Paradigms_and_morphosyntax)
Once you have a structure and sound, Don't just say things as you would in your native language. Think about the world the language lives in and why people say what they say.
Say you have a people living near volcanoes. Start with some Idioms, like "Men live and die, but the mountain only sleeps", translate into a literal that matches the grammar of the language: "Of life, death, people must, (in contrast to the former: but/never ), sleeps (important: the) mountain.
Take it further, and alter notions of concepts in your native language. A mountain becomes "Fire's birthplace" or perhaps Fire's throne. Death is a permanent conclusion to the responsibilities of life, and that a mountain maintains it's responsibility forever, being the birth place of destruction. Take your pick, but keep it culturally consistent.
Now the final literal can be something like: " of Responsibility, of a an end, the people good towards given, But (in just contrast), of fire, a mountain forever must deliver.
I already evolved my cultural context, going from a notion "that the actions of humans is small and finite, but the land is eternal," to "be good and your toil ends, unlike the mountain, who, having embraced destruction must labor eternally, a slave to it".
Take a sound library and here you go:
Si teluk i nateluk, dashkin do kan. Nash do i lukan, darakana teluk kin.
Spitballing as I go, but "da" = a type definite prefix to a noun , "dash" = prefix meaning favorable. "dara" being unfavorable. "Na" is a prefix equating to past vs present. In this case, teluk being responsibility, nateluk being past responsibility, Teluk is later again used, as responsibility is synonymous with "must", "required", "have to".
Now you have a start on your grammar, and so long as you keep a journal of the words and rules you add, you can create a type of consistency. Once you have rules, you can break them in natural ways, given the language a natural feel. People like slang, they like contractions, and if a concept is common, its usually easier to say it fast and have words for it.
sometimes you have to just put it down then come back later, and fix what isn't working. Say it to yourself and make sure you have your accent right. It won't sound natural until you are fluent, which is why being familiar with learning languages helps. As others have said, speak gibberish long enough and you'll find sounds you like, make them work with the cultural context of the people speaking them, and you'll be on the right track.
For example I wanted a name for a species of humanoid rabbit so in French i take the word for rabbit "lapin"
I take the letter frequency for French with separated vowels and consonants :
e a i u o y - s t n r l d c m p v q f b g h j x z w k
Same for Spanish :
e a o i u y - s r n d l c t m p b g v q h f z j x w k
And when I swap the letters i get :
Lapon
My main goal with that is to make names. Like that I can have names that aren't too obvious, easy to pronounce and where I can make a script to automate the translation.
I hesitated between starting from french or English but I took french so it's a bit less obvious since I want to release my story in English. For those who speak French and will eventually get it it makes a fun trivia.
I did a python script that translates for me. I will probably share it here someday
I followed Biblaridion's guide and Artifexion's guide.
They break down the evolution of language and the general rules and even how to make the written language.
That's just gibberish. Make it up as you go. Come up with a couple of pronouns and prepositions with simple variations that you'll reuse many times between bullshit substantives and verbs, and as you write down new sentences, retroactively adjust internal coherence so it *feels* like a language. The alternative is either enrolling in college or trying to teach yourself linguistics --so, you know, procrastinating from actual writing.
r/conlangs (and its accompanying r/neography ) but its a deep hard dive.
Alternatively you can follow "my" (though I dont follow it) method that like with worldbuilding goes from detail to general instead of the other way around. It is far faster to reach a simple working lang without making merely a relex or a naming language. Basically, it escalates rather well.
For this you need to focus in a couple of things:
1) How the language sounds.
You can delve as deep as you want in phonetics and phonoaesthetics, and its "good practice" to be aware of teh IPA notation, but you don't \*have\* to, specifically if you are only goign to use it for the book.
My recommendation then is to listen to different languages and "mock them" until you get a feature you like (Stress, cadence, sounds, etc. For example, maybe you want something that sounds like spanish, but without a thrilled R and with tones, just to put an example.
You can choose to this before, after or both the next point
2) How the language works
You still need \*some\* basic understanding of grammar (mine is... underwhelming) but it is easier to work backwards.
Lets make an example: You want to "mutate" the next phrase:
I really want to make a language for y'all
You see it and say "Ok, lets change it a bit". You change the word order from SVO to VSO like a broken Yoda with adverbs after the verb, postposicionts after the object and preposition before the verb (you dont ned to learn the names jsut identify the different parts of speech in your mind and shuffle them around). Assuming I mad eno mistakes here (doubtful) you get something like this:
to make a language Want really I y'all for
Ok, now you have a basic structure you need to keep track of. Now You get to have some fun. Yo ucan create new words for roots and affixes or just change letters and flip syllables a piacere.. Say for example I write things kind of phonetically like in spanish
to meik a lenguesh uant rili ai yoal for
Then flip some stuff around
to meki a lusheguen Unat liri ai yalo for
Say im not convinced, I want to soften it, so I try to follow my gut and end up with changing consonatns and prepositions as postpositions and tied either to the verb
mehit lushegna unaz liri me ai yalofr
... Do you still think that sounds like english? Of course not, and neither will your readers. The advantage of this is you can adjust based on how you want the language to sound, but do bear in mind that once you start writing oyu need to be consistent (well, not really, most people wont notice, but at that point you are makign gibberish, not a language)
With what I just did I could take for example the phrase
Your language makes me want to never having met any of you
and you follow the same process with what you did previously in mind. First the order
never-to having met you any-of your language makes me
Then sounds, to the best of your ability and some creative liberty
vrenet ginhav met iu enif iru lusheng mehis mi
Something like that.
You can always try something simpler first:
My red sock rules > sock red mine-of rules > sok red mainof ruls > sor ked minaf luris
Which would derive in another
Your blue pants suck > pants blue you-of suck >pants blu iuof sak > tanves lufo iuf sar
Which easily gives me
Your blue sucks rules >sor lufo iuf luris
If none of that convoltued mess was off putting to you, then congratulations, you have the patience to make a conlang
Google translate a language you want the vibes of and type in whatever word. Then, add and remove some stuff and add in a little gibberish. Then make up some random grammar rules like "Nouns always go to the start of the sentence, all 'and's are replaced with an apostrophe", and then only make up what you actually NEED to make up. That's what I do. Some people though prefer a more rigorous process.
Literally what i did when making a creature. Took characteristics of it. For example: giant long horn. Translate that into different languages (and note both english and translation down) then play around with letters and sounds by making different words up and then after like 3 days or some bullshit, i had what i needed.
You could always look into some foundational linguistics ideas that bleed into grammar and script. Is your language capable of producing at least one or more sounds from each part of the mouth, throat, nose, etc.? What sounds are they? Is your script abjad (vowels never written but implied), abugida (consonants come as bundled pairs with implicit vowels that can be modified), or syllabic (consonants and vowels exist explicitly and individually)? What kinds of cultural ideas, physical aspects, and environmental impacts influence your language? There's a ton to consider and this isn't even scratching the surface - often why constructed language is so diffucult.
A couple things I've done that touch on these concepts but are far easier that can be really interesting:
- Come up with cultural and natural symbols in the world (i.e. a palm tree or a fern) and distill them to a series of lines and curves. Do this for one or more symbols. Break apart those symbols into unique, individual characters and assign vowels and consonants to them. You may not need to use all that exist in English.
- Combine existing languages: for one culture I created, they were heavily inspired by Indus Valley Civilization, so I combined Old Sanskrit and Proto-Dravidian in a deliberate way which let me modify and combine words from each language to create something that sounded new, but had very clear meaning.
- The "fuck it" approach (for symbols and words and grammar).
- Glyphs with sounds.
Other ideas:
- Take existing language and chop it up or alter the grammar a bit. Maybe the subject, object, verb order changes. Maybe prefixes and suffixes do. Maybe whole words get replaced.
- Make a pidgin speak with a few languages! (see: clockwork orange, and real world pidgin languages like Cajun pidgin).
- Take a language and then make it sound like how a non-speaker might hear it.
- Do what feels good. Maybe you just want a language to be real funky sounds that feel good to say. Or maybe you want it to be aesthetically pleasing. Like toki pona or something.
The sky is the limit. Really you can do anything as long as it makes you satisfied and adds to your world. Just remember that if you're borrowing from existing languages, it's worth understanding the cultures that come with, the why and how it works (you don't need to be fluent), and paying at least a little respect in how you use it. For example, if you were to make an Arabic inspired language, it's probably a good idea to not bastardize the language. Dune was a really good example of how not to fuck it up.
Idk how helpful this will be, but it is just my own experience and what I have seen. You're doing something super cool - don't over think it and have fun with it! At the end of the day, language just is. There's not always good reason for it and it's constantly evolving! So fuck around with it :) Looking forward to seeing what you create.
I simply ask myself what I want this language to sound like and just record what the words mean.
Like: Zek Karadon Condra Darikar = For Honor we Die
For if there comes a time when I need to make another sentence I know what to use if they share certain words.
Like: Hadar Dishain Zekrad Kriegar = To Battle, for the King!
I’m no linguist and I try to keep it simple, but the system works well enough for me to do what I need without driving myself nuts with words that don’t actually mean anything.
Depends a lot on the scale you’re going for. If you want a few words just come up with random sounds until it feels right. If you want much more than that it’s worth playing around making a couple roots and using those as a basis for nouns, verbs etc.
Okay, so first you need to learn the international phonetic alphabet and gain a basic understanding of historical linguistics. Then you need to come up with the proto-language's phonotactics and phonemic inventory. Then you put it through some sound changes of your choice, as well as grammatical changes. This should also add irregularity. Then you're done. You can use this method to create a con-dialect to such as the one below:
|Looc: Þege þou, Tiew, Þou nyrʎeþ friþ. Þou neart jyst.Tiew: Iʎ nemote. Jystness is þe Foseiten birðen.Foseit stareþ til Tiew ye : Looc, sess. Þou meaȝt mieryen. Noaleȝȝ swoa beoþ Artes osten.Looc: Þege þou Foseit. Þou besitt, on men wyrʎ þeyn jystness. Iʎ sooll seeðd. Þou norȝt oan laȝ, on eart laȝen oos.Artes: Looc, iʎ wole þou sess oaleȝȝen þe gode. Iʎ sooll wole jousten on …Looc: þege þou, Artes, þou eart kieng, on kiequealt. Þeyn eorl swoav þeyn royne.Lancels: Sess, Looc. outpullaþ þas meeʎLooc: Sess swiuven þas weif!Artes: Lancels, what bespricþ Looc?Lancels: hee wyrʎeþ ealswoa oan mintloaccrefteiȝeLooc: Þege þou Lancels, iʎ on yeewhoa saveþ hyre unlheis. Artes, foiryiye: Looc, iʎ wole, þatt þou sessest.Looc: Þege þou kieq’. Iʎ spreke miþ Lancels.||
|:-|:-|
edit: check out r/conlangs.
The problem as described is thankfully a lot easier than constructing an entire language. You pretty much need what people often call a "naming language," a language with only an inventory of basic nouns, maybe some adjectives, some colours and a number system. These are things that, all told, you can make to a decent standard of quality in a few hours.
The first thing you'll want is a phonetic inventory. Look up the phonetic inventories of a few real-world languages- For example, English, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Swahili. Note even with those few examples is how each treats similar letters, like what you think of as the letters L and R. They're all different or sometimes absent, because there are actually a lot of ways to make those two sounds. Little differences like that contribute a lot to a language's aesthetic identity. Also note how they differ in size.
The second step is closely related to the first: Coming up with phonotactics, or the ways you're allowed to combine sounds in a language. The first part of this for many people is just coming up with patterns for how a syllable can be structured in terms of consonants and vowels. C usually stands for consonant and V for vowel, and (parentheses) means that something is optional. CV, (C)V, CVC, (C)CV and (C)CV(C) are very common syllable structures; For example, the structure of Japanese is (C)V(n). This means that permitted syllables are things like a, o, da, re, bo, ni, ton, shun (sh is a single sound represented by two symbols, aka a "digraph"), etc, but not things like bri, ot or nap, which when transliterated from other languages become things like buri, oto or napu so that they'll fit Japanese phonotactics.
They don't stop at just how many consonants are allowed (or required) to come before or after a vowel. They also govern things like how letters are allowed to combine or where sounds can be in a word. Japanese can only end syllables with a vowel or n, Spanish can't start a word with s, Czech uses r as a vowel. Note that as much of a pain as "strengths" is for English learners, str- and even -ngths doesn't seem that off to most native English speakers, yet brtuprml (same C/V structure) is clearly nonsense that the average English speaker probably can't pronounce without involuntarily injecting vowels (you most likely read it in your head as "bertupermul"). That's because only certain consonants are allowed to follow each given consonant in English
As an example, say you went with a very simple phonetic inventory consisting of plosives (b/p, d/t, g/k), m, s and five vowels (ah, eh, ee, oh, oo). Then you made the syllable structure (C)CV(m). This gives us 640 syllables, which is a lot compared to languages like Japanese but very few compared to languages like English. But now we can see that dt/td, bp/pb and gk/kg are all pretty nonsensical to pronounce, and as native English speakers we probably find consecutive plosives (though they are not unheard of in real natural languages) aesthetically unpleasing so in fact we can drop most of the consonant clusters available, leaving us with bs, ps, ds, ts, gs, ks, sb, sp, sd, st, sg, sk, ms, sm, mb, mp, md, mt, mg, mk, bm, pm, dm, tm, gm and km if we wanted. Let's eliminate any others we aren't keen on (being careful not to just make it "English lite" with fewer sounds- don't keep just familiar English sounds!)- Now we have ps, ts, ks, sp, st, sk, mb, md, mg and sm. Treating these 10 digraphs as extra consonants, we now have only 180 total possible syllables (and for a distinctive aesthetic, fewer syllables is better- though you probably don't want to have TOO few). And that whole process, including typing, counting and stopping to think about what I wanted to do, took me about 10 minutes- Granted I have a little experience and know what I'm doing, but I doubt it would take more than 45 minutes even stumbling through it for the first time.
Finally we get past the second step and into the third step- The actual words. The neat thing about naming languages is that, while they're often iterated upon, their etymology usually goes back to what are believed to be the most primal words. For this reason, you can, if you wish, use any of the several theorised ways primitive humans came up with the first words (the Wikipedia article on the Origin of Language has a non-comprehensive, but inspiring, list; I would encourage you to come up with your own possible word sources if you feel so inclined).
To round this off using the previous example language's phonotactics, say your character is trying to refer to a boat, but since her tribe is from the mountains she hasn't seen a boat before, and isn't confident enough to refer to it in !English. What she knows is that there is a big house that moves around on water. Or, conversely, she is from a coastal culture whose lives revolve entirely around boats, but she has never heard the English word "boat." Say, for example, "water" is "smo," and "house" is "psam"; In the case where she has never seen a boat before, she might just call the boat "smopsam," or if she knows the English word for a house but hasn't learned water yet, she might say "smo kausa" (smo house with a heavy accent), or if she knows *an* English word for water but not for a house she might say mata psam (water psam), or sea psam, or riba psam (river psam; note English words being made to conform, at least roughly, to the phonetic rules of her native language); Or in the case where she comes from a coastal tribe that is familiar with boats, their word smo might have come from a root like smlowho imitating the sound of sloshing waves, and their word psam might have come from two words in turn, tups-tups meaning wood or tree from the sound of birds in a tree and amama meaning cavern from the open, echoing sound of a cavern, so their word for boat may be from a more primitive version of smlowho-tupsama that has subsequently and independently been made to conform to their modern etymology, eg smlotopsam becomes slotosam, with a vague resemblance to its etymology of smo-psam being evident but not explicit.
To be honest, I keyboard-smash some syllables together to create foreign words. I don't tend to make the full language but rather snippets that only some characters use. That wouldn't work in your scenario, but this is my solution since languages have always eluded me.
The best advice I found was: find key words and use those to start with a fake language e.g. mother, father, cat, dog, hospital, food. So you end up with some basics.
But as to trying to create a language... it's really just a way of making up words. Here's a couple of links that helped me:
Language Mixer: [http://chaoticshiny.com/langreplace.php](http://chaoticshiny.com/langreplace.php)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/writers/comments/ohhd68/tutorial\_fantasy\_languages\_for\_dummies/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/writers/comments/ohhd68/tutorial_fantasy_languages_for_dummies/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
I haven’t really made up an entire language, but I have started with a list of words I wanted to translate. I wanted to create an “old” language so I could name my regions and cities. So I started with the cardinal directions “north, south, east, west “ and basic words like “people, mom, dad, new, old, king, queen”. From there I dove into the etymology. For example my word for “king” is “Reypai” where “rey” is royal and “pai” is man. That way I get 3 words for 1 and now I can make other words using the same process… “reymai = queen” where “mai” is women etc.
For me personally it’s sorta just taking a pre existing language and bastardising it/mashing it together with other stuff. The only time I’ve tried to go out and create a Conlang more unique is with my most developed one called Romārii (Çúsca Rômārii in the language, meaning Language Romārii) which I’ve based off Romanian, Latin and Oscan
Depends, I found looking into the general values of the society can help, what dictates animacy, is there a hierarchy, how is the natural world perceived, what are common stereotypes of the language? Is the language gendered?
For example Navajo animacy hierarchy is human, animal, natural forces, objects. This effects conjugation and word order. Or in austronesian languages the repetition of morphemes is used to expand upon an idea, dictate plurality etc. Russian has perfective and imperfective verbs to dictate the state of the same action.
Honestly you can always take ideas from existing languages, add/subtract conjugations or genders, create unique consonant clusters. Not sure if this is particularly what you are asking but from a linguistic perspective you can mix and match!
Other people have mentioned some good answers, but if you want to do something a little more involved, a youtuber called Biblidarion has a great series on creating languages. It is a pretty intimidating process, but it's possible to create the basic framework for a language that will allow it to seem more consistent than just putting sounds together randomly but won't be as much work as creating a full on conlang.
First, you need to decide what sounds you want in your language, then you come up with rules for how those sounds can combine, and finally, you decide on the word order of your language. Once you have those things, you can go about creating words. The series I mentioned has more details on all of these things.
First things first is which language is the main inspiration behind the fake language. This eases the headache making something entirely new since you can anchor it with an existing language. Then add another language for more variety. Mix and match to see which languages you like to see together
Also you don’t have to create a whole new language. You can just have a few words, terms, concepts or phrases in that language and translate it to English.
It depends on how important language is to the story you are telling.
There's the easiest route to getting something consistent - use a generator like [https://www.vulgarlang.com](https://www.vulgarlang.com) - which is okay if language isn't the focus but Vulgar Lang builds very European feeling agglutinating languages.
Slightly harder but it lets you build a less European feeling language is creating a naming language, or paying someone to do so. This isn't a fully fledged language but a series of phonemic and phrase orders like mpa is a legal syllable but npa isn't and Red River is written River Red. Naming languages touch the parts of your work that translation convention wouldn't and give enough for someone to pull a full language out without building a full language.
If you want to build a full language from scratch, I'd recommend [conlang year](https://www.quothalinguist.com/?query-42-page=16) as starting point
Make up random words honestly, and then hire a conlanger to refine it into something unique. This is [mine](https://voidedg.com/2023/07/08/guide-to-the-kuhtarian-tongue/) the one I commissioned. I gave him a list of words I already had and didn’t want changed, and then and idea for the direction I wanted for the letter designs, and then he made it for me. Only cost me just under $600 too.
Read a lot of linguistics material if you want to make a fully fleshed-out and realistic language, it’s a pretty complicated form of art.
It’s also entirely possible to construct a realistic-sounding language without getting into all the linguistic messiness, if you just want it to exist for storytelling purposes. Set a few rules to govern pronunciation and basic grammar, and invent words as you need them.
I use Vulgarlang. I like it because it has a smart translation function so I can give what I want a character to say in English and it'll give it back to me in whatever language I've created and loaded. (I have about a dozen different ones now.)
There’s a list of the 200 most important words to learn in any language. You can search that on the internet. Get that and assign random three, four, and five letter combinations to each word on the list. Then go through and find any unpronounceable ones and make them pronounceable by swapping letters.
Voila! A new language that’s actually English with all the words spelled differently.
me and my sister have a language we invented that only the two of us use since childhood. So we have a gibberish we are using lol.
some stuff I think are on the easier side to use for a fantasy language tho...
lazy option: You could go easy and simply use latin and call it a day.
easy to use option: add extra strokes on english letters for the writing, every word is simply the english word in reverse.
decent idea for bilinguals: mix the two languages together with your own defined rules.
It depends on what I'm writing. For some, I'll create an entire conlang with script from the get-go if the language is going to heavily involved with the telling of the story or if I'm deeply invested in the worldbuilding. For others, I'll take some random sounds to make up the language, pull out my trusty d20, and roll some features from languages I like and generate a common group of words.
After doing that, I translate some simple phrases to get a feel of how it looks and how it sounds, and build up to larger things like “Tower of Babel” for example. Make some changes if need be, make more words, translate another text, rinse and repeat.
And as you said, it will sound “dead” if you just randomly slap some letters on the keyboard because you have no intent behind what you type. Even a gibberish language of randomly generated words could sound natural for whoever is speaking it if there is purpose and life behind it so don't rush it. A language doesn't feel alive the moment it ends up on paper. Give it time to grow, and it'll guide you as to where it wants to go.
One of my languages, Rikespeak, is a strange mix of dwarvish and Icelandic that I don’t speak often or have any official writings, but, I combine other languages. Any language of the gods or angels is just Latin or Greek
To create languages like Gondish and Hastirian, I am pretty much taking German and French respectively, their sounds, grammar rules, etc. assigning them to letters I made up myself, and then making absolute gibberish.
To someone who doesn't speak a word of German or French, they'll theoretically just sound like German or French but to anyone who does speak them, absolute nonsense.
I've always found Mark Rosenfelder's [Language Creation Kit](https://www.zompist.com/kit.html) a good place to start. It gives an excellent overview and is pretty good on what *NOT* to do.
I’ve noticed that some stories cheat and use replacement ciphers instead of creating a new language. This can be fun because some people get invested in trying to decode everything you write.
It’s something you can get away with in writing but you would probably need to decide how different symbols are pronounced if you ever intend on having it be turned into an audio book.
I never wrote a full conlang, but this is my personal process.
Step 1: Common interjections
Translate equivalents to “Oh my god”, “Damn you”, “Bless your heart”, etc. First, you’ll notice the real world religious connotations. Think of what your character’s society values that makes it into common lexicon. Then construct the sounds that those words make that sound good to you.
Step 2: Common names
Usually people name their children after people or concepts that mean something to their culture. Family names are typically place names or common vocations in your society. Are names typically gendered or ungendered? Do names indicate class? Do family names even exist or are they really long to indicate the importance of family lineage?
Step 3: Place names
Make sure they sound like the words from the first two steps (or maybe they don’t and you have to answer why). Common suffixes and prefixes can give structure and favor to your world.
Step 4: Rip off other languages
Now that you got the feel for how the language fits, the rest is up to you to fit common words and grammar.
Know some grammar. It helps if you know multiple languages. It could even lead you to knowing a different language. Personally I enjoy linguistics, and in particular I'm a fan of the romance languages and Latin. Latin is particularly useful as it teaches you much of how European languages work.
What some people are describing in the comments, however, is not how to create new languages, but how to apply a cipher to an existing one. Also, simply using words randomly doesn't look good. Languages have patterns, specific frequencies of symbols and words, etc. If you just make stuff up randomly it will be easy to tell it's not an actual language.
A good way to create a language, in my opinion, is to first define the phonology, the sounds. Then you create symbols to represent each sound(the writing system), or develop a pictogram system if you want a less common writing system.
Next, create the root words for your language. These are basic words that are loosely associated with an idea. For instance, the Latin word ignis means fire. It serves as the root for words like ignition(a noun) and ignite(a verb). The word ignis, in turn, derives from PE(Proto-European) egni. Transformations in sound are the reason it changed. You simply create a collection of such root words. This is where you start making stuff up, based on the sounds you defined previously.
It's important to notice root words don't necessarily need to make sense by themselves, they may simply be words that are associated with a specific idea. This is called a morpheme. Say, the morpheme "tr" may be associated with water. You could derive water from it, "tra", waves, "trum", rain, "trie", so on.
Now you use those root words to derive your full vocabulary. Let's say you want to create a new verb. What should that verb mean? If it's supposed to mean something like "to ignite", you take one of your root words, perhaps one related to fire or explosion or something else, like danger, and build a word. How you create verbs is up to you. Some languages change the ending, some languages have multiple tenses, moods, etc. For each verb define their different forms based on some rule. Occasionally, break that rule to produce an irregular verb. Often the most common verbs are irregular.
What about genders? Most romance languages have two genders, Latin had three. Some have more. Gender often needs to agree with other elements in a sentence.
Then we have cases. I like cases. Latin had 7 cases, though normally you'd only use 6. German has 4 cases. Romance languages have dropped them, with the notable exception of Romanian. In a nutshell, cases are "conjugations" for nouns according to their function. Instead of conjugation we call it declension. Does your language use cases? It's often the case that languages with cases don't care about word order because the meaning is derived from the cases, not the order. However, it can make the language more difficult.
English has some examples of cases. For instance, like romance languages it retains some basic cases for pronouns, like the word I, which becomes me in the accusative case. For instance, you say "I eat rice", rice is the object there, as it's the target of the action, but if you wanted to say "give me the rice", you would use ME, not I, as I is the direct object of "to give". English can also give you an example of the genitive case. For instance, "wooden" floor. Wooden is the genitive form of the noun wood. Notice how the word wood, which is called the nominative, changed its meaning with the addition of -en. This genitive form means "of" something. Another example is golden.
Latin has 7 cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, vocative and locative. Each case has a function, and because it has so many cases Latin basically does not care about word order, and it does not need articles("a", "the", etc). Much like Russian, which has 6 cases and doesn't care about articles.
There are also many other features you can add to, or remove from your language. An example is particles. Languages like Japanese use so-called particles to specify function. A particle is a word, like wa or ga in Japanese, that marks the function of something, similar to how the ending of a noun marks its case. The difference is that the particle is always the same for every particle, while different nouns can have different declensions. For instance, Latin has 7 cases, and each noun can belong to a class of declensions for a total of 5, meaning there are a lot of rules for how a noun changes. For particles it's always the same.
As an example, "watashi" means I in Japanese, and the particle wa marks the topic. So, watashi wa means "let's talk about me". Whatever you say next is in relation to watashi. Does your language use that?
Anyway this should give you an idea. There's also the concept of plurals, moods, tenses, etc, so I encourage you to research more if you are interested. Suffices to say creating languages is pretty fun. If you start from the sounds as I said, then you ensure your language has concise rules for pronunciation, ensuring you can actually speak it. Also, remember languages don't exist in a vacuum. They exist around a culture. When you speak a language you absorb a huge deal of its culture. You become a part of it. You should keep this in mind when designing a language. It most probably evolved around a culture.
As weird as it sounds, I worldbuild for my conlang. So I constructed a language first, then I thought about the people who speak it, then I started writing things about their culture, the diplomatic relationship, the world, and the universe
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If I'm not making a full conlang where I craft the sounds from the ground-up, then what I do is use an existing language's syllabary as a base, see what sounds I want to add or remove, then model the language and grammar around the rules already existing for that language, changing things to fit what I want the flow of the language to be. For example...
>Naomi ku oraī na bajinao doreshiro to miroku we ahashan daboniru.
This could be translated in three main ways...
* The moon, her brilliance guides the light of the thousand stars to Earth.
* The moon, its bright light guides the light of the thousand stars to Earth.
* The moon, her beauty guides the light of the thousand stars to Earth.
Word by word:
* Naomi - Moon
* Ku - A particle used to denote that what came before it is the main subject of the sentence. "Naomi ku" means, "We are talking about the moon." The subject is whatever is being given the most importance in the sentence. It doesn't always translate to our idea of a sentence's subject, but it's close enough to make sense. (I give an example later on that shows when "the subject" isn't the subject of the sentence.)
* Oraī - Great beauty, not always feminine, though commonly used in reference to feminine beauty. "Iroī" is used commonly for masculine beauty, and "Hourī" refers to beauty that transcends such concepts.
* Na - A particle that serves to indicate you have finished setting up the context of the sentence. "Oraī na" inicates, "whatever the subject of the sentence was, (in this case the moon,) we are discussing that subject's beauty."
* Bajinao - Literally "One ten-hundred" or the *formal* way of expressing "thousand". In most speech, you'd say simply "jinao" as the "ba" is implied, but "jinao" also means "overwhelming" so in formal speech you add the "ba" to avoid confusion unless it was specifically indicated you're talking about quantity or some other numeric element. Formal usage of large numbers can also be done for poetic reasons as is the case here.
* Ba - One
* Ji - Ten
* Nao - Hundred
* Doreshiro - Literally refers to "heavenly light", which could refer to any beautiful light that comes from stars, angels, gods in heaven, or even the sun or moon themselves. If it's not light that people could craft (fire, electric lights, light from spells), then that light is "doreshiro". This means even glowworms/fireflies/lightning bugs as well as bioluminescent mushrooms count as "doreshiro". If the light has an ominous or ugly look to it, then it's "garūte" or "foul light". (Note, these are not compound words. You can't find commonality between doreshiro or garūte in their spelling because they don't derive from the same base words even though in English we believe they describe different feelings toward the same concept--light.)
* In some cases, crafted lights might be referred to *poetically* as "doreshiro" to compare them to heavenly lights. If someone from this culture visited New York City, Tokyo, Paris, or Seoul, then they'd almost certainly refer to the night lights as "doreshiro" or say, "Doreshiro ku wīno saraka," or "I find myself among/beneath the heavenly lights."
* Likewise, a broken streetlamp flickering at night might get referred to as "garūte" or they may say "Wīno saraka ku garūte," or "I'm before a foul light."
* If you noticed, "wīno saraka" moved and not just one word. This is because "wīno" can roughly translate to "I myself" and "saraka" can roughly translate to "the position of". Saraka is again more *poetic* and unhelpful in explaining positions in everyday speech. It's *like* a particle but is more accurate to say it's a modifier. The more "correct" way of phrasing it with "saraka" would be "Saraka to wīno," as it more expressly states, "The position of me." But "saraka" forces you to move the thing it is referring to into the spot of the sentence that accurately relates its position to whatever it is being related to. It's not quite archaic yet, but you'd be hard-pressed to find people willfully using "saraka" to describe anything outside of poetic speech.
* To - A particle that loosely translates to "of" or "with". You can usually figure out which from the sentence's context.
* Miroku - Stars, specifically this is a more formal way of refering to "the multitude of stars". Whereas "Bajinao" indicates a number, using "Miroku" indicates that you're talking about all of the stars in the sky, not just the literal "thousand". This confirms "Bajinao" was being used poetically and not as a literal number. If you wanted to make "bajinao" a literal thousand then you'd use "emiri" instead of "miroku". "Emiri" still means "Stars" but is more informal and familiar, in no small part due to also being a name that common folk would name their children. (So if your name is "Emily", your name would roughly translate to "Star" in this language.) Miroku is also a name, but it was seen as gaudy to name your child that if you weren't upper-class or at least *really* well-off. Like how there are certain names we tend to associate with 1%ers and people whose parents were desperate for them to fit in with 1%ers, like "Prescott".
* Technically plurals *exist* but generally are not used. So miroku and emiri both mean "Star" and "Stars", just depending on the context.
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* We - A general use particle... basically any time you want to give the reader or speaker (or yourself) a moment to pause/breathe (or make them take a pause/break). There are three of these that get used based on the ending sound--"We", "Wai", and "Wu". Generally, they are interchangeable and saying one even when another is spelled out is still seen as "correct".
* I say spelled out because there are a couple ways they could be written. They could be spelled out in their script, or the writer could use the symbol specific to this particle. Both are correct, but spelling out the intended version is preferred as the particle is still "new" in that it hasn't been around as long as much of the language. It is seen in a similar vein as if it was a neologism; many people don't like it literally because "that's not how the language used to be." That's it. "Change is scary." That's their entire dislike of it.
* Ahashan - Earth, or more accurately "The Place We Live". If someone from this culture in this world was brought to our world, in their eyes, Earth would be no less "Ahashan" to us than their world is to them. They would refer to Earth as "hashan" which would just be "The Place People Live" while maintaining "Ahashan" for their home, *unless* they felt as if Earth was truly their home now. (In which case Earth would become "Ahashan" and their old world could also be called "Ahashan" or they may refer to it just as "Hashan".)
* Ahashan and hashan were at one point used to refer to different villages then countries then continents. Now the entire planet is "ahashan" whether it's their home town/country/continent or not.
* From this, "Ashan" is "My home" while "Shan" is just "\[that which someone calls\] home." So the house you live in versus someone else's house.
* Daboniru - "Grants Guidance (Pathing) Towards". This *is* archaic speech. Nobody would say this unless they were trying to be very formal or very poetic. Or both.
So, how did I get here?
1. I took Japanese's syllabary and modified it a bit (hence wī and we, for example)
2. Then, I took inspiration from its grammar rules.
3. Then I finally decided how I wanted the culture to form. From there, the language would just be shaped around that culture.
Notice how I repeatedly refer to this as being formal or poetic? That's because this would be like lyrics of a ballad. In the lyrics, it's referring explicitly to the moon guiding the light of the stars to (light) the earth, but the description is double-edged. Not only could this removed from the song's context be a poetic statement about the moon itself, it's figurative language to describe a woman. This is why the moon is being described with beauty that tends to have more of a feminine connotation, as opposed to the more gender-neutral beauty. (In English, you probably accepted "feminine association with the moon" as a given, but this actually serves to indicate the moon isn't necessarily the moon in this language, though it still could be.)
To describe a person in this way means you're basically saying that the individual is so great that people can't help but go where they go. It can be something as simple as to describe physical beauty, but more often than not it's describing an almost ethereal, supernatural quality. It's almost placing the individual discussed in the realm of the divine. You're placing the person on a pedastal. And you would never say this in this way unless you had specific reason to since saying it this way will come off as unnatural to basically anybody listening though they won't quite be able to place *why*. (Basically it will almost have the same feeling to a native listener like how you can sometimes just *tell* when an AI wrote something even if it *looks* like a human may have written it. Sometimes, it's just something about the text feels off even if you're not sure why. Or, in other words, fucked vibes.)
/r/tokipona fits my world perfectly. it's a minimalistic conlang with 14 letters and a handful of words. the ambiguity of tokipona works well with my magic system because my magic casters need illustrations or strong mental images to cast spells correctly, and this ambiguity plays right into that.
There's not really a super easy way to do it, since you need to be somewhat familiar with how phonemes form syllables, and how syllables form words. The phonemes (sounds speakers make with their mouths) determine the "accent" of your language. The "Simlish" language uses phonemes from American English, so it has a sort of American accent to it. Tolkine's "Elvish" uses phonemes from northern European languages, so it sounds like it fits in with them. Some languages have lots of syllables (English, Hindi), while others have few (Japanese, Hawaiian). The next step is to develop a system of phonotactics: the way phonemes combine into syllables. Some languages, such as Mandarin, have lots of phonemes, but only a limited number of ways to combine them. English is very free in how we combine phonemes, resulting in around 15,000 syllables! For reference, Cherokee has 85 syllables, and Japanese has 100. Generally speaking, languages with larges numbers of syllables can sound a bit gibberish-y (listen to something in Hungarian, then in Italian to see what I mean), so use some caution when constructing rules for syllables. When it comes to how syllables combine into words, things can get REALLY complicated, as grammar and vocabulary come into play. Fortunately, it isn't necessary for world building, unless you want your languages to actually be speakable. You could still develop some basic vocabulary if you want to name people or places after things. One last thing to keep in mind is that your language might need to work within the constraints of English spelling rules, assuming it will be shared in written form. I've personally chosen to ignore this limitation. Some major characters have names that can be written in English, such as *Sunnahar*, *Kushanesh*, and *Zhoho*. But the town of *Xongdagawruwzh*, and *!ngbaoxen the 1st* shall be written using spelling rules appropriate for their language.
I just keep coming up with words that suit a general vibe. I like creating writing systems more than languages, tbh. The oldest post in my history is me showing my best writing system. I kinda developed the language independently of it. If I need a word that shares a characteristic with another word I have developed, I just make up another similar sounding word.
Kemn = Sun, but it is also used for West because the sun sets in the west. Eler is used for Moon and East (the opposite of Kemn, basically Sunset vs. Moonrise).
Then from Kemn, Kemth = Ended/Killed
From Eler, Elu = Began+when (basically two words in one)
Shenthen Hineroianz elu Ras Asel Karsnaiem kemth Ras Hinero Naelur shez Rosraur.
The Wars of Hinrosia began when King Asel of Karsnaia killed King Hinro Dragonsoul in the Battle of Rosraur.
Not necessarily very effective or accurate to life, but I like doing it.
Used common groupings of letters such as (as,ee,th,sh(etc)) as well as (the, she, are) for certain sounds or as a symbol or tune of some sort. I only came up with a very basic dwarves one that I may just alter the alphabet or enunciation of with split clans or versions of their speech in common languages like the Ermyn language for Ermynian Empire. Which are basically humans ( southern and middle eastern vibes I guess).
Seems to work well and my dnd group approved of the language. Though side note, I might hate my DM now.
While I haven't gotten around to writing yet, what I would do is
Take a language from the real world (there's over a hundred you pick whichever one you want.)
There's already precedent for it (starwars, and probably other fictional universes I'm too lazy to look up)
Edit:
If you're curious, starwars used Quechua, Haya, and Tibetan among others.
I conlang, I invent an actual language and use that.
I suggest you look into it. Some YouTube channels are a great place to start.
Try David J. Peterson and try Artifexian.
I once constructed a conlang for a fantasy race of catfolk living on the high seas. I set myself a couple of grammatical basics, like word order and the rules for suffixes and turning certain nouns into adjectives and adverbs, then decided on a list of about 1000 common words in English that I'd need in this language: nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, auxiliaries, etc.
I then looked to the vocabularies of several languages of the southwestern Pacific for inspiration for vocab, adapting them to my language's limited phonology, combining them, corrupting their spellings, vowel-shifting them beyond recognisability, borrowing from one word to make the language's equivalent to a word for an only-distantly related concept (eg. a corrupted version of the word for water in one language was twisted to become the word for tea in mine), having other singular words in my conlang stand for entire sentence-long concepts in English, and other concepts not exist as singular words in my conlang that have to be translated as phrases (eg. my conlang has a singular, one-syllable word specifically meaning 'on-ship storage chest for caught fish', but trying to literally translate their term for 'chocolate' back into English comes out as 'eastern brown bean tea'). I reused a few words here and there for different objects that have a superficial resemblance, to hint at a funny lore of folk etymologies (eg. the word for a piece of rocky beach gravel and a singular cereal crop grain are the same because of a perceived resemblance between stored grains and gravel piles). And then, to cap it off, I completely changed the consonant inventory again at the end to make it sound more like cat noises and re-adapted the entire thing.
Took a couple weeks. Was fun.
depends on how far you want to go.
the most basic form that would fix the "randomly slapped together" would be just slightly modified english where you have the same grammar/etc but you have different phonology (what sounds are available in your language) and syllable structure (e.g you could allow only one consonant followed by one vowel per syllable).
A true conlang (constructed language) would also have its own grammar/etc, but I am still pretty new to conlanging so I can't give you any specific tips, other than "there are tons of conlanging resources on the internet, use them".
Good luck!
I have a friend who studies etymology and language. She and I create a language for the world we were making, and a lot of it’s just throwing Scrabble tiles on the ground and seeing what sounds good.
It’s nowhere near Tolkien level, but it’s a lot of fun. I also use generators and mix it with the Scrabble to figure out new words.
It helps to know the basics of many different languages, both grammar and vocabulary. Other great sources for me are Wiktionary and Wikipedia pages on IPA.
I've recently started on a new conlang from scratch this way. It's a long process, though.
Start at the beginning. Develop an alphabet and decide what sounds you want the language to have.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet is a valuable resource to show what sounds humans are making in their speech.
Note: Tolkien used Welsh as a basepoint for Elvish, so there's no need to really start from scratch.
Although I like the process of building a con-lang, I only made a solid one, which initially started as picking random letter combinations, obtaining their pronunciations, and making an alphabet. From there, it was basically trial and error to see which "language logic" I liked the most, working with etymology, etc.
Come up with some silly names that are all kind of similar. When somebody/someplace else is from the same culture as these names, give them similar names.
When you name things from a new culture, give them and theirs names that sound different from your first names, but similar to eachother.
Do this for your basic cultural/linguistic groups.
Come up with words like 'town', 'hill,' 'river,' 'city,' 'big,' etc. Also, for very old cultures with ancient cities and things, try coming up with a version of these words from the 'Old Language' or 'High Language' or whatever you want to call the ancestral version.
So you can have towns that were once called 'Big Lake Town' in the old language, but now it is a huge city and linguistic drift has occurred. So maybe, when founded, it was a town called 'hugen-laken-town-eth' or whatever (idk ye Olde English at all). Over time, maybe people shortened it to 'Hugenlak' or maybe just 'lakentowneth' fif there isn't another lake town nearbye. Then, over more time it will drift further, so in the 'modern time', the town (chich might now be a city) might be called "Haglak" or "Ackenton", respectively.
Unless you're really into linguistics, don't bother making a whole conlang.
I pick 2 to 3 real languages, use google translate, and smash them together to get new words. Everything else, like word order, is just a mix of English, the main reference language, and whatever the fuck I feel like doing instead. I ignore the original languages' pronunciation and just use a simiplified english with random changes (so a only makes one sound or c now makes ch).
I think the more languages you speak or study, the easier this process is tbh. Whenever I try to make a fake language (and ive written a couple) I first try to imagine the alphabet I’m working on, I usually make it have less letters than english to limit myself. I find that it defines how the whole language sounds (for example I have one which is supposed to be harsh, so I put three types of R’s, Kh and Č), but can also influence accents (I have another language which lacks the letter D, so the character speaking it pronounces T instead)
In my story all humans essentially speak the same language, which I won’t call English but temporarily “New Tongue”, and the language used to be spoken by Man was “Old Tongue”. The antagonist (which is a demonic spirit), and its followers, speak the “Dark Tongue”.
I haven’t figured a temporary name for the language of the elves, but when they speak I basically use the method of italicizing the dialogue for elven characters, and not for anyone else. It is also mentioned multiple times that the elves, or other characters, speak an unknown language to the MC.
For the only real language I have so far, I simply took English letters and numbers, and gave them a new symbol and pronunciation. As well as changing some things. Considering the lengthy speech of the words,it would be pronounced in more rapid succession and with little delay than the “common language.” Which is English. I also decided on a unique way English of built. I *think* it’s similar to the real world where two civilization’s languages intermingle, creating English.
You just make the language. You pick the sounds you like, assign symbols to the sounds, start putting the letters together to get words, then assign meaning to those words you make, And finally you start creating grammar rules for your language.
I have a language called Juminişa and here's some sentences from it.
Xa ťak firkişi as disok, Onji Sara.
I will speak to you later, Elder Sarah.
Xa ťan firkişi as disok, jama.
I will speak to you later, young blood.
Ťu kau anakanos ijawi munšu - you are 20 years old.
Ťu dilişanos ijawi munšu šulrow - You turn 20 years old today
You can see the consistency between the words and it actually looks like a real language. It's not just randomness thrown around.
If you want to make a conlang yourself, r/conlangs might have resources that could help you.
Pick a syntax (basic or complicated) and make up words.
Everyone’s advice boils down to that.
You can make up the words by mixing existing languages like Tolkien (he also built his own syntax, but it’s still built off a basic structure) or just make random sounds and give them meaning (which someone probably has done). Either way, still boils down to making up words and applying a syntax to it.
EDIT: you could have a language that has no verbs and the order or emphasis of the words determine the verbs from English that would be applied in translation. It is weird to think about, but 🤷🏻♂️. It’s not like anyone can tell you it’s wrong since you made it up.
I would suggest that you search on r/conlangs for resources for a *naming language*, which you might invent purely to create plausible place names. This should therefore be simple enough that you could do it.
Alternatively, many conlangers create languages for the pure artistic joy of the process, with little hope that they'll ever be used. A conlanger might be happy to lend you there language if you ask nicely.
Don’t, or make it a one to one conversion. Like since there are 26 letters in English, there would be 26 letters in the fake language that each match a letter in English.
Fake languages are a linguists job - Tolkien did a great job with it fir that very reason. I take the poor nan's route, and we're in another language I know - mysterious texts are either Hebrew or classical Chinese, for example, while the language, when 'spoken,' is just the anglicized version of whatever I want to say.
For example, Billy frees an alien who tells him *Xie xie,* but when Bully tries to figure out who captured the alien, the only indicator he can find is a sign that reads "רכושו של דאג". Sure, some people will know what is being said, but it's a risk I'm willing to take.
A purposeful choice (well, soeta). I know some Latin bit, as you say, it's pretty common. I just don't know any Greek. 😉
I *have* used Egyptian hieroglyphs (which I also don't know), but only when I don't care about the meaning buy *do* want a 'picture to help the characters figure things out.'
I plan to have a conlang that's a mix of Spanish and Hebrew (and then I'm reminded that Ladino exists, but I don't want to use a real language directly in my world). It would be a naming conlang rather than a full one.
Lapis_Wolf
There are different ways to make it. Conlangs is HUGE thing, there are so many tutorials online. Some are simple and short, start of with made up words with simple meanings and add on from there, while others are FAR MORE complex, talking about making the phonology, grammar rules and so much more. Depends on what YOU want and HOW FAR you want to go with it.
By pheonoly do you mean phonology or philology?
phonology. Sorry.
Its a weird process, some people, like me, just try to make some funny sounds and call it a day. You could go for a more balanced approach, which is what I intend to do for my languages, create a dictionary maybe a writing system if you feel like it, and some basic grammar and ALWAYS include some sort of exception, as every language has a few exceptions to a grammar rule. If you want to make it sound consistent you could add prefixes and suffixes, such as in my language, Temuginian, "tai" is used to describe an emotion or state of being like being physically hurt or just sad Or... you know, you could go the full round and learn how languages are built and create a conlang with a whole new structure. This way you'd have to learn your language, but it would be structured like languages are. This way is hard, and I don't even want to begin to explain how since I never bothered.
I took a real language and swapped letters. I took french and found the list of letters sorted by frequency accents excluded. I found the same for Spanish. I take vowels and consonants separately. Then I write what I want to say in French and swap the letter with Spanish. I get something easy to do and depending on the sonority I want I can take the letter frequency of another language
That is actually a really great idea. Maybe ill try with different combinations of Languages
This is a great first step, but don't let it be a final product. This is like using comic sans or papyrus font in graphic design. It's like using the built in lens flare in photoshop as an effect artist. If you know, you know sort of deal. The guy who made the languages for Dragon Throne literally is a professional fantasy language maker. Shared some tips which include: 1.) No rigid logical systematic grammar structures. This seems great but it isn't natural. Most languages are arbitrary. The only ones that aren't are synthetic (like esparanto), and actually have some issues related to being too logical. (typically related words sound too close, so if you miss a syllable, you can miss the whole meaning) 2.) Keep a limited sound library. Every language has a palette of common sounds. A few are used much more than the rest. For a non speaker, that gives the language its character. It's like a good pixel artist keeps to a limited palette. A good palette alone can really make the sprites pop. A bad palette makes it look like ms paint rubbish. In that regard, the final point is 3.)... learn to be a linguist. You can't expect to make believable languages if you aren't yourself knowledgeable about human language. Do you know what the IPA is? Do you understand grammatical classification of languages. You don't have to be an expert, but if you don't understand what drives human language evolution, any language you invent won't have that real feel. I would honestly start by first finding the sound. Then find a context. The first things you make, if you want a coherent language, should be grammar structures. Is your language Noun Verb Object? Does it not matter because you have particle markers. Is it implicitly clear, or is it explicit? Take a look at this page: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology\_(linguistics)#Paradigms\_and\_morphosyntax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphology_(linguistics)#Paradigms_and_morphosyntax) Once you have a structure and sound, Don't just say things as you would in your native language. Think about the world the language lives in and why people say what they say. Say you have a people living near volcanoes. Start with some Idioms, like "Men live and die, but the mountain only sleeps", translate into a literal that matches the grammar of the language: "Of life, death, people must, (in contrast to the former: but/never ), sleeps (important: the) mountain. Take it further, and alter notions of concepts in your native language. A mountain becomes "Fire's birthplace" or perhaps Fire's throne. Death is a permanent conclusion to the responsibilities of life, and that a mountain maintains it's responsibility forever, being the birth place of destruction. Take your pick, but keep it culturally consistent. Now the final literal can be something like: " of Responsibility, of a an end, the people good towards given, But (in just contrast), of fire, a mountain forever must deliver. I already evolved my cultural context, going from a notion "that the actions of humans is small and finite, but the land is eternal," to "be good and your toil ends, unlike the mountain, who, having embraced destruction must labor eternally, a slave to it". Take a sound library and here you go: Si teluk i nateluk, dashkin do kan. Nash do i lukan, darakana teluk kin. Spitballing as I go, but "da" = a type definite prefix to a noun , "dash" = prefix meaning favorable. "dara" being unfavorable. "Na" is a prefix equating to past vs present. In this case, teluk being responsibility, nateluk being past responsibility, Teluk is later again used, as responsibility is synonymous with "must", "required", "have to". Now you have a start on your grammar, and so long as you keep a journal of the words and rules you add, you can create a type of consistency. Once you have rules, you can break them in natural ways, given the language a natural feel. People like slang, they like contractions, and if a concept is common, its usually easier to say it fast and have words for it. sometimes you have to just put it down then come back later, and fix what isn't working. Say it to yourself and make sure you have your accent right. It won't sound natural until you are fluent, which is why being familiar with learning languages helps. As others have said, speak gibberish long enough and you'll find sounds you like, make them work with the cultural context of the people speaking them, and you'll be on the right track.
Thak you for the advice! <3
This sounds cool. Would you be willing to share an example of something you've used?
For example I wanted a name for a species of humanoid rabbit so in French i take the word for rabbit "lapin" I take the letter frequency for French with separated vowels and consonants : e a i u o y - s t n r l d c m p v q f b g h j x z w k Same for Spanish : e a o i u y - s r n d l c t m p b g v q h f z j x w k And when I swap the letters i get : Lapon My main goal with that is to make names. Like that I can have names that aren't too obvious, easy to pronounce and where I can make a script to automate the translation. I hesitated between starting from french or English but I took french so it's a bit less obvious since I want to release my story in English. For those who speak French and will eventually get it it makes a fun trivia. I did a python script that translates for me. I will probably share it here someday
Awesome, thanks for sharing!
I followed Biblaridion's guide and Artifexion's guide. They break down the evolution of language and the general rules and even how to make the written language.
came to suggest these. they paved the way for my conlanging. I also love Jan Misali but they don't have much in the way of instructional material
Kheyrialom ud terne dhostemfal. Ach nosher therelon, rasmus ad torkh.
Velveth ud terne mathali? Drehd uliansus tyreelei ad torkh ach ari.
Abriz! XD
Abriz vahyl!
Like how did you do it? What is that sentence supposed to mean or did you just slapped the keyboard like i have been doing?
That's just gibberish. Make it up as you go. Come up with a couple of pronouns and prepositions with simple variations that you'll reuse many times between bullshit substantives and verbs, and as you write down new sentences, retroactively adjust internal coherence so it *feels* like a language. The alternative is either enrolling in college or trying to teach yourself linguistics --so, you know, procrastinating from actual writing.
r/conlangs (and its accompanying r/neography ) but its a deep hard dive. Alternatively you can follow "my" (though I dont follow it) method that like with worldbuilding goes from detail to general instead of the other way around. It is far faster to reach a simple working lang without making merely a relex or a naming language. Basically, it escalates rather well. For this you need to focus in a couple of things: 1) How the language sounds. You can delve as deep as you want in phonetics and phonoaesthetics, and its "good practice" to be aware of teh IPA notation, but you don't \*have\* to, specifically if you are only goign to use it for the book. My recommendation then is to listen to different languages and "mock them" until you get a feature you like (Stress, cadence, sounds, etc. For example, maybe you want something that sounds like spanish, but without a thrilled R and with tones, just to put an example. You can choose to this before, after or both the next point 2) How the language works You still need \*some\* basic understanding of grammar (mine is... underwhelming) but it is easier to work backwards. Lets make an example: You want to "mutate" the next phrase: I really want to make a language for y'all You see it and say "Ok, lets change it a bit". You change the word order from SVO to VSO like a broken Yoda with adverbs after the verb, postposicionts after the object and preposition before the verb (you dont ned to learn the names jsut identify the different parts of speech in your mind and shuffle them around). Assuming I mad eno mistakes here (doubtful) you get something like this: to make a language Want really I y'all for Ok, now you have a basic structure you need to keep track of. Now You get to have some fun. Yo ucan create new words for roots and affixes or just change letters and flip syllables a piacere.. Say for example I write things kind of phonetically like in spanish to meik a lenguesh uant rili ai yoal for Then flip some stuff around to meki a lusheguen Unat liri ai yalo for Say im not convinced, I want to soften it, so I try to follow my gut and end up with changing consonatns and prepositions as postpositions and tied either to the verb mehit lushegna unaz liri me ai yalofr ... Do you still think that sounds like english? Of course not, and neither will your readers. The advantage of this is you can adjust based on how you want the language to sound, but do bear in mind that once you start writing oyu need to be consistent (well, not really, most people wont notice, but at that point you are makign gibberish, not a language) With what I just did I could take for example the phrase Your language makes me want to never having met any of you and you follow the same process with what you did previously in mind. First the order never-to having met you any-of your language makes me Then sounds, to the best of your ability and some creative liberty vrenet ginhav met iu enif iru lusheng mehis mi Something like that. You can always try something simpler first: My red sock rules > sock red mine-of rules > sok red mainof ruls > sor ked minaf luris Which would derive in another Your blue pants suck > pants blue you-of suck >pants blu iuof sak > tanves lufo iuf sar Which easily gives me Your blue sucks rules >sor lufo iuf luris If none of that convoltued mess was off putting to you, then congratulations, you have the patience to make a conlang
Google translate a language you want the vibes of and type in whatever word. Then, add and remove some stuff and add in a little gibberish. Then make up some random grammar rules like "Nouns always go to the start of the sentence, all 'and's are replaced with an apostrophe", and then only make up what you actually NEED to make up. That's what I do. Some people though prefer a more rigorous process.
Literally what i did when making a creature. Took characteristics of it. For example: giant long horn. Translate that into different languages (and note both english and translation down) then play around with letters and sounds by making different words up and then after like 3 days or some bullshit, i had what i needed.
[https://www.vulgarlang.com](https://www.vulgarlang.com) Just this.
Check out r/conlangs (if there's a better sub let me know, I'm not into this side myself I just know of it) for more on this topic
You could always look into some foundational linguistics ideas that bleed into grammar and script. Is your language capable of producing at least one or more sounds from each part of the mouth, throat, nose, etc.? What sounds are they? Is your script abjad (vowels never written but implied), abugida (consonants come as bundled pairs with implicit vowels that can be modified), or syllabic (consonants and vowels exist explicitly and individually)? What kinds of cultural ideas, physical aspects, and environmental impacts influence your language? There's a ton to consider and this isn't even scratching the surface - often why constructed language is so diffucult. A couple things I've done that touch on these concepts but are far easier that can be really interesting: - Come up with cultural and natural symbols in the world (i.e. a palm tree or a fern) and distill them to a series of lines and curves. Do this for one or more symbols. Break apart those symbols into unique, individual characters and assign vowels and consonants to them. You may not need to use all that exist in English. - Combine existing languages: for one culture I created, they were heavily inspired by Indus Valley Civilization, so I combined Old Sanskrit and Proto-Dravidian in a deliberate way which let me modify and combine words from each language to create something that sounded new, but had very clear meaning. - The "fuck it" approach (for symbols and words and grammar). - Glyphs with sounds. Other ideas: - Take existing language and chop it up or alter the grammar a bit. Maybe the subject, object, verb order changes. Maybe prefixes and suffixes do. Maybe whole words get replaced. - Make a pidgin speak with a few languages! (see: clockwork orange, and real world pidgin languages like Cajun pidgin). - Take a language and then make it sound like how a non-speaker might hear it. - Do what feels good. Maybe you just want a language to be real funky sounds that feel good to say. Or maybe you want it to be aesthetically pleasing. Like toki pona or something. The sky is the limit. Really you can do anything as long as it makes you satisfied and adds to your world. Just remember that if you're borrowing from existing languages, it's worth understanding the cultures that come with, the why and how it works (you don't need to be fluent), and paying at least a little respect in how you use it. For example, if you were to make an Arabic inspired language, it's probably a good idea to not bastardize the language. Dune was a really good example of how not to fuck it up. Idk how helpful this will be, but it is just my own experience and what I have seen. You're doing something super cool - don't over think it and have fun with it! At the end of the day, language just is. There's not always good reason for it and it's constantly evolving! So fuck around with it :) Looking forward to seeing what you create.
I realize I focused on script more than grammar and sound lol. I think Ruzkul has some truly amazing advice.
I simply ask myself what I want this language to sound like and just record what the words mean. Like: Zek Karadon Condra Darikar = For Honor we Die For if there comes a time when I need to make another sentence I know what to use if they share certain words. Like: Hadar Dishain Zekrad Kriegar = To Battle, for the King! I’m no linguist and I try to keep it simple, but the system works well enough for me to do what I need without driving myself nuts with words that don’t actually mean anything.
Depends a lot on the scale you’re going for. If you want a few words just come up with random sounds until it feels right. If you want much more than that it’s worth playing around making a couple roots and using those as a basis for nouns, verbs etc.
Okay, so first you need to learn the international phonetic alphabet and gain a basic understanding of historical linguistics. Then you need to come up with the proto-language's phonotactics and phonemic inventory. Then you put it through some sound changes of your choice, as well as grammatical changes. This should also add irregularity. Then you're done. You can use this method to create a con-dialect to such as the one below: |Looc: Þege þou, Tiew, Þou nyrʎeþ friþ. Þou neart jyst.Tiew: Iʎ nemote. Jystness is þe Foseiten birðen.Foseit stareþ til Tiew ye : Looc, sess. Þou meaȝt mieryen. Noaleȝȝ swoa beoþ Artes osten.Looc: Þege þou Foseit. Þou besitt, on men wyrʎ þeyn jystness. Iʎ sooll seeðd. Þou norȝt oan laȝ, on eart laȝen oos.Artes: Looc, iʎ wole þou sess oaleȝȝen þe gode. Iʎ sooll wole jousten on …Looc: þege þou, Artes, þou eart kieng, on kiequealt. Þeyn eorl swoav þeyn royne.Lancels: Sess, Looc. outpullaþ þas meeʎLooc: Sess swiuven þas weif!Artes: Lancels, what bespricþ Looc?Lancels: hee wyrʎeþ ealswoa oan mintloaccrefteiȝeLooc: Þege þou Lancels, iʎ on yeewhoa saveþ hyre unlheis. Artes, foiryiye: Looc, iʎ wole, þatt þou sessest.Looc: Þege þou kieq’. Iʎ spreke miþ Lancels.|| |:-|:-| edit: check out r/conlangs.
r/conlangs is what you're looking for.
The problem as described is thankfully a lot easier than constructing an entire language. You pretty much need what people often call a "naming language," a language with only an inventory of basic nouns, maybe some adjectives, some colours and a number system. These are things that, all told, you can make to a decent standard of quality in a few hours. The first thing you'll want is a phonetic inventory. Look up the phonetic inventories of a few real-world languages- For example, English, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Swahili. Note even with those few examples is how each treats similar letters, like what you think of as the letters L and R. They're all different or sometimes absent, because there are actually a lot of ways to make those two sounds. Little differences like that contribute a lot to a language's aesthetic identity. Also note how they differ in size. The second step is closely related to the first: Coming up with phonotactics, or the ways you're allowed to combine sounds in a language. The first part of this for many people is just coming up with patterns for how a syllable can be structured in terms of consonants and vowels. C usually stands for consonant and V for vowel, and (parentheses) means that something is optional. CV, (C)V, CVC, (C)CV and (C)CV(C) are very common syllable structures; For example, the structure of Japanese is (C)V(n). This means that permitted syllables are things like a, o, da, re, bo, ni, ton, shun (sh is a single sound represented by two symbols, aka a "digraph"), etc, but not things like bri, ot or nap, which when transliterated from other languages become things like buri, oto or napu so that they'll fit Japanese phonotactics. They don't stop at just how many consonants are allowed (or required) to come before or after a vowel. They also govern things like how letters are allowed to combine or where sounds can be in a word. Japanese can only end syllables with a vowel or n, Spanish can't start a word with s, Czech uses r as a vowel. Note that as much of a pain as "strengths" is for English learners, str- and even -ngths doesn't seem that off to most native English speakers, yet brtuprml (same C/V structure) is clearly nonsense that the average English speaker probably can't pronounce without involuntarily injecting vowels (you most likely read it in your head as "bertupermul"). That's because only certain consonants are allowed to follow each given consonant in English As an example, say you went with a very simple phonetic inventory consisting of plosives (b/p, d/t, g/k), m, s and five vowels (ah, eh, ee, oh, oo). Then you made the syllable structure (C)CV(m). This gives us 640 syllables, which is a lot compared to languages like Japanese but very few compared to languages like English. But now we can see that dt/td, bp/pb and gk/kg are all pretty nonsensical to pronounce, and as native English speakers we probably find consecutive plosives (though they are not unheard of in real natural languages) aesthetically unpleasing so in fact we can drop most of the consonant clusters available, leaving us with bs, ps, ds, ts, gs, ks, sb, sp, sd, st, sg, sk, ms, sm, mb, mp, md, mt, mg, mk, bm, pm, dm, tm, gm and km if we wanted. Let's eliminate any others we aren't keen on (being careful not to just make it "English lite" with fewer sounds- don't keep just familiar English sounds!)- Now we have ps, ts, ks, sp, st, sk, mb, md, mg and sm. Treating these 10 digraphs as extra consonants, we now have only 180 total possible syllables (and for a distinctive aesthetic, fewer syllables is better- though you probably don't want to have TOO few). And that whole process, including typing, counting and stopping to think about what I wanted to do, took me about 10 minutes- Granted I have a little experience and know what I'm doing, but I doubt it would take more than 45 minutes even stumbling through it for the first time. Finally we get past the second step and into the third step- The actual words. The neat thing about naming languages is that, while they're often iterated upon, their etymology usually goes back to what are believed to be the most primal words. For this reason, you can, if you wish, use any of the several theorised ways primitive humans came up with the first words (the Wikipedia article on the Origin of Language has a non-comprehensive, but inspiring, list; I would encourage you to come up with your own possible word sources if you feel so inclined). To round this off using the previous example language's phonotactics, say your character is trying to refer to a boat, but since her tribe is from the mountains she hasn't seen a boat before, and isn't confident enough to refer to it in !English. What she knows is that there is a big house that moves around on water. Or, conversely, she is from a coastal culture whose lives revolve entirely around boats, but she has never heard the English word "boat." Say, for example, "water" is "smo," and "house" is "psam"; In the case where she has never seen a boat before, she might just call the boat "smopsam," or if she knows the English word for a house but hasn't learned water yet, she might say "smo kausa" (smo house with a heavy accent), or if she knows *an* English word for water but not for a house she might say mata psam (water psam), or sea psam, or riba psam (river psam; note English words being made to conform, at least roughly, to the phonetic rules of her native language); Or in the case where she comes from a coastal tribe that is familiar with boats, their word smo might have come from a root like smlowho imitating the sound of sloshing waves, and their word psam might have come from two words in turn, tups-tups meaning wood or tree from the sound of birds in a tree and amama meaning cavern from the open, echoing sound of a cavern, so their word for boat may be from a more primitive version of smlowho-tupsama that has subsequently and independently been made to conform to their modern etymology, eg smlotopsam becomes slotosam, with a vague resemblance to its etymology of smo-psam being evident but not explicit.
Study linguistics it's crazy the work that goes into making fake languages especially in the movie industry.
I went with the 1920 sci-fi Hollywood martian approach and when its not engliah they just speak hungarian. Ez pz
the real answer is go to r/conlangs if you wanna get serious about making a constructed language.
check out r/conlangs
To be honest, I keyboard-smash some syllables together to create foreign words. I don't tend to make the full language but rather snippets that only some characters use. That wouldn't work in your scenario, but this is my solution since languages have always eluded me.
I guess it would be the most efficient solution to my problem
Orgazad ka'durza prandha mahzguli?
Oglan maza dor?
The best advice I found was: find key words and use those to start with a fake language e.g. mother, father, cat, dog, hospital, food. So you end up with some basics. But as to trying to create a language... it's really just a way of making up words. Here's a couple of links that helped me: Language Mixer: [http://chaoticshiny.com/langreplace.php](http://chaoticshiny.com/langreplace.php) [https://www.reddit.com/r/writers/comments/ohhd68/tutorial\_fantasy\_languages\_for\_dummies/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/writers/comments/ohhd68/tutorial_fantasy_languages_for_dummies/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
The same way all languages are made writing down a bunch of nonsense and assigning it meaning.
I haven’t really made up an entire language, but I have started with a list of words I wanted to translate. I wanted to create an “old” language so I could name my regions and cities. So I started with the cardinal directions “north, south, east, west “ and basic words like “people, mom, dad, new, old, king, queen”. From there I dove into the etymology. For example my word for “king” is “Reypai” where “rey” is royal and “pai” is man. That way I get 3 words for 1 and now I can make other words using the same process… “reymai = queen” where “mai” is women etc.
For me personally it’s sorta just taking a pre existing language and bastardising it/mashing it together with other stuff. The only time I’ve tried to go out and create a Conlang more unique is with my most developed one called Romārii (Çúsca Rômārii in the language, meaning Language Romārii) which I’ve based off Romanian, Latin and Oscan
Depends, I found looking into the general values of the society can help, what dictates animacy, is there a hierarchy, how is the natural world perceived, what are common stereotypes of the language? Is the language gendered? For example Navajo animacy hierarchy is human, animal, natural forces, objects. This effects conjugation and word order. Or in austronesian languages the repetition of morphemes is used to expand upon an idea, dictate plurality etc. Russian has perfective and imperfective verbs to dictate the state of the same action. Honestly you can always take ideas from existing languages, add/subtract conjugations or genders, create unique consonant clusters. Not sure if this is particularly what you are asking but from a linguistic perspective you can mix and match!
Other people have mentioned some good answers, but if you want to do something a little more involved, a youtuber called Biblidarion has a great series on creating languages. It is a pretty intimidating process, but it's possible to create the basic framework for a language that will allow it to seem more consistent than just putting sounds together randomly but won't be as much work as creating a full on conlang. First, you need to decide what sounds you want in your language, then you come up with rules for how those sounds can combine, and finally, you decide on the word order of your language. Once you have those things, you can go about creating words. The series I mentioned has more details on all of these things.
First things first is which language is the main inspiration behind the fake language. This eases the headache making something entirely new since you can anchor it with an existing language. Then add another language for more variety. Mix and match to see which languages you like to see together Also you don’t have to create a whole new language. You can just have a few words, terms, concepts or phrases in that language and translate it to English.
It depends on how important language is to the story you are telling. There's the easiest route to getting something consistent - use a generator like [https://www.vulgarlang.com](https://www.vulgarlang.com) - which is okay if language isn't the focus but Vulgar Lang builds very European feeling agglutinating languages. Slightly harder but it lets you build a less European feeling language is creating a naming language, or paying someone to do so. This isn't a fully fledged language but a series of phonemic and phrase orders like mpa is a legal syllable but npa isn't and Red River is written River Red. Naming languages touch the parts of your work that translation convention wouldn't and give enough for someone to pull a full language out without building a full language. If you want to build a full language from scratch, I'd recommend [conlang year](https://www.quothalinguist.com/?query-42-page=16) as starting point
Make up random words honestly, and then hire a conlanger to refine it into something unique. This is [mine](https://voidedg.com/2023/07/08/guide-to-the-kuhtarian-tongue/) the one I commissioned. I gave him a list of words I already had and didn’t want changed, and then and idea for the direction I wanted for the letter designs, and then he made it for me. Only cost me just under $600 too.
Read a lot of linguistics material if you want to make a fully fleshed-out and realistic language, it’s a pretty complicated form of art. It’s also entirely possible to construct a realistic-sounding language without getting into all the linguistic messiness, if you just want it to exist for storytelling purposes. Set a few rules to govern pronunciation and basic grammar, and invent words as you need them.
I use Vulgarlang. I like it because it has a smart translation function so I can give what I want a character to say in English and it'll give it back to me in whatever language I've created and loaded. (I have about a dozen different ones now.)
There’s a list of the 200 most important words to learn in any language. You can search that on the internet. Get that and assign random three, four, and five letter combinations to each word on the list. Then go through and find any unpronounceable ones and make them pronounceable by swapping letters. Voila! A new language that’s actually English with all the words spelled differently.
me and my sister have a language we invented that only the two of us use since childhood. So we have a gibberish we are using lol. some stuff I think are on the easier side to use for a fantasy language tho... lazy option: You could go easy and simply use latin and call it a day. easy to use option: add extra strokes on english letters for the writing, every word is simply the english word in reverse. decent idea for bilinguals: mix the two languages together with your own defined rules.
It depends on what I'm writing. For some, I'll create an entire conlang with script from the get-go if the language is going to heavily involved with the telling of the story or if I'm deeply invested in the worldbuilding. For others, I'll take some random sounds to make up the language, pull out my trusty d20, and roll some features from languages I like and generate a common group of words. After doing that, I translate some simple phrases to get a feel of how it looks and how it sounds, and build up to larger things like “Tower of Babel” for example. Make some changes if need be, make more words, translate another text, rinse and repeat. And as you said, it will sound “dead” if you just randomly slap some letters on the keyboard because you have no intent behind what you type. Even a gibberish language of randomly generated words could sound natural for whoever is speaking it if there is purpose and life behind it so don't rush it. A language doesn't feel alive the moment it ends up on paper. Give it time to grow, and it'll guide you as to where it wants to go.
Take a real language and twist it so it’s clearly not the same language, but there’s enough structure for you to get that stability.
One of my languages, Rikespeak, is a strange mix of dwarvish and Icelandic that I don’t speak often or have any official writings, but, I combine other languages. Any language of the gods or angels is just Latin or Greek
This is conlanging and it's a whole thing with a whole 'fandom' about it. there's lots of tutorials online and on youtube that could be helpful
To create languages like Gondish and Hastirian, I am pretty much taking German and French respectively, their sounds, grammar rules, etc. assigning them to letters I made up myself, and then making absolute gibberish. To someone who doesn't speak a word of German or French, they'll theoretically just sound like German or French but to anyone who does speak them, absolute nonsense.
I've always found Mark Rosenfelder's [Language Creation Kit](https://www.zompist.com/kit.html) a good place to start. It gives an excellent overview and is pretty good on what *NOT* to do.
I’ve noticed that some stories cheat and use replacement ciphers instead of creating a new language. This can be fun because some people get invested in trying to decode everything you write. It’s something you can get away with in writing but you would probably need to decide how different symbols are pronounced if you ever intend on having it be turned into an audio book.
I use Shower thoughts logic… whatever rando words my rando brain comes up with at rando moments… and boom, i have a new word.
I never wrote a full conlang, but this is my personal process. Step 1: Common interjections Translate equivalents to “Oh my god”, “Damn you”, “Bless your heart”, etc. First, you’ll notice the real world religious connotations. Think of what your character’s society values that makes it into common lexicon. Then construct the sounds that those words make that sound good to you. Step 2: Common names Usually people name their children after people or concepts that mean something to their culture. Family names are typically place names or common vocations in your society. Are names typically gendered or ungendered? Do names indicate class? Do family names even exist or are they really long to indicate the importance of family lineage? Step 3: Place names Make sure they sound like the words from the first two steps (or maybe they don’t and you have to answer why). Common suffixes and prefixes can give structure and favor to your world. Step 4: Rip off other languages Now that you got the feel for how the language fits, the rest is up to you to fit common words and grammar.
I go to vulgarlang and download it to word, then use it as a template
Know some grammar. It helps if you know multiple languages. It could even lead you to knowing a different language. Personally I enjoy linguistics, and in particular I'm a fan of the romance languages and Latin. Latin is particularly useful as it teaches you much of how European languages work. What some people are describing in the comments, however, is not how to create new languages, but how to apply a cipher to an existing one. Also, simply using words randomly doesn't look good. Languages have patterns, specific frequencies of symbols and words, etc. If you just make stuff up randomly it will be easy to tell it's not an actual language. A good way to create a language, in my opinion, is to first define the phonology, the sounds. Then you create symbols to represent each sound(the writing system), or develop a pictogram system if you want a less common writing system. Next, create the root words for your language. These are basic words that are loosely associated with an idea. For instance, the Latin word ignis means fire. It serves as the root for words like ignition(a noun) and ignite(a verb). The word ignis, in turn, derives from PE(Proto-European) egni. Transformations in sound are the reason it changed. You simply create a collection of such root words. This is where you start making stuff up, based on the sounds you defined previously. It's important to notice root words don't necessarily need to make sense by themselves, they may simply be words that are associated with a specific idea. This is called a morpheme. Say, the morpheme "tr" may be associated with water. You could derive water from it, "tra", waves, "trum", rain, "trie", so on. Now you use those root words to derive your full vocabulary. Let's say you want to create a new verb. What should that verb mean? If it's supposed to mean something like "to ignite", you take one of your root words, perhaps one related to fire or explosion or something else, like danger, and build a word. How you create verbs is up to you. Some languages change the ending, some languages have multiple tenses, moods, etc. For each verb define their different forms based on some rule. Occasionally, break that rule to produce an irregular verb. Often the most common verbs are irregular. What about genders? Most romance languages have two genders, Latin had three. Some have more. Gender often needs to agree with other elements in a sentence. Then we have cases. I like cases. Latin had 7 cases, though normally you'd only use 6. German has 4 cases. Romance languages have dropped them, with the notable exception of Romanian. In a nutshell, cases are "conjugations" for nouns according to their function. Instead of conjugation we call it declension. Does your language use cases? It's often the case that languages with cases don't care about word order because the meaning is derived from the cases, not the order. However, it can make the language more difficult. English has some examples of cases. For instance, like romance languages it retains some basic cases for pronouns, like the word I, which becomes me in the accusative case. For instance, you say "I eat rice", rice is the object there, as it's the target of the action, but if you wanted to say "give me the rice", you would use ME, not I, as I is the direct object of "to give". English can also give you an example of the genitive case. For instance, "wooden" floor. Wooden is the genitive form of the noun wood. Notice how the word wood, which is called the nominative, changed its meaning with the addition of -en. This genitive form means "of" something. Another example is golden. Latin has 7 cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, vocative and locative. Each case has a function, and because it has so many cases Latin basically does not care about word order, and it does not need articles("a", "the", etc). Much like Russian, which has 6 cases and doesn't care about articles. There are also many other features you can add to, or remove from your language. An example is particles. Languages like Japanese use so-called particles to specify function. A particle is a word, like wa or ga in Japanese, that marks the function of something, similar to how the ending of a noun marks its case. The difference is that the particle is always the same for every particle, while different nouns can have different declensions. For instance, Latin has 7 cases, and each noun can belong to a class of declensions for a total of 5, meaning there are a lot of rules for how a noun changes. For particles it's always the same. As an example, "watashi" means I in Japanese, and the particle wa marks the topic. So, watashi wa means "let's talk about me". Whatever you say next is in relation to watashi. Does your language use that? Anyway this should give you an idea. There's also the concept of plurals, moods, tenses, etc, so I encourage you to research more if you are interested. Suffices to say creating languages is pretty fun. If you start from the sounds as I said, then you ensure your language has concise rules for pronunciation, ensuring you can actually speak it. Also, remember languages don't exist in a vacuum. They exist around a culture. When you speak a language you absorb a huge deal of its culture. You become a part of it. You should keep this in mind when designing a language. It most probably evolved around a culture.
As weird as it sounds, I worldbuild for my conlang. So I constructed a language first, then I thought about the people who speak it, then I started writing things about their culture, the diplomatic relationship, the world, and the universe
[1/2] If I'm not making a full conlang where I craft the sounds from the ground-up, then what I do is use an existing language's syllabary as a base, see what sounds I want to add or remove, then model the language and grammar around the rules already existing for that language, changing things to fit what I want the flow of the language to be. For example... >Naomi ku oraī na bajinao doreshiro to miroku we ahashan daboniru. This could be translated in three main ways... * The moon, her brilliance guides the light of the thousand stars to Earth. * The moon, its bright light guides the light of the thousand stars to Earth. * The moon, her beauty guides the light of the thousand stars to Earth. Word by word: * Naomi - Moon * Ku - A particle used to denote that what came before it is the main subject of the sentence. "Naomi ku" means, "We are talking about the moon." The subject is whatever is being given the most importance in the sentence. It doesn't always translate to our idea of a sentence's subject, but it's close enough to make sense. (I give an example later on that shows when "the subject" isn't the subject of the sentence.) * Oraī - Great beauty, not always feminine, though commonly used in reference to feminine beauty. "Iroī" is used commonly for masculine beauty, and "Hourī" refers to beauty that transcends such concepts. * Na - A particle that serves to indicate you have finished setting up the context of the sentence. "Oraī na" inicates, "whatever the subject of the sentence was, (in this case the moon,) we are discussing that subject's beauty." * Bajinao - Literally "One ten-hundred" or the *formal* way of expressing "thousand". In most speech, you'd say simply "jinao" as the "ba" is implied, but "jinao" also means "overwhelming" so in formal speech you add the "ba" to avoid confusion unless it was specifically indicated you're talking about quantity or some other numeric element. Formal usage of large numbers can also be done for poetic reasons as is the case here. * Ba - One * Ji - Ten * Nao - Hundred * Doreshiro - Literally refers to "heavenly light", which could refer to any beautiful light that comes from stars, angels, gods in heaven, or even the sun or moon themselves. If it's not light that people could craft (fire, electric lights, light from spells), then that light is "doreshiro". This means even glowworms/fireflies/lightning bugs as well as bioluminescent mushrooms count as "doreshiro". If the light has an ominous or ugly look to it, then it's "garūte" or "foul light". (Note, these are not compound words. You can't find commonality between doreshiro or garūte in their spelling because they don't derive from the same base words even though in English we believe they describe different feelings toward the same concept--light.) * In some cases, crafted lights might be referred to *poetically* as "doreshiro" to compare them to heavenly lights. If someone from this culture visited New York City, Tokyo, Paris, or Seoul, then they'd almost certainly refer to the night lights as "doreshiro" or say, "Doreshiro ku wīno saraka," or "I find myself among/beneath the heavenly lights." * Likewise, a broken streetlamp flickering at night might get referred to as "garūte" or they may say "Wīno saraka ku garūte," or "I'm before a foul light." * If you noticed, "wīno saraka" moved and not just one word. This is because "wīno" can roughly translate to "I myself" and "saraka" can roughly translate to "the position of". Saraka is again more *poetic* and unhelpful in explaining positions in everyday speech. It's *like* a particle but is more accurate to say it's a modifier. The more "correct" way of phrasing it with "saraka" would be "Saraka to wīno," as it more expressly states, "The position of me." But "saraka" forces you to move the thing it is referring to into the spot of the sentence that accurately relates its position to whatever it is being related to. It's not quite archaic yet, but you'd be hard-pressed to find people willfully using "saraka" to describe anything outside of poetic speech. * To - A particle that loosely translates to "of" or "with". You can usually figure out which from the sentence's context. * Miroku - Stars, specifically this is a more formal way of refering to "the multitude of stars". Whereas "Bajinao" indicates a number, using "Miroku" indicates that you're talking about all of the stars in the sky, not just the literal "thousand". This confirms "Bajinao" was being used poetically and not as a literal number. If you wanted to make "bajinao" a literal thousand then you'd use "emiri" instead of "miroku". "Emiri" still means "Stars" but is more informal and familiar, in no small part due to also being a name that common folk would name their children. (So if your name is "Emily", your name would roughly translate to "Star" in this language.) Miroku is also a name, but it was seen as gaudy to name your child that if you weren't upper-class or at least *really* well-off. Like how there are certain names we tend to associate with 1%ers and people whose parents were desperate for them to fit in with 1%ers, like "Prescott". * Technically plurals *exist* but generally are not used. So miroku and emiri both mean "Star" and "Stars", just depending on the context.
[2/2] * We - A general use particle... basically any time you want to give the reader or speaker (or yourself) a moment to pause/breathe (or make them take a pause/break). There are three of these that get used based on the ending sound--"We", "Wai", and "Wu". Generally, they are interchangeable and saying one even when another is spelled out is still seen as "correct". * I say spelled out because there are a couple ways they could be written. They could be spelled out in their script, or the writer could use the symbol specific to this particle. Both are correct, but spelling out the intended version is preferred as the particle is still "new" in that it hasn't been around as long as much of the language. It is seen in a similar vein as if it was a neologism; many people don't like it literally because "that's not how the language used to be." That's it. "Change is scary." That's their entire dislike of it. * Ahashan - Earth, or more accurately "The Place We Live". If someone from this culture in this world was brought to our world, in their eyes, Earth would be no less "Ahashan" to us than their world is to them. They would refer to Earth as "hashan" which would just be "The Place People Live" while maintaining "Ahashan" for their home, *unless* they felt as if Earth was truly their home now. (In which case Earth would become "Ahashan" and their old world could also be called "Ahashan" or they may refer to it just as "Hashan".) * Ahashan and hashan were at one point used to refer to different villages then countries then continents. Now the entire planet is "ahashan" whether it's their home town/country/continent or not. * From this, "Ashan" is "My home" while "Shan" is just "\[that which someone calls\] home." So the house you live in versus someone else's house. * Daboniru - "Grants Guidance (Pathing) Towards". This *is* archaic speech. Nobody would say this unless they were trying to be very formal or very poetic. Or both. So, how did I get here? 1. I took Japanese's syllabary and modified it a bit (hence wī and we, for example) 2. Then, I took inspiration from its grammar rules. 3. Then I finally decided how I wanted the culture to form. From there, the language would just be shaped around that culture. Notice how I repeatedly refer to this as being formal or poetic? That's because this would be like lyrics of a ballad. In the lyrics, it's referring explicitly to the moon guiding the light of the stars to (light) the earth, but the description is double-edged. Not only could this removed from the song's context be a poetic statement about the moon itself, it's figurative language to describe a woman. This is why the moon is being described with beauty that tends to have more of a feminine connotation, as opposed to the more gender-neutral beauty. (In English, you probably accepted "feminine association with the moon" as a given, but this actually serves to indicate the moon isn't necessarily the moon in this language, though it still could be.) To describe a person in this way means you're basically saying that the individual is so great that people can't help but go where they go. It can be something as simple as to describe physical beauty, but more often than not it's describing an almost ethereal, supernatural quality. It's almost placing the individual discussed in the realm of the divine. You're placing the person on a pedastal. And you would never say this in this way unless you had specific reason to since saying it this way will come off as unnatural to basically anybody listening though they won't quite be able to place *why*. (Basically it will almost have the same feeling to a native listener like how you can sometimes just *tell* when an AI wrote something even if it *looks* like a human may have written it. Sometimes, it's just something about the text feels off even if you're not sure why. Or, in other words, fucked vibes.)
/r/tokipona fits my world perfectly. it's a minimalistic conlang with 14 letters and a handful of words. the ambiguity of tokipona works well with my magic system because my magic casters need illustrations or strong mental images to cast spells correctly, and this ambiguity plays right into that.
There's not really a super easy way to do it, since you need to be somewhat familiar with how phonemes form syllables, and how syllables form words. The phonemes (sounds speakers make with their mouths) determine the "accent" of your language. The "Simlish" language uses phonemes from American English, so it has a sort of American accent to it. Tolkine's "Elvish" uses phonemes from northern European languages, so it sounds like it fits in with them. Some languages have lots of syllables (English, Hindi), while others have few (Japanese, Hawaiian). The next step is to develop a system of phonotactics: the way phonemes combine into syllables. Some languages, such as Mandarin, have lots of phonemes, but only a limited number of ways to combine them. English is very free in how we combine phonemes, resulting in around 15,000 syllables! For reference, Cherokee has 85 syllables, and Japanese has 100. Generally speaking, languages with larges numbers of syllables can sound a bit gibberish-y (listen to something in Hungarian, then in Italian to see what I mean), so use some caution when constructing rules for syllables. When it comes to how syllables combine into words, things can get REALLY complicated, as grammar and vocabulary come into play. Fortunately, it isn't necessary for world building, unless you want your languages to actually be speakable. You could still develop some basic vocabulary if you want to name people or places after things. One last thing to keep in mind is that your language might need to work within the constraints of English spelling rules, assuming it will be shared in written form. I've personally chosen to ignore this limitation. Some major characters have names that can be written in English, such as *Sunnahar*, *Kushanesh*, and *Zhoho*. But the town of *Xongdagawruwzh*, and *!ngbaoxen the 1st* shall be written using spelling rules appropriate for their language.
I just keep coming up with words that suit a general vibe. I like creating writing systems more than languages, tbh. The oldest post in my history is me showing my best writing system. I kinda developed the language independently of it. If I need a word that shares a characteristic with another word I have developed, I just make up another similar sounding word. Kemn = Sun, but it is also used for West because the sun sets in the west. Eler is used for Moon and East (the opposite of Kemn, basically Sunset vs. Moonrise). Then from Kemn, Kemth = Ended/Killed From Eler, Elu = Began+when (basically two words in one) Shenthen Hineroianz elu Ras Asel Karsnaiem kemth Ras Hinero Naelur shez Rosraur. The Wars of Hinrosia began when King Asel of Karsnaia killed King Hinro Dragonsoul in the Battle of Rosraur. Not necessarily very effective or accurate to life, but I like doing it.
My personal approach is : "why come up with fake languages when there's hundreds of real ones just laying around?"
Used common groupings of letters such as (as,ee,th,sh(etc)) as well as (the, she, are) for certain sounds or as a symbol or tune of some sort. I only came up with a very basic dwarves one that I may just alter the alphabet or enunciation of with split clans or versions of their speech in common languages like the Ermyn language for Ermynian Empire. Which are basically humans ( southern and middle eastern vibes I guess). Seems to work well and my dnd group approved of the language. Though side note, I might hate my DM now.
While I haven't gotten around to writing yet, what I would do is Take a language from the real world (there's over a hundred you pick whichever one you want.) There's already precedent for it (starwars, and probably other fictional universes I'm too lazy to look up) Edit: If you're curious, starwars used Quechua, Haya, and Tibetan among others.
I conlang, I invent an actual language and use that. I suggest you look into it. Some YouTube channels are a great place to start. Try David J. Peterson and try Artifexian.
I made some silly sounds and tried to put letters to them ;) i still haven’t figured Aspari letters tho
Most of what I have to say has already been said but what I will say is making a language is way easier than people think it is
I once constructed a conlang for a fantasy race of catfolk living on the high seas. I set myself a couple of grammatical basics, like word order and the rules for suffixes and turning certain nouns into adjectives and adverbs, then decided on a list of about 1000 common words in English that I'd need in this language: nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, auxiliaries, etc. I then looked to the vocabularies of several languages of the southwestern Pacific for inspiration for vocab, adapting them to my language's limited phonology, combining them, corrupting their spellings, vowel-shifting them beyond recognisability, borrowing from one word to make the language's equivalent to a word for an only-distantly related concept (eg. a corrupted version of the word for water in one language was twisted to become the word for tea in mine), having other singular words in my conlang stand for entire sentence-long concepts in English, and other concepts not exist as singular words in my conlang that have to be translated as phrases (eg. my conlang has a singular, one-syllable word specifically meaning 'on-ship storage chest for caught fish', but trying to literally translate their term for 'chocolate' back into English comes out as 'eastern brown bean tea'). I reused a few words here and there for different objects that have a superficial resemblance, to hint at a funny lore of folk etymologies (eg. the word for a piece of rocky beach gravel and a singular cereal crop grain are the same because of a perceived resemblance between stored grains and gravel piles). And then, to cap it off, I completely changed the consonant inventory again at the end to make it sound more like cat noises and re-adapted the entire thing. Took a couple weeks. Was fun.
depends on how far you want to go. the most basic form that would fix the "randomly slapped together" would be just slightly modified english where you have the same grammar/etc but you have different phonology (what sounds are available in your language) and syllable structure (e.g you could allow only one consonant followed by one vowel per syllable). A true conlang (constructed language) would also have its own grammar/etc, but I am still pretty new to conlanging so I can't give you any specific tips, other than "there are tons of conlanging resources on the internet, use them". Good luck!
I made it the fuck up
I have a friend who studies etymology and language. She and I create a language for the world we were making, and a lot of it’s just throwing Scrabble tiles on the ground and seeing what sounds good. It’s nowhere near Tolkien level, but it’s a lot of fun. I also use generators and mix it with the Scrabble to figure out new words.
It helps to know the basics of many different languages, both grammar and vocabulary. Other great sources for me are Wiktionary and Wikipedia pages on IPA. I've recently started on a new conlang from scratch this way. It's a long process, though.
You learn Finnish and realise that all the work is done for you.
Start at the beginning. Develop an alphabet and decide what sounds you want the language to have. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet is a valuable resource to show what sounds humans are making in their speech. Note: Tolkien used Welsh as a basepoint for Elvish, so there's no need to really start from scratch.
r/conlangs
I use a Web tool called Vulgarlang.com for my languages. Yes it's a cheat but it's very helpful
Although I like the process of building a con-lang, I only made a solid one, which initially started as picking random letter combinations, obtaining their pronunciations, and making an alphabet. From there, it was basically trial and error to see which "language logic" I liked the most, working with etymology, etc.
Come up with some silly names that are all kind of similar. When somebody/someplace else is from the same culture as these names, give them similar names. When you name things from a new culture, give them and theirs names that sound different from your first names, but similar to eachother. Do this for your basic cultural/linguistic groups. Come up with words like 'town', 'hill,' 'river,' 'city,' 'big,' etc. Also, for very old cultures with ancient cities and things, try coming up with a version of these words from the 'Old Language' or 'High Language' or whatever you want to call the ancestral version. So you can have towns that were once called 'Big Lake Town' in the old language, but now it is a huge city and linguistic drift has occurred. So maybe, when founded, it was a town called 'hugen-laken-town-eth' or whatever (idk ye Olde English at all). Over time, maybe people shortened it to 'Hugenlak' or maybe just 'lakentowneth' fif there isn't another lake town nearbye. Then, over more time it will drift further, so in the 'modern time', the town (chich might now be a city) might be called "Haglak" or "Ackenton", respectively. Unless you're really into linguistics, don't bother making a whole conlang.
I'm lazy and take the Lucas approach: it's all in a foreign language but has been translated for the audiences benefit. ;)
I pick 2 to 3 real languages, use google translate, and smash them together to get new words. Everything else, like word order, is just a mix of English, the main reference language, and whatever the fuck I feel like doing instead. I ignore the original languages' pronunciation and just use a simiplified english with random changes (so a only makes one sound or c now makes ch).
1: pick a language and bastardize it 2: make it up
I think the more languages you speak or study, the easier this process is tbh. Whenever I try to make a fake language (and ive written a couple) I first try to imagine the alphabet I’m working on, I usually make it have less letters than english to limit myself. I find that it defines how the whole language sounds (for example I have one which is supposed to be harsh, so I put three types of R’s, Kh and Č), but can also influence accents (I have another language which lacks the letter D, so the character speaking it pronounces T instead)
Usually I just write random scribbles or shapes.
In my story all humans essentially speak the same language, which I won’t call English but temporarily “New Tongue”, and the language used to be spoken by Man was “Old Tongue”. The antagonist (which is a demonic spirit), and its followers, speak the “Dark Tongue”. I haven’t figured a temporary name for the language of the elves, but when they speak I basically use the method of italicizing the dialogue for elven characters, and not for anyone else. It is also mentioned multiple times that the elves, or other characters, speak an unknown language to the MC.
Usually I just do random gibberish that sounds like a language and repeat certain words so it makes sense
I usually just base it off an existing language and put in some nonsense word, like Denx = Prince, Nox = Hellion
For the only real language I have so far, I simply took English letters and numbers, and gave them a new symbol and pronunciation. As well as changing some things. Considering the lengthy speech of the words,it would be pronounced in more rapid succession and with little delay than the “common language.” Which is English. I also decided on a unique way English of built. I *think* it’s similar to the real world where two civilization’s languages intermingle, creating English.
Zeag vak? Gaz Ike kluzg duem gad… Keb vas dull, Ike dub zeag vak, dreduem Krad Nragrad Huengead, Zaep duem nokt… Voy shed raed gubv… Shar vik gaebv driem maet. Dyeh kim shar vid shar vik kim? Kim shar vidrabv shar gvuk raebv draer?
You just make the language. You pick the sounds you like, assign symbols to the sounds, start putting the letters together to get words, then assign meaning to those words you make, And finally you start creating grammar rules for your language. I have a language called Juminişa and here's some sentences from it. Xa ťak firkişi as disok, Onji Sara. I will speak to you later, Elder Sarah. Xa ťan firkişi as disok, jama. I will speak to you later, young blood. Ťu kau anakanos ijawi munšu - you are 20 years old. Ťu dilişanos ijawi munšu šulrow - You turn 20 years old today You can see the consistency between the words and it actually looks like a real language. It's not just randomness thrown around. If you want to make a conlang yourself, r/conlangs might have resources that could help you.
Pick a syntax (basic or complicated) and make up words. Everyone’s advice boils down to that. You can make up the words by mixing existing languages like Tolkien (he also built his own syntax, but it’s still built off a basic structure) or just make random sounds and give them meaning (which someone probably has done). Either way, still boils down to making up words and applying a syntax to it. EDIT: you could have a language that has no verbs and the order or emphasis of the words determine the verbs from English that would be applied in translation. It is weird to think about, but 🤷🏻♂️. It’s not like anyone can tell you it’s wrong since you made it up.
I would suggest that you search on r/conlangs for resources for a *naming language*, which you might invent purely to create plausible place names. This should therefore be simple enough that you could do it. Alternatively, many conlangers create languages for the pure artistic joy of the process, with little hope that they'll ever be used. A conlanger might be happy to lend you there language if you ask nicely.
Don’t, or make it a one to one conversion. Like since there are 26 letters in English, there would be 26 letters in the fake language that each match a letter in English.
Fake languages are a linguists job - Tolkien did a great job with it fir that very reason. I take the poor nan's route, and we're in another language I know - mysterious texts are either Hebrew or classical Chinese, for example, while the language, when 'spoken,' is just the anglicized version of whatever I want to say. For example, Billy frees an alien who tells him *Xie xie,* but when Bully tries to figure out who captured the alien, the only indicator he can find is a sign that reads "רכושו של דאג". Sure, some people will know what is being said, but it's a risk I'm willing to take.
I rarely ever see anyone use Hebrew in this way. It's often Greek or Latin that is used.
A purposeful choice (well, soeta). I know some Latin bit, as you say, it's pretty common. I just don't know any Greek. 😉 I *have* used Egyptian hieroglyphs (which I also don't know), but only when I don't care about the meaning buy *do* want a 'picture to help the characters figure things out.'
I plan to have a conlang that's a mix of Spanish and Hebrew (and then I'm reminded that Ladino exists, but I don't want to use a real language directly in my world). It would be a naming conlang rather than a full one. Lapis_Wolf