Tag: how to make conlang

To view the full list of my Conlanging 101 series, click here.

To view my Culture Building series, click here.

Over the months I’ve had my first book out, The Warriors of Bhrea: The Lost King, I’ve gotten many questions as to just how I created a language as well those expressing they wish they could do the same. Conlangs, or constructed languages, seem like they take an immense amount of work–but the truth is, they only really take as much work as you want to put into them. You could go full J. R. R. Tolkien, or you could just lay a simple ground work with a few words to get you through a scene or give a character a little extra pizzazz.

This is the first part of a series detailing the step-by-step process I used to build the language I use in my books, Korvet. I created a full set of phonemes, morphemes, lexicon, syntax, and more. Don’t let those words intimidate you–I will explain everything as we go! These are steps you can follow to whatever degree is best for you. I’ll also provide some GREAT conlang resources and tools along the way.

Strap in, and welcome to part 1 of Tabby’s conlang tutorial, guide, blog, or whatever you want to call it. 😎 We’re gonna do some Tolkienin’.

First things first. Why do you want to create a conlang?

It’s important to consider this before getting started, that way you only do as much as you need to and don’t overwhelm yourself with complex details if you don’t need to. Some potentials reasons would be:

• for a book–likely a fantasy book–and characters will speak this language
• for an original character creation–and you will need some interesting words and phrases to flesh out this character
• for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign–characters will speak words from it, locations and items will be named according the language’s conventions
• for fun–you just want to create a fleshed out world complete with how its denizens speak (for the record, this one is not lame…this is how J. R. R. Tolkien started out!)

Find your reason and use it to determine just how in-depth you need to go. Do you just need some words and phrases, or do you need to plan the whole shebang? Using your why as your guide, you can go through my step by step process and decide how far you need to go with each step to achieve your goal.

Next up: researching and looking at examples!

This step might seem insignificant, but it is worth it. Trust me, you will WANT to look at other languages (real and constructed) to get inspiration and ideas for your conlang! Let’s take a look at a range of language types, both natural and constructed. Don’t feel the need to look through all of these, but hopefully a few them will give you some ideas of different sounds, tones, and feels you could explore with your language. Make sure to check out some of the audio and video to hear some samples as well!

While you’re exploring languages, pay attention to their sounds and tone, then think of your language. Do you want your language to sound fluid and soft, or how about harsh and blocky? Do you want it to have tones and sound sing-songy, or will speakers use other kinds of inflection? This segues perfectly into the first real step of constructing a language…

Step 1: Creating the sounds of your language

Every language is made up of a set of basic sounds. Those sounds can generally be divided into consonants and vowels. Linguists organize those sounds into fancy charts. For example, the consonant chart for North American English is below:

			Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	bilabial	labio-dental	dental	alveolar	palatal	velar	glottal
stop	p b			t d		k g
fricative		f v	θ ð	s z	ʃ ʒ		h
affricate					t̠ʃ d̠ʒ
nasal	m			n		η
liquid				l	r
glide	w				y

If that looks like a bunch of mumbo jumbo, and you’re pretty much right! However, it’s really quite simple once you know what columns and rows mean.

Place of articulation indicates where in your mouth you make the sound. Sounds with your lips are bilabial, such as the /m/ sound, because you are pressing your lips together and push air through your vocal cords to make a sound.

Manner of articulation is how the airstream is affected as it flows from the lungs and out the nose and mouth. To revisit the /m/ sound again, it is nasal because the air goes through your vocal cords and out your nose. In each column, consonants can be voice or voiceless. Voiceless does not use the vocal cords, like p, t, and s. Voiced use the vocal cords, like b, d, and z. In the tables, I have the voiceless consonants on the left side of each column and the voiced on the right.

I don’t want to bore you with long lists describing the difference between bilabial and palatal, so check out this video on the subject! It breaks it down very well.

There is also a chart for vowels, but to be honest, that adds another layer of complexity may be unnecessary if you don’t want to get into all the subtle differences between each vowel sound. To keep it simple, I’ve stuck with your good ol’ a, e, i, o, and u, with a couple minor variations for e and i and the dipthongs au, ei, and ai. If you’re interested in learning more, you can hear all the different vowels sounds here.

These are the Korvet consonants:

			Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	bilabial	labio-dental	alveolar	postaveolar	palatal	velar
stop	p b		t d			k g
fricative		v	s	ʒ ɹ̠˔		x
affricate			d̠ʒ
flap			ɾ
nasal	m		n			η
liquid			l
lateral fricative			ɬ
glide	w				y

You may notice that there are several differences between Korvet and English. For instance, Korvet doesn’t have an /f/ or /h/, but it has a /ɹ̠˔/, which is a sound that doesn’t appear in that many languages. According to Wikipedia, it only appears in some dialects of Dutch, Thai, and Mandarin. The closest way I can describe it is that it is a mix between an r and a j. You can listen to what it sounds like here! This sound is found at the end of Korvet words that end in r, like agesjinar. Another is ɬ, which is most famously known as the Welsh ll, like in Llywelyn. In Korvet, that sound is made when l is combined with an aleovlar consonant, like t or j. The name Tlense has this sound.

So all that was a roundabout way of thinking about what sounds you want to have in your language, because it all begins there. I think the sounds can say a lot about “the feel” of a language. I wanted Korvet to have a soft and flowy feel, so there aren’t that many fricatives or affricates, and there are a few glides and liquids.

Once you have your sounds, starting putting them together. Have some fun with it! Some examples of common sounds in English are mp, nt, fr…and adding vowels in the mix. Plass and dilk are words that could be in English because they use common sound combinations, but vlar and mtib could not be from English.

In Korvet, I allowed some unusual sounds to be put together, such as tl, jl, vl, dv, and sv. There are also some familiar combinations, like nt, gl, sk, and lt.

Romanization

As you pick and combine sounds for your language, you will need to consider how it will be represented in the Roman alphabet. In other words, how will the English-speaking normies read your word? If they saw a word like h₃rḗḱs, I wouldn’t blame them for running away. A more palatable way to put it would be hraex, or perhaps hraeks. While still foreign-looking, it is written only with Roman letters, thus being much less intimidating to read.

When creating Korvet, I kept in mind how the language would look in with Roman letters. Despite having several sounds that don’t correlate to any English letter, there were some approximations that would do the job. For example, there is no single letter that represents the /x/ sound, so kh would do (this is the common spelling for it anyway). English also doesn’t have a consistent way of spelling the /ʒ/ sound (like in measure or decision), so I decided sj would be the consistent spelling for that sound in Korvet.

Now I have a way to spell out my langauge:

Nasj’jos, Attriminda kamse. Bhreata yaserase. Korveta etsjwoten? Sem ettongle’anen?

[Hello, I’m Attriminda. I live in Bhrea. Do you speak Korvet? Can you understand me?]

While it doesn’t look like English, it also doesn’t look so foreign that it will be impossible to parse out how to pronounce it.

Wrapping up

I’ve given you a lot of information–now it’s time to go try some things on your own! Write down some sounds you want to use for your language–remember that there are many, many potential sounds to choose from. Some are very rare. Don’t be afraid to explore those as well.

You can write down your sounds in a list, or if you want a more organized visual representation, here is a blank consonant chart for you to play around with:

	bilabial	labio-dental	alveolar	postaveolar	palatal	velar
stop
fricative
affricate
flap
nasal
lateral liquid
lateral fricative
glide

And next time, we will go over how to create a lexicon, or list of words. You are going to love the resources I’ve found for you–it will make compiling lists of words easy and fun! Click here to go to Part 2!