Building Simple Conlangs for Stories, Worlds, Memes, and Personal Use
Clickbait title: How to make a language in 7 easy steps! Linguists HATE HER!
Conlanging (Constructed + Language + ing) is the art of making languages and it is very difficult to do well. The typical gold standard of Conlanging for worldbuilding and storytelling is making a language that is naturalistically formed, with an older form of the language (Protolang) that evolves over in-world time to form a modern version of the language. This requires a pretty comprehensive understanding of linguistics and other languages.
Not everyone has that kind of time or energy but still would like a function and phonoaesthetically-pleasing language for their storyworld or as a meme or for personal use as a secret code or as an art language to explore philosophy or any other number of reasons.
If this is you (because it’s definitely me), then you are in the right place! We’re going to make what is typically called an “engilang” for “Engineered Language” that loosely acts naturalistically and will, at the very least, sound cool! Follow these simple steps and you’ll have a pretty functional little language for your use in whatever!
Step 0. Gather existing words
Did you pre-emptively start a language before you had this guide and want to incorporate those words into a full Conlang? That’s great! Gather all of them into a list. I will be proceeding as if you have no grammar rules yet. You likely have some grammar things already—whether you know it or not—but this guide will assume you do not.
Step 1. Figure Out Your Language Goals
Figure out what you want your language to do, what purpose you want it to serve, what culture you want it to represent, or what aesthetic you want it to have. Write it down. This can help guide your decisions later in the process.
Here’s an example of my objective from my Sealtongue Conlang:
“To create a very simple, ocean-oriented language which can inspire the slang of Selkies and form songs. Basically, intended to be a Tokiponita of my world with some Keleni Relationals thrown in for good measure. Generally very minimalistic. It should be easy to sing, sound Japanese AND Norse.”
As you can see, mine states the cultural purpose, some grammar notes, and some phonology notes. Yours doesn’t need these; it needs to have whatever you want.
Step 2. Language Sounds and Phonoaesthetics
Phonoaesthetic is the word for sound-aesthetic. Basically, we are going to determine what sounds are in your language. Typically, you would want to use the International Phonemic Alphabet (IPA) for your phonology (language sounds), but we are not. (But you are free to.)
Instead, you are going create a list of sounds you want in your language and associate each sound with a letter or group of letters. If you are working from a list, write down all the sounds you see in that list. Divide them into consonant sounds like T or K or CH or SH or TS or NG or THR. If you want to keep it simple, go through the alphabet and write every consonant that you like down in a list. Remember, though, to keep it simple: One sound per symbol. In English, we pronounce C in like 3 different ways.
Next, you’re going to do the same thing for vowels. The most common system is the 5-vowel system in which:
A is pronounced Ah like “Aha!”
E is pronounced Eh kinda like E in “Get”
I is pronounced like the EE is “See”
O is pronounced like its name
U is pronounced like the OO in “Soothe”
PLEASE REMEMBER: One sound per symbol or group of symbols. Notice how OU in English is different in “through”, “though”, “thou”, “tough”, “trough”, and all the others it’s weird in? Do not do this. English spelling sucks. Your language ought to be spelled consistently.
If you do not like how it looks on the page, you can change it later but for your pronunciation record keeping, keep it.
Step 3. Grammar and Syntax
Grammar and syntax describe how the language systematically works. Languages in the real world are absolutely wild and this is the point where outside knowledge will benefit you the most. However, if you know nothing, this is still fine. If you’re working from a list, look at what you already have and see if you’ve done this already. Let’s break this down into smaller choices:
Weird Quirks
Yupik and Inuit infamously have somewhere around 800 words for snow (this is only kinda true, it’s complicated, Google it). Many other real-world languages have different versions of the language you speak at different levels of formality. My Demonic language forces everyone to conjugate verbs based on if they are in debt or not to those around them. Your language can literally accommodate whatever you want. I put this first because if you do something like this, it’ll shape everything else you do. So, make this decision now. You want to do something weird?
Word Order
Word order is the order in which you put words in clauses (that is, sentences or complete ideas). Let’s take the example sentence, “The dog eats food.” There are three* types of words to account for in this:
Subject—The thing in the sentence doing the thing. In our case, the dog.
Verb—The action of the sentence. What is the dog doing? Eating. “Eats” is the verb.
Object—The thing receiving the action. What is the dog eating? Food. “Food” is the object.
*"The" is called a "definite article", more on this below...
Obviously, sentences can be more complicated than this, but these are the basics. For clarity, this is the order we SPEAK in the language, rather than the order we write—we’ll discuss that later. If you are having trouble choosing, here are some examples:
SVO order—the order we use in English.
SOV order—this is used in Japanese and is the most common throughout the world.
VOS order—rare, but still occurs in 3% of the world’s languages.
Freeform—You can say words in whatever order you want, making subject and object in a way that does not require order. You are probably putting the most new, broad information at the front and the least necessary and most specific information at the end.
Grammar Sidebar: Direct and Indirect Objects
I know you didn’t come here for grammar lessons but this is important. Take the sentence: “I give you my lunch”. The Direct Object is “you”. But “I give you” isn’t a real sentence (or if it is, it has weird implications). The Indirect Object is “my lunch”—the thing being involved in the doing. Think about how you want to mark or place these as well.
Adjectives
Adjectives are descriptors used to modify words. Like “good lunch” or “bad day”. Your primary choices are either have them go before or after the word they modify.
If they go before, the adjectives probably used to be nouns. If they go after, you’re probably in a SOV language in which they were initially separate verbs. (Like, in Japanese, the word “tsumetai” both means cold, the temperature, and “it is cold” the sentence.)
Prefixes, Postfixes, and other Affixes
Affixes attach to words to help you understand how they relate to other words. When you say things like “in”, “at”, “on”, or “honorable”, do they go before or after the relevant word? English developed “inside” from “in” and “side” getting merged from being said together so much—we have prefixes. But we could say “sidein” to mean the same thing in a hypothetical universe.
Some languages have other types affixes, though they are rarer. For example, infixes go in the middle of words. The closest thing we have in English are profanities like “abso-fucking-lutely”.
Articles
Articles are words like “the”, “an”, and “a”. In English, they evolved from demonstratives (words like “this” and “that” and “which”) and we cannot sound sophisticated without them. (For example, "Dog ate food" vs. "The dog ate food") Decide if you want them, how many you want, and when they are used.
Plural and Grammatical Number
In English, we usually add -S to the end of words to make them plural. ("Cat" vs. "Cats") But you could also change the vowels in the word. ("Goose" vs. "Geese") Other languages just use one word for plural and singular (1 Pikachu, 5 Pikachu). Some languages have singular, exactly two, and more than two. Some languages have what is called a "paucal" form, which translates in English to "some" as in "some cats". How do you want to handle your plurals?
Possession
In English, we can both say “Brian’s book” and “the book of Brian” to mean, loosely, the same thing. But Spanish does not have an equivalent of the apostrophe-S system in English and only has “of”. Japanese only has an apostrophe-S style system with the word “no”. In Japanese, “Brian no hon” means “Brian’s book”. Decide how you want your possession—the possessor will typically act similarly to an adjective, but not necessarily.
Grammatical Gender
While in real-world languages, gender is often associated with the masculine and feminine, it does not have to be. This is just the different ways one handles different groups of things. One could have the Natural and Artificial as grammar genders or Dogs and Not-Dogs or Cats, Fish, and Neither. In Spanish, you can typically tell gender by the ending letter of words and this impacts the articles used (Los gatos vs. las fotografías). If you want to have gender, how do you want to mark it? What does this impact? How does it impact the way people think in that language’s culture?
Ergativity and Case Marking
In English, we can say “She likes her” but we cannot say “her likes she”. This is ergativity. This is marking nouns for what role they serve in the sentence typically (marking subject and object and such). You basically need this in a freeform system. Otherwise, it’s optional. Do you want this feature in your language? How do you want to mark it? Different words? Affixes?
Verbs
Verbs change based on the context of the actions being done. The forms of words we will make are called the “infinitive” typically. (In English, you’d say it as “to eat”, “to drink”, “to run”, “to be”, etc.) This is an unconjugated verb. You can conjugate for many things. Here are some examples to draw on, but feel free to use multiple or none of the following systems:
Person—“I eat” but “he eats”. In Spanish and many other Romance languages, it conjugates for first person, second person, third person, first person plural, second person plural, and third person plural.
Negation—In Japanese, verbs don’t conjugate for person, only for if it happened or not. “I eat” or “I don’t eat”.
Formality—In Japanese, there are a several different conjugation-systems for if you’re being polite or not.
Tense/Time—“I eat” versus “I am eating” versus “I will eat” versus “I ate” versus "I ate everyday". All of these tell you when the eating is/was/will be happening.
Mood—“If I were a rich man” versus “I was a rich man”. One of these things is called subjunctive mood (it didn’t or hasn’t happened, but if it did… It’s also more polite) and the other is definitive (it definitely happened). You can also make up your own moods. You could make one conjugation that means, “If I were a rich man, which I want to be, but I’m not” and a different one that means, “If I were a rich man, which would never happen and I don’t want it to happen” and you could do it with just one word.
How you know the information—Did you witness the information firsthand? Is it a well-known fact? Is this your opinion? Do you doubt its validity?
There are many more options. Verbs are one of the broadest things in language because you can create any number things for which to conjugate. Be creative! Have fun!
Step 4. Consonant-Vowel Clusters
Ordinarily, to form words, as I mentioned, you will first make a protolanguage and derive all your modern vocabulary through it—typically inspired by real sound transitions that happened in actual linguistic history. We are going to do a simplified version of this.
First, we have to determine what consonant-vowel clusters are allowed in the language. Look at the following words:
Gengo -- CVCCV
Language -- CVCCVVCV
K’wanik’wa -- C’CVCVC’CV
Bharsarhcakarr -- CCVCCVCCCVCVCC
These are obviously all from different languages and you can tell because of how long the words are and the consonant-vowel clusters they allow. If you’re working from a list, find the structure of the words on the list by writing C every where there is a Consonant and V everywhere there is a Vowel (as above). If there are any compound words (that is, words with two or more words in them like “pineapple” or “swordsman”), break them up. If you’re starting from scratch, I recommend making everything CV or CVC.
Why do I recommend making such small words? Because then you can concatenate them (that is, put them together like the words “to” and “gather”) to make more words later!
Alternatively, I recommend making it CVCVCV or CVCVC and but making certain orders of vowels mean something specific.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Feel free to create CV structures that include a specific letter in them such as “C(r)VC”. This is not exactly how you use CV in actual linguistics but this helps me keep everything clear.
When you’ve decided on your potential word structures, you can move on to your next step!
Step 5. Word Formation
The next step is to start filling in the Cs and Vs with the sounds from the list earlier and assigning them meanings. (Please see the Conlang Template at the end that I use to start making languages. If you want additional resources, Google "vocabulary list for learning languages".) This is where you can start associating certain sounds with certain meanings.
If you ever find a collection of letters you do not like (for instance, I’m not usually a fan of VG or SJ), make a note to yourself with the rest of your sounds so it is BANNED from the language. Keep in mind you might only not like sounds in the beginning or ends of words! It’s the same way that we don’t have the sound NG at the beginning of words in English—only at the end.
Now, I am relatively minimalist with my Conlangs so I try to repurpose existing words to make new words based on how my storyworld cultures would perceive the world. Try some of the following to make words:
You can mash old words together concatenatively to form larger Frankenwords (like “Frankenwords” from “Frankenstein” and “Words”).
You can change the vowels to form a different word—such as how “freeze” is the present tense of “froze”.
You can use old words in new contexts. For instance, in English we say “cast magic”—in the same way we “cast fishing rods” or “cast clay pots”.
How do your people conceptualize things in your world? Remember—having language blank spots can be as significant as the words you do have. The Conlang Dothraki by David J. Peterson (from Game of Thrones) infamously has no word for “Thank You”.
If you are struggling to decide what letters you want in your words, remember you can always change things so just put SOMETHING in. And if you REALLY cannot decide, roll dice to randomly generate it (or use this website: http://akana.conlang.org/tools/awkwords/ ). In fact, if you programmed all these steps, you could 100% auto-generate whole little languages with this. Remember you can always tweak things later—language in the real world is always evolving too.
Step 6. Fill Out The 111 Word Sheet
At this point, it’s simply of building until you’re “done” with all the words you need. But since that could be never, for the purposes of this exercise, you will have a sufficient amount of words to communicate a number of somewhat difficult ideas when you can translate the following sentences:
Hello, my name is ______.
Life is good.
That red thing was very bad. It was the worst.
In the morning, you will go to the city.
I should fight with you.
Excuse me, do I know you?
What is that?
They understand my mother because she uses magic.
Last year, there were 1,111 green creatures (or insert important creature you want to have a word for here).
He said, "I like animals."
Congratulations on your daughter.
I love you.
Keep in mind, when translating sentences, other languages aren’t just secret codes where you change a few words. You don’t look up a translation of “life” and then a translation of “good” and then a translation of “is”. Other languages are entire entities and cultures of their own, and words in these languages should have different implications than in ours.
Look at the following translations of “Life is good” from my conlang, Sha Hirza Ni:
Arashas girumaq d'vid'. ((The concept of) Life is objectively good)
Irash's girumaq d'vid'. ((My) life is good)
Irash's girumaq davud'. (In my opinion, the concept of life is the same as the concept of goodness)
As you can see, they’re all different. This is how actual languages work in the real world as well. If you want to replicate naturalistic languages, then try to capture this essence when you make your translations.
Step 7. Create the Writing System (Optional)
Hypothetically, your writing system will start with a pictography, as all writing does—influenced by being carved or painted—and be constrained by the medium in which it is portrayed (vertical on trees, horizontal on wide things, curves for brushes, lines for carved, etc.) and then simplify (or not) until it reaches its modern state. Think about how the medium impacts your writing and then design it to be maximally easy for the writers using it. The most important thing to remember about writing is that it should be designed for your conlang, not for writing English words. It may not and need not work nicely with English—and doing a one-to-one character conversion is rather silly.
A couple of sample writing systems (of which yours may be one or a hybrid of):
Alphabets—We have this in English, one symbol for every consonant and vowel, you place them one after the other.
Abugidas—Devanagari and Tolkien Elvish are both abugidas. Basically, it’s the same as an alphabet, except you write vowels above or below the consonants they modify instead of to the right/left. (Or more precisely, perpendicular to the writing direction.)
Syllabary—This is when every possible syllable in your language has a symbol, and works best with CV languages (as opposed to CVC or bigger Consonant-Vowel clustering). Japan is famous for its two syllabaries, Hiragana and Katakana.
Logography—This is where every word has a symbol. Most languages begin this way until the pictures are used to represent sounds and it is simplified. However, modern Chinese is still a pictography so feel free to use this if you want to do the work.
This part is pretty unnecessary to have a fully complete language—after all, most people will not put in the effort to learn to read the symbols but already read the Roman alphabet. Feel free to just write out the sounds as you have been doing.
And now you’re done!
…for now. You will likely want to go back, fill in a bunch more of the language, add more culturally specific words, figure out how longer clauses work, and other such things. But now, you have a solid little language in which speakers could have a conversation, from which you can create idioms/sayings, and, most significantly, a sound system to create names for people, places, and things. Good work! And thank you for joining me on this little journey—I have very few visitors here and it is good to have more.
Conlang Template
OBJECTIVE
PHONOLOGY
GRAMMAR
CONJUGATION
SAMPLE SENTENCES TO TRANSLATE
· Hello, my name is ______.
· Life is good.
· That red thing was very bad. It was the worst.
· In the morning, you will go to the city.
· I should fight with you.
· Excuse me, do I know you?
· They understand my mother because she uses magic.
· Last year, there were 1,111 green creatures (or insert important creature you want to have a word for here).
· He said, "I like animals."
· Congratulations on your daughter.
· I love you.
VOCABULARY (111 Words to Kickstart Your Conlang!)
Basics
Greeting
· Yes
· No
· Excuse Me
· Sorry
· Thank you
· You're Welcome
· Congratulations
· It/Thing
Interrogatives
· What?
· Who?
· Where?
· When?
· Why?
· How?
Grammar
· Therefore
· However
· (Superlative)
· Very/Much
· This
· That/That (Over there)
· Because
· Of
· (Possessive Form(s))
· To
· At
· For
· By
· From
· In
· On
· And
· Or
· With
People
· I
· You/You (plural)
· He/She/Neutral
· We (inclusive/Exclusive)
· They
· People
· (Diminuitive Nickname)
· Family
· Mother/Father
· Son/Daughter
· Sibling
· Lover
Time
· Morning
· Evening
· Day
· Week
· Year
· Time
· Last
· Next
· Place
· Light
· Dark
· Name
· Place
· City
· Country (And this country in specific)
· World
· Home
· Shop
Descriptors
· Red
· Blue
· Green
· Yellow
· Metal
· Wood
· Good
· Bad
Verbs
· To be
· To have
· To go
· To like
· To see
· To fight
· To use magic
· To say
· To know/To understand
· (Verb Unique to Language)
· How to say "should"
· How to say "can"
Concepts & Nature
· Language (And this language in specific)
· Life
· Death
· Love
· Water
· Earth
· Fire
· Air
· Tree
· Animal/Creature
· Culturally important creature
Language Specific Words
· Language Important Word
· Language Important Word
· Language Important Word
· Language Important Word
· Language Important Word
Numbers (for a Base-10 system)
· One
· Two
· Three
· Four
· Five
· Six
· Seven
· Eight
· Nine
· Ten
· One Hundred
· One Thousand
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