History SoYouWantTo / CreateAConlang

* '''...or aspirated?''' [[TakeAThirdOption There is a third option]] for stop consonants. They can be aspirated too. English has both the aspirated /pʰ/ sound and the non-aspirated voiceless /p/. This is the different between the 'p' sounds in '''p'''ie and '''p'''ly. You don't notice, because English doesn't treat the sounds as contrasting. But some do. Chinese, in particular, draws a distinction between aspirated and non-aspirated stops and not between voiced/voiceless stops. This is why Beijing is written with a b, even though English-speakers might think the sound is more like a p. The older spelling of Peking reflects this.

* The focus of this article is on ''naturalistic'' conlangs—that is, languages with an aim to look realistic, especially as compared to other languages of the world. You are of course free to create non-naturalistic languages (e.g. [[Franchise/StarTrek Klingon]], Lojban, and Esperanto), although these will for the most part not be focused on here.

What you're probably going to want to do is start with the ''phonology'', the sound of the language, first. You can have ideas for other aspects of the language in question before you start, but the sounds are going to be necessary for actually making parts of the language[[note]]unless you're specifically going for a writing-only language, of course[[/note]].

Once you have this done, you can start with the ''grammar'' (or ''syntax''). To a first approximation, this is how the language works internally—how you put the pieces together to encode relations between the words. This topic covers things like word order, syntactic alignment, typology, and grammatical number.

Next (or concurrently), you can work on ''morphology''. This is the shape of the functional bits of the words in your language—prefixes, suffixes, infixes, function words, consonant mutation, things of that nature.

!'''Potential Subversions'''
!'''Conlangers' Lounge'''
!!'''Suggested Themes and Aesops'''
!!'''Potential Motifs'''
!!'''Suggested Plots'''

* '''...or aspirated?''' [[TakeAThirdOption There is a third option]] for stop consonants. They can be aspirated too. English has both the aspirated /pʰ/ sound and the non-aspirated voiceless /p/. This is the different between the 'p' sounds in '''p'''ie and s'''p'''y. You don't notice, because English doesn't treat the sounds as contrasting. But some do. Chinese, in particular, draws a distinction between aspirated and non-aspirated stops and not between voiced/voiceless stops. This is why Beijing is written with a b, even though English-speakers might think the sound is more like a p. The older spelling of Peking reflects this.

Sandhi covers the various sound changes which occur at morpheme and word boundaries - for example, the various ways the -s plural can be pronounced in English depending on the sound made before the plural, the way English uses "a" and "an" depending on what comes after the word, the way Japanese will sometimes substitute "g" for "k" in compound words like "hiragana" (hira + kana) and so on.

A noun is a person, place, thing, or idea.

In English, like most languages, a noun changes if it is plural. A few nouns have an irregular plural (''children'') or none at all (''sheep'') but most follow a regular set of rules.

A few other languages have separate plural forms, such as a separate plural for 'two' or for a very large number.

Most people who have already learned a foreign language will have already met 'gender marking'. Many languages like French and Spanish divide nouns into 'masculine' and 'feminine' categories, even if they aee inanimate objects. Others like German and Russian add 'neuter' as a third category. And others like Swedish have genders that are not based around masculine and feminine. Some have 'animate' or 'inanimate' genders.

Some languages have a more complex set of inflections for nouns, called ''cases''. A simple example is Esperanto, which states that if a noun is the object of a sentence, the suffix '-n' is added. The possessive in English could also be considered a case.

Other languages have a far more complex system of cases, usually by changing nouns for different types of object--say, accusative for direct and dative for indirect--and sometimes changing other words like adjectives.

An extreme example is Latin, where nouns inflect for six (or seven) cases as well as singular/plural, and do so with five patterns, plus a few exceptions!

Adjectives describe a noun. These words are a simple matter in English. Many languages have adjectives that inflect to 'agree' with the noun. If the noun is plural, the adjective takes a plural form. In languages that have gender marking, adjectives inflect more the noun's gender too. Some even inflect for the noun's case.

Verbs are the soul of grammar. Not only are they the action words of a sentence, but they tend to show the tense as well.

Synthetic languages use many verb inflections to signify not just tenses, but also whether the subject was 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person and whether they were singular or plural. French verbs can have up to about 40 different forms, and Latin verbs can have over 100.

Most verbs are 'regular', meaning they follow a regular pattern, though there may be more than one for different word endings. But the most frequently used verbs often end up being irregular. In some cases, irregular verbs do follow a pattern, but it's a rare one or impossible to tell if you don't know of it.

In analytic languages, by contrast, verbs may not change at all. Chinese uses separate words to mark whether an action is in the past or present, but also often relies only on the context.

English leans towards being analytic. Most verbs have only three inflections (''walk'', ''walks'', ''walking'', ''walked''). Some have four (''do'', ''does'', ''did'', ''done''). The odd one is ''to be'', which has eight. A lot of tenses are formed with auxiliary (helping) verbs, either with the verb inflected (''I was walking'') or not (''I will walk'').

One can also have no dominant word order. Latin, especially Latin poetry, exhibits this word order; most of the work is taken up by the inflectional endings of the words[[note]]looking at you, Cicero, beginning your very long sentence with the direct object[[/note]].

* '''Sound change:''' As Latin developed into Romance, the way people pronounced words began to change in (usually-)systematic ways. For example, Latin had long /l/ and /n/ sounds. On the way to Spanish, these sounds palatalized and ended up as /ʎ/ and /ɲ/, respectively--compare Latin ''annum'' 'year' > Spanish ''año'', but ''anus'' 'ring' > Spanish ''ano'' 'anus'. (Don't look at me like that. It was the first example that came to mind and it illustrates the principle nicely.) Latin ''annum'' also yielded French ''an'', which didn't palatalize, but turned into a nasalized vowel through a different process.
* '''Grammatical change:''' The grammar changed too, as features were developed and lost. Latin had a distinction between ''vel'' 'and/or' and ''aut'' 'either/or' which didn't survive Vulgar Latin (e.g., French ''ou'' 'or' < Latin ''aut''). Romance languages also mostly did away with the infamous case system of Latin (though it lingers on in a reduced form in Romanian). In terms of gains, some Romance languages developed new verbal inflections--the French future tense developed out of a construction of the form [infinitive] + ''habere'', as can be seen in, for example, ''mangerai'' '(I) will eat'. Spanish ''usted'' is a shortening of a respectful form of addressing someone else that didn't exist in Latin. Romance languages also gained stricter word order. In Latin, the case endings carried the information about a word's role in the phrase, so you could shuffle them around a lot, as readers who have the misfortune of being familiar with Cicero know all too well. As sound change destroyed the case system, speakers of Romance had to figure out some other way of helping figure out how the words fit together in the sentence, and they did this by making the order of the words more important. (Something similar actually happened on the way from Old English to Modern English because Middle English said "Word-final case markings? lolno".)
* '''Lexical change:''' Words changed meaning, fell out of use entirely, or were borrowed. One prominent example is the word for "horse"--originally, this was ''equus'' in Latin. This fell out of use in Vulgar Latin, from which Romance developed; it borrowed a Celtic word for horse, which ended up as ''caballus'' (whence, say, French ''cheval''). Famously, Portuguese ''saudade'' (look up the definition, it's nuanced) came from Latin ''solitatem'', which just meant 'solitude'. The word "admiral" doesn't come from Latin, although it looks like it does; it's from Arabic ''amiir al-'' 'emir of'[[note]]the ''d'' is actually an instance of someone trying to make it look Latinate like it was "supposed" to be!

* The focus of this article is on ''naturalistic'' conlangs—that is, languages with an aim to look realistic, especially as compared to other languages of the world. You are of course free to create non-naturalistic languages—[[Franchise/StarTrek Klingon]] is one, as is Lojban, although these will for the most part not be focused on here.

First, be sure to check out SoYouWantTo/WriteAStory for basic advice that holds across ''all'' genres. Then, get look over a rundown of the genre-specific tropes that will help you, hurt you, and guide you on your way.

!'''Choices, Choices'''

Next (or concurrently), you can work on ''morphology''. This is the shapes of the functional bits of the words in your language—prefixes, suffixes, infixes, function words, consonant mutation, things of that nature.

The IPA is a valuable tool for displaying how words in a conlang are pronounced. It works by giving each phonetic sound a single letter. For instance /g/ represents a hard g sound, and never a soft g (or English j) sound, which is represented by /dʒ/. Some sounds (like the previously mentioned /dʒ/) may instead be represented by two letters if they are actually made up of more than one 'pure' phonetic sound. For instance, the 'ch' sound is represented as /tʃ/ because it's actually made up of a 't' and 'sh' sound. The 'ow' sound (as in n'''ow''') is represented as /aw/ because it's actually a combination of an 'ah' and an 'w' sound juxtaposed. A compound vowel sound like this is called a diphthong.[[note]]Consonants are called occlusives if they are stops and affricates if they have two points of articulation, like /tʃ/ [[/note]]

There are many, many possible consonants. There are slightly less many vowels. A realistic conlang is unlikely to use exact same set of sounds as English.[[note]]The English "th" sound is actually quite rare, for instance.[[/note]] A conlang that is designed to sound exotic or alien, like Klingon, may include some unusual consonants while missing out common sounds like /k/.

* How many vowel sounds a language have can vary considerably. As mentioned already, English has quite a lot of monophthongs (i.e. vowel sounds that aren't diphthongs). Most other Germanic languages have a fairly big inventory, Dutch having 19 monothongs and 4 diphthongs. Others have less; Spanish only really has 5, while the late Ubykh got by with ''2''[[note]]If that's not enough for you, some analyses of Nuxálk treat it as having only one vowel, and Dahalo has been analyzed as having ''none''—that is to say, its vowels aren't meaningful but can be predicted from context in a word[[/note]].

* Some languages such as Chinese make use of the tone that a vowel is said with. Thus "ma" can mean mother, "hemp", "horse" or "scold", depending on the intonation it is said with. An similar example in English would be the difference between [[FlatWhat "What."]] and "What (the hell)?!"

If you still can't decide on an inventory, it might be helpful to know that the most common consonants are /p, t, k, s, m, n, l/ and the most common vowels are /a, i, u/. All languages have most of these sounds, and most languages have all of these sounds.

A noun is a person, a place, an object or an idea.

A few other languages have seperate plural forms, such as a seperate plural for 'two' or for a very large number.

Most people who have already learned a foreign language will have already met 'gender marking'. Many languages like French amd Spanish divide nouns into 'masculine' and 'feminine' categories, even if they aee inanimate objects. Others like German and Russian add 'neuter' as a third category. And others like Swedish have genders that are not based around masculine and feminine. Some have 'animate' or 'inanimate' genders.

Although nouns that are clearly related to one gender tend to take the same gender in grammar, often it has more to do with the noun's ending. The German word for girl (''Mädchen'') is neuter, because all German words that end with ''-chen'' are neuter.

If used, gender tends to affect the articles the noun takes, what adjectices it takes and what pronouns replace it. Occasionally it can affect verbs as well.

Other languages hace a far more complex system of cases, usually by changing nouns for different types of object, amd sometimes changing other words like adjectives.

An extreme example is Latin, where nouns inflect for six (or seven) cases as well as singular/plural, amd do so with five patterns, plus a few exceptions!

Pronouns replace the noun. Most languages have seperate singular or plural pronouns, and also seperate ones for each grammatical 'person':

More exotically, some language have differenr pronouns for two people, for relatives and steangers, or for whether 'we' includes the person being spoken to or not.

!!!'''Adjectives'''
Adjectives describe a noun. These words are a simple matter in English. Many languages have adjectives that inflect to 'agree' with the noun. If the noun is plural, the adjectice takes a plural form. In languages that have gender marking, adjectives inflect more the noun's gender too. Some even inflect for the noun's case.

It is worth noting tbat while English puts adjectives in front of the noun, some languages prefer to put them after.

Synthetic languages use many verb inflections to signify not just tenses, but also whether the sibject was 1st, 2nd or 3rd person and whether they were singular or plural. French verbs can have up to about 40 different forms, and Latin verbs can have over 100.

In analytic languages, by contrast, verbs may not change at all. Chinese uses seperate words to mark whether an action is in the past or present, but also often relies only on the context.

* SOV (a tendency in Proto-Indo-European)

The morphological typology of a language determines how much words are inflected. It's best to imagine it as a triangle; in one corner, there are isolating languages (Chinese dialects, Hawaiian, most Southeast Asian languages, etc.), which have vary few inflections, instead opting for word order and and determiners; in another corner, there are agglutinating languages (Japanese, Nahuatl, Turkish, etc.), which have a one to one ratio of morphemes and their meaning (e.g. one affix for case and one for number); and in the third corner, there are fusional languages (Romance languages, Germanic languages, Semitic languages, etc.) which use one morpheme to refer to multiple meanings (e.g. one affix for both case and number). No natural language is 100% isolating, agglutinating or fusional; Mandarin Chinese has an agglutinating plural (''wǒ'' "I" but ''wǒmen'' "we") and Turkish pronouns show some fusion (''ben'' "I" and ''biz'' "we" but ''o'' "he/she/it" and ''onlar'' "they").

* Marc Okrand's Klingon, created for the ''Franchise/StarTrek'' cinematic universe. While not really a naturalistic language, its cultural influence is considerable and looking at how utterly different it is can be useful and/or at least instructive and inspirational.

In English, like most languages, a noun chamges if it is plural. A few nouns have an irregular plural (''children'') or none at all (''sheep'') but most follow a regular set of rules.

Although nouns that are clearly related to one gender tend to take that gender, often it has more to do with the noun's ending. The German word for girl (''Mädchen'') is neuter,because all German words that end with ''-chen'' are neuter.

Most people who has already learned a foreign language will have already met 'gender marking'.

* '''Lexical change:''' Words changed meaning, fell out of use entirely, or were borrowed. One prominent example is the word for "horse"--originally, this was ''equus'' in Latin. This fell out of use in Vulgar Latin, from which Romance developed; it borrowed a Celtic word for horse, which ended up as ''caballus'' (whence, say, French ''cheval''). Famously, Portuguese ''saudade'' (look up the definition, it's nuanced) came from Latin ''solitatem'', which just meant 'solitude'. The word "admiral" doesn't come from Latin, although it looks like it does; it's from Arabic ''amiir al-'' 'emir of'[[note]]the ''d'' is actually an instance of someone trying to make it look Latinate like it was "supposed" to be![[/note]].

So you've decided to create a conlang, whether to add some depth to your own setting or because you were paid to do so for someone else (lucky!). You love to read ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings'' and watch stuff like ''Franchise/StarTrek'', ''Series/{{Defiance}}'', ''Series/GameOfThrones'', and ''Film/ThorTheDarkWorld'', so you've decided to craft your own language.

* '''J.R.R. Tolkien'''. Tolkien's so-called "secret vice" led to '''Franchise/TheLordOfTheRings''' with its many languages. Why does Middle-Earth feel so alive? In large part because of its languages.

Sandhi covers the various sound changes which occur at morpheme and word boundaries - for example, the various ways the -s plural can be pronounced in English depending on the sound made before the plural, the way English uses "a" and "an" depending on what comes after the word, the way Japanese will sometimes substitute "g" for "k" in the middle of compound words like "hiragana" (hira + kana) and so on.

An animacy hierarchy is a set of rules governing what subjects can act on what objects or what actors can have certain roles in a sentence. [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animacy Wikipedia]] gives the typical hierarchy as:

The IPA is a valuable tool for displaying how words in a conlang are pronounced. It works by giving each phonetic sound a single letter. For instance /g/ represents a hard g sound, and never a soft g (or English j) sound, which is represented by /dʒ/. Some sounds (like the previously mentioned /dʒ/) may instead be represented by two letters if they are actually made up of more than one 'pure' phonetic sound. For instance, the 'ch' sound is represented as /tʃ/ because it's actually made up of a 't' and 'sh' sound. The 'ow' sound (as in n'''ow''') is represented as /aʊ/ because it's actually a combination of an 'ah' and an 'oo' sound merged together. A compound vowel sound like this is called a diphthong.[[note]]Consonants are called affricates if it is a stop and fricative or occlusives if they have two points of articulation, like /nm/ [[/note]]

A syllable can be divided into two parts: The ''onset'', or everything before the vowel (or syllabic consonant if you want to get fancy), and the ''rhyme'' (or ''rime''), which is everything from the vowel to the end. Rhymes can be further divided into two parts, the ''nucleus'', which is typically a vowel, and the ''coda'', which can either be consonant(s) or nothing. Linguistically, languages have a tendency to have larger onsets than codas[[note]]although, of course, there's a possible exception: In at least one analysis, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Arrernte_language Arrernte]] only has coda consonants[[/note]].

* Some languages such as Chinese make use of the tone that a vowel is said with. Thus "ma" can mean mother, "hemp", "horse" or "scold", depending on the intonation it is said with.

* '''Lexical change:''' Words changed meaning, fell out of use entirely, or were borrowed. One prominent example is the word for "horse"--originally, this was ''equus'' in Latin. This fell out of use in Vulgar Latin, from which Romance developed; it borrowed a Celtic word for horse, which ended up as ''caballus'' (whence, say, French ''cheval''). Famously, Portuguese ''saudade'' (look up the definition, it's nuanced) came from Latin ''solitatem'', which just meant 'solitude'. The word "admiral" doesn't come from Latin, although it looks like it does; it's from Arabic ''amiir al-'' 'emir of'[[note]]the ''d'' is actually an instance of someone trying to make it look Latinate like it was "supposed" to be![[/note]].

* How many vowel sounds a language have can vary considerably. As mentioned already, English has quite a lot of monophthongs (i.e. vowel sounds that aren't diphthongs). Most other Germanic languages have a fairly big inventory, Dutch having 19 monothongs and 4 diphthongs. Others have less; Spanish only really has 5, while Arabic gets by with ''3''.

* people

The IPA is a valuable tool for displaying how words in a conlang are pronounced. It works by giving each phonetic sound a single letter. For instance /g/ represents a hard g sound, and never a soft g sound. Some sounds may instead be represented by two letters if they are actually made up of more than one 'pure' phonetic sound. For instance, the 'ch' sound is represented as /tʃ/ because it's actually made up of a 't' and 'sh' sound. The 'ow' sound (as in n'''ow''') is represented as /aʊ/ because it's actually a combination of an 'ah' and an 'oo' sound merged together. A compound vowel sound like this is called a diphthong.

IPA is fairly intuitive for consonants. The main oddity is /j/, which represents the 'y' in '''y'''es. A few other symbols are brought in, such as /ʃ/ for the 'sh' sound. The vowels are trickier. English uses 5 vowels (and sometimes 'y' as well) to represent 4 times as many vowel sounds, including about 12 that aren't diphthongs. Not only that, but IPA is based off how the vowels were pronounced in Latin. English has significantly deviated from this, thanks to the Great Vowel Shift. For instance, the vowel sound in s'''ee''' is represented by /i/, because that's how "i" was pronounced in Latin.

There are many, many possible consonants. There are slightly less many vowels. A realistic conlang is unlikely to use exact same set of sounds as English.[[note]]The English "th" sound is actually quite rare, for instance.[[/note]] A conlang that is designed to sound exotic or alien, like Klingon, may include some unusual consonants while missing out common sounds like 'k'.

* '''Voiced or Voiceless...''' On a consonants chart, consonants come in pairs. For instance, /s/ is the voiceless counterpart to the voiced consonant /z/. Two counterparts like this may sometimes get swapped into each other. Notice how the "s" in "cabs" gets turned into a "z" when it comes after the voiced "b" consonant, and compare that to how it sounds in "maps". Most languages don't bother having this contrast for nasal consonants, but Icelandic is one that does.

* How many vowel sounds a language have can vary considerably. As mentioned already, English has quite a lot of monophthongs (i.e. vowel sounds that aren't diphthongs). Most other Germanic languages have a fairly big inventory. Others have less; Spanish only really has 5, while Arabic gets by with ''3''.

A syllable can be divided into two parts: The ''onset'', or everything before the vowel[[note]]or syllabic consonant[[/note]], and the ''rhyme'' (or ''rime''), which is everything from the vowel to the end. Rhymes can be further divided into two parts, the ''nucleus'', which is typically a vowel, and the ''coda'', which can either be consonant(s) or nothing. Linguistically, languages have a tendency to have larger onsets than codas[[note]]although, of course, there's a possible exception: In at least one analysis, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Arrernte_language Arrernte]] only has coda consonants[[/note]].

The IPA is a valuable tool for displaying how words in a conlang are pronounced. It works by giving each pure phoneme sound a single letter. For instance /g/ represents a hard g sound, and never a soft g sound. Some sounds may instead be represented by two letters if they are actually . For instance, the 'ch' sound is represented as /tʃ/ because it's actually made up of a 't' and 'sh' sound. The 'ow' sound (as in n'''ow''') is represented as /aʊ/ because it's actually a combination of an 'ah' and an 'oo' sound merged together. A compound vowel sound like this is called a diphthong.

* '''Voiced or Voiceless...''' On a consonants chart, consonants come in pairs. For instance, /s/ is the voiceless counterpart to the voiced consonant /z/. Two counterparts like this may sometimes get swapped into each other. . Most languages don't bother having this contrast for nasal consonants, but Icelandic is one that does.

Vowels are often divided into front vowels ("ee", "eh"), back vowels ("oo", "oh") and central vowels (which tend to sound duller). "ah" sounds can count as either, though most often as back vowels. Central vowels are rarer, and you usually have an equal or greater number of front vowels than back vowels[[note]]though this constraint does not always hold; some of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uto-Aztecan_languages Uto-Aztecan]] and [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gbe_languages Gbe]] languages are exceptions[[/note]].

* people
* nonhuman animates
* inanimates

where "1", "2", and "3" stand for those respective grammatical persons.

In essence, objects can appear in the agent role only if the patient role, if any, is either in the same tier or lower of the hierarchy—''e.g.'', a general word for a person can appear as the agent if an inanimate object is the patient, but not the other way around. Getting around this can be done in one of several ways—you can have suppletive words that appear higher on the hierarchy than their referents "should"; you can invent morphological processes to keep the roles or order of the words the same, but change the meaning; or you can forbid it entirely and have such concepts handled with semantics or circumlocutions.
!!!'''Alignment'''
It is useful to list several relevant terms for this section:
* '''A'''gent
* '''E'''xperiencer
* '''O'''bject
* '''P'''atient
* '''S'''ubject

There are some different possible ways for you to align your syntax.
* '''Nominative-accusative'''. A and E are marked the same (nominative), P is marked differently (accusative).
* '''Ergative-absolutive'''. P and E are marked the same (absolutive), A is marked differently (ergative).
* '''Transitive-intransitive'''. A and P are marked the same (transitive), E is marked differently (intransitive).
* '''Tripartite'''. A (agent), E (experiencer), and P (patient) are all marked differently.
* '''Split-ergative'''. Appears as ergative-absolutive sometimes, nominative-accusative in others, typically dependent upon the tense of the verb.
* '''Austronesian''' (''a.k.a.'' '''Philippine''' or '''direct-inverse'''). Nouns take either a "direct" marking if they're the subject or an "indirect" marking if they aren't, and the verb tells you what role the noun plays.
* '''Active-stative'''. Nouns that are the subject of an intransitive verb can either be in the A or E role, depending on certain conditions. There are two subtypes:
** ''Split-S'', where the role is a quirk of the particular verb in question.
** ''Fluid-S'', where you can use either, but there is a difference in connotation depending on whether the noun is marked for the A or E role.
!!!'''Typology'''
!!!'''Head-directionality'''
This is a fancy way of saying "does the main part of the concept come at the beginning or the end of the phrase?". In ''head-initial'' languages, the important word tends to come at the beginning of the phrase (for instance, nouns precede adjectives, verbs precede adverbs). In ''head-final'' languages, the opposite is true (nouns tend to follow adjectives, verbs tend to follow adverbs). According to [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-directionality_parameter Wikipedia]], no language is strictly head-initial or head-final in every category—it is a ''pattern'', not an exceptionless rule.
!!'''Linguistic Change'''
For bonus points as far as naturalism is concerned, you can put your language through the hourglass. There are three main types of linguistic change: '''Sound change''', '''lexical change''', and '''grammatical change'''.
!!!'''Sound change'''
These are optional, and could be placed under the phonology section (though the nesting would be a problem), but are recommended to add some organicity to your language. First, however, we're going to make a short aside about a resource for sound changes, the ''[[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17784007/Index.pdf Index Diachronica]]''; the sound changes in this section are sourced from it[[note]]the use of greater-than ( > ) or less-than ( < ) signs in this article is influenced more by academic literature; in the ''Index'', you'll see arrows used instead, but for the purposes of that document they mean the same thing (even though in academia they don't)[[/note]]. The ''Index Diachronica'' is a compendium of sound changes suggested to have happened in real languages; if you want to get a sense of naturalistic sound changes, this is a good place to start. The major drawback is that there is no way to search it easily[[note]]an artifact of the fact that it is coded in a typesetting program called [=LaTeX=][[/note]]. To understand how to use the ''Index'' (and to write your own sound changes), it may be helpful to see examples of sound changes written.

Here is a very simple sound change, from Anglo-Frisian to Old English:

ɑ̃ː > õː

What this means is that the original vowel *ɑ̃ː (in Anglo-Frisian) becomes the vowel õː in Old English, without condition—that is, it becomes õː everywhere.

Here's another sound change, this time from West Germanic to Anglo-Frisian:

h > Ø / V_V

This change means that the original *h sound of West Germanic is deleted in Anglo-Frisian. Note the part after the slash—this is the conditioning of the sound changes. A capital V means a vowel, and the null sign indicates nothing or zero. The underscore indicates that this is where the original sound was found.

From West Germanic to Anglo-Frisian again, introducing a few more concepts:

{u,i} > Ø / _# ! VC_

The fact that there are two sounds in brackets means that both have the same outcome—''i.e.'', both *u and *i become zero. The hashtag indicates a word boundary; since the underscore comes before the hashtag, it means that this happens at the end of a word (note that there's nothing stopping you from having sound changes apply across word boundaries—Celtic languages such as Irish got their eclipsis processes this way). The exclamation point means "except", and a capital C stands for any consonant, so this rule does not apply if the sound comes after a vowel-consonant sequence. Therefore, one can say that "the vowels *u and *i become zero at the end of a word unless following a vowel-consonant sequence".
!!!'''Lexical change'''
This is just how the meanings of words change over time.
!!!'''Grammatical change'''
!'''Extra Credit'''
!!'''The Greats'''
* '''J.R.R. Tolkien'''. Tolkien's so-called "secret vice" led to '''Franchise/TheLordOfTheRings''' with its many languages. Why does Middle-Earth feel so alive? In large part because of its languages.
* '''David J. Peterson''', full stop. The former president of the Language Creation Society, he created Dothraki for ''Series/GameOfThrones'' as well as the languages used in ''Film/ThorTheDarkWorld'', ''Series/{{Defiance}}'', ''Series/StarCrossed'', and ''Series/The100''.
* Marc Okrand's Klingon, created for the ''Franchise/StarTrek'' universe. While not really a naturalistic language, its cultural influence is considerable and looking at how utterly different it is can be useful and/or at least instructive and inspirational.
!!'''The Epic Fails'''
!'''Resources/Further Reading'''
* David J. Peterson's '''''The Art of Language Invention''''' deals with conlanging and features many relevant examples from both natural and constructed languages.
* The '''[[http://concepticon.clld.org/ Concepticon]]''' is a good way to build a starting vocabulary for a conlang.
* The '''[[http://aveneca.com/cbb/index.php New Conlang Bulletin Board]]''', a community for language creators.
* Marc Rosenfelder's '''''A Conlanger's Lexipedia''''' provides ideas on coining words with etymologies attested in natural languages.
* '''[[http://www.etymonline.com/ Etymonline]]''', a database about the origins of words in English.
* "'''[[http://dedalvs.conlang.org/notes/ergativity.php Ergativity]]'''", by David J. Peterson. Notes on how to derive (split-)ergative languages from languages that were originally nominative-accusative.
* '''[[http://www.frathwiki.com/Main_Page FrathWiki]]''', a conlanging wiki.
* The aforementioned '''''[[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17784007/Index.pdf Index Diachronica]]''''' is a resource for those interested in naturalistic sound changes.
* Marc Rosenfelder's '''''[[http://www.zompist.com/kit.html Language Construction Kit]]''''' is a good starting place for those who want to build their own languages. Rosenfelder literally wrote the book on conlanging—the Kit is available in two volumes.
* '''[[http://www.omniglot.com/ Omniglot]]''', a source for looking at the various writing systems of the world (and invented ones).
* redditor /u/yaesen's "'''[[https://www.reddit.com/r/neography/comments/2kxofa/on_generating_ideograms/ On Generating Ideograms]]'''" can [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin help with creating ideograms]].
* '''[[http://gesc19764.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/vowels/vowel_systems.html A Survey of some Vowel Systems]]''' is a good resource for making your vowels naturalistic.
* '''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page Wikipedia]]''' has a large amount of information on linguistics topics.
* The '''[[http://wals.info/ World Atlas of Language Structures]] (WALS)''' is a database of the features of natural languages. One can find data sets and examples there and can even compare multiple features across languages, which can be useful in getting ideas on how to proceed if a language already has certain features.
* Marc Rosenfelder's page on '''[[http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm yingzi]]''' is a good place to start for those of you who want to create logograms.
* The '''[[http://www.incatena.org/index.php Zompist Bulletin Board]]''', run by Marc Rosenfelder, is a community of conlangers (as well as a forum for his own projects, such as the world of Almea).

So you've decided to create a conlang, whether to add some depth to your own setting or because you were paid to do so for someone else (lucky!). You love to read ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings'' and watch stuff like ''Franchise/StarTrek'', ''LiveActionTV/{{Defiance}}'', ''LiveActionTV/GameOfThrones'', and ''Film/ThorTheDarkWorld'', so you've decided to craft your own language.

* VSO ([[https://wiki.dothraki.org/Syntax#Topicality.2C_Emphasis_and_the_Old_Word_Order Old]] [[LiveActionTV/GameOfThrones Dothraki]])

* '''David J. Peterson''', full stop. The former president of the Language Creation Society, he created Dothraki for ''LiveActionTV/GameOfThrones'' as well as the languages used in ''Film/ThorTheDarkWorld'', ''LiveActionTV/{{Defiance}}'', ''LiveActionTV/StarCrossed'', and ''LiveActionTV/The100''.

So you've decided to create a conlang, whether to add some depth to your own setting or because you were paid to do so for someone else (lucky!). You love to read ''Literature/LordOfTheRings'' and watch stuff like ''Franchise/StarTrek'', ''LiveActionTV/{{Defiance}}'', ''LiveActionTV/GameOfThrones'', and ''Film/ThorTheDarkWorld'', so you've decided to craft your own language.

There are many, many possible consonants. There are slightly less many vowels.

One thing you're going to want to do to keep your phonology naturalistic is not to just dump a pile of random consonants and vowels into your language. There tends to be some form of symmetry in consonant inventories, though you don't have to have ''complete'' symmetry; gaps in consonant systems are perfectly naturalistic as long as you don't go overboard. In terms of vowels, central vowels are rarer, and you usually have an equal or greater number of front vowels than back vowels[[note]]though this constraint does not always hold; some of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uto-Aztecan_languages Uto-Aztecan]] and [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gbe_languages Gbe]] languages are exceptions[[/note]].

One thing you're going to want to do to keep your phonology naturalistic is not to just dump a pile of random consonants and vowels into your language. There tends to be some form of symmetry in consonant inventories, though you don't have to have ''complete'' symmetry; gaps in consonant systems are perfectly naturalistic as long as you don't go overboard. In terms of vowels, central vowels are rarer, and you usually have an equal or greater number of front vowels than back vowels[[note]]though this constraint does not always hold; some of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uto-Aztecan_languages Uto-Aztecan]] and [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gbe_languages Gbe]] languages are exceptions]].

!!'''Writing'''
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!!'''Stunt Department'''