History SoYouWantTo / CreateAConlang

* 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).

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. Some famous conlangs, such as [[UsefulNotes/EsperantoTheUniversalLanguage Esperanto]] and Lojban, were designed to be as logical as possible, rather than to feel like natural languages.

#First, you should start with the ''phonology'', deciding which sounds are used in the language. 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.

#Finally, you have the task of creating a ''lexicon'' – the actual words.

* How many vowel sounds a language has 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 monophthongs 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]].

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 French drops most consonants on the ends of words, the way Japanese will sometimes substitute "g" for "k" in compound words like "hiragana" (hira + kana) and so on.

Derivational morphology changes the meaning or type of word. To state that someone writes habitually, you can add "-er" to the verb "write" to make the noun "writer," and to state that someone gives glory, you can add "-ify" to "glory" to make the verb "glorify." Some can change within the same category, such as making adjective "reddish" from adjective "red," or verb "encircle" from verb "circle." Multiple affixes can go onto a word, such as making "conceive"--think about--into "inconceivable"--cannot be thought about.

Fusional languages often carry multiple meanings within a single morpheme. This is found in many Indo-European languages like German and Latin, and Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew. In Spanish, the word "hablo" means "I speak," with the suffix -o meaning first person, singular number, and present tense.

Tense marks the time an action took place in. Generally, English people are taught that the language has three tenses: past ("ate"), present ("eat"), and future ("will eat"), although technically it only has two marked tenses--past and non-past. Some languages distinguish between the recent and remote past, such as in Italian--the ''passato prossimo'', found in ''hai amato'' (you loved recently), and the ''passato remoto'' ''amasti'' (you loved).

Tense marks the time an action took place in. Generally, English people are taught that the language has three tenses: past ("ate"), present ("eat"), and future ("will eat"), although technically it only has two marked tenses--past and non-past. Some languages distinguish between the recent and remote past, such as in Italian--the ''passato prossimo'', found in ''hai amato'' (you loved recently), and the ''passato remoto'' (amasti, you loved).

!!'''The Goods and the Mixed Bags'''

If phonology is the building blocks of a language, then grammar is the blueprint. It tells the speaker how to put the words together in ways that make sense through specific categories. These can be roughly divided between action words (verbs) and substantive words (nouns, pronouns, modifiers, etc.), and can

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 are inanimate objects. Others like German, Russian and Latin add 'neuter' as a third gender. And others like Swedish and Dutch have genders that are not based around masculine and feminine. Some have 'animate' or 'inanimate' genders, and Bantu languages like Swahili have up to ''18'' 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 adjectives it takes, and what pronouns replace it. Occasionally it can affect verbs as well.

Some languages have inflections for nouns based on their role in a sentence, called ''cases''. A simple example is Esperanto, which states that if a noun is the direct object of a sentence, the suffix '-n' is added. This is called the accusative case. Another example is how English inflects nouns to show possession with '-'s.' This possessive form is formally called the genitive case.

These basic cases also have opposites: in Basque, for instance, the subject and direct object are marked as the ''absolutive'' case, and the agent of a transitive verb is marked separately as the ''ergative''. In Persian, the final noun in a phrase takes a suffix ''-(y)e'' to be marked in the ''construct state'' before a possessor's noun.

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

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. In Spanish and Latin, subject pronouns are usually dropped because the verb tends to make it clear what the subject pronoun would be.

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. Occasionally, some verbs are irregular (like ''to be'' in English) because they were formed by different conjugations of verbs merging; these are called ''suppletive'' verbs.

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. In English, the present tense is sometimes used to talk about future events ("We are catching the train at 10 o'clock tomorrow."). Chinese goes further by not actually having a future tense.

English leans towards being analytic. Most verbs have only four forms (''walk'', ''walks'', ''walking'', ''walked''). Some have five (''do'', ''does'', ''did'', ''done'', ''doing''), and others have three (''put'', ''puts'', ''putting''). The odd one out 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'').

* '''...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 difference 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.

!!!'''The syllable'''
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. This is because generally speaking, it's easier to hear a consonant when it comes before a vowel rather than after it[[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]].

Still others have completely different numbers, like Arabic's dual for specifically two of something, or Kurmanji's paucal for a few of something; the Na'vi language in ''Film/{{Avatar}}'' also has a mandatory trial number for exactly three of something. The dual is by far the most common of the non-singular/plural numbers, given that many things come in natural pairs, such as the parts of the body. Even languages that don't have the actual dual often distinguish it; think ''both'' vs. ''all''; ''between'' vs. ''among''; ''either'' vs. ''any''.

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 are inanimate objects. Others like German, Russian and Latin add 'neuter' as a third gender. And others like Swedish and Dutch 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 adjectives it takes, and what pronouns replace it. Occasionally it can affect verbs as well.

Some languages have inflections for nouns based on their role in a sentence, called ''cases''. A simple example is Esperanto, which states that if a noun is the direct object of a sentence, the suffix '-n' is added. This is called the accusative case. Another example is how English inflects nouns to show possession. This possessive form is formally called the genitive case. Other languages have a more complex system of cases, usually by distinguishing the type of object. For example, German distinguishes between accusative for direct objects and ''dative'' for indirect. Latin also distinguishes motion away from someplace (the ''ablative'') and address (the ''vocative'') in five separate patterns. Dravidian languages like Malayalam and Tamil add a ''locative'' to show location, ''instrumental'' to show means of accomplishment, and ''comitative''[[note]]called ''sociative'' in Dravidian tradition[[/note]] to show accompaniment or association. But that's not even the most complex language. Uralic languages like Hungarian distinguish between 18 different cases!

* 2nd person: You

The single/plural divide is less common for the second person. Not only does English use ''you'' for both, but many European languages use the plural form as the polite singular form.

Pronouns are far more inflectional than their respective nouns. Sometimes, pronouns change for gender where nouns are not marked for it. As in English, a language that lacks grammatical gender, this is often limited to the third person; Arabic, a language with grammatical gender, also distinguishes it in the second. Pronouns usually change for case (''I'' for a subject, ''me'' for an object), even in languages that do not have noun cases, as in most Romance languages. Some languages which lack a dual number for nouns may have them in pronouns, like Hawaiian. Some may distinguish between relatives and strangers in the third person. One of the more common distinctions is whether 'we' includes the addressee or not--inclusive vs. exclusive. However, formality is also a rather common part of such systems; think Spanish's ''tú'' vs. ''usted'', where the former is used for familiarity or subordinates, and the latter used for politeness or superiors.

Adpositions are words that describe relation between nouns. These tend to be used more often with languages that do not have extensive case systems. For instance, while Latin had five cases for each noun, prepositions such as "cum," "ad," "ab," and "in" filled semantic roles that could not be filled by the case system. In fact, prepositions could mean different things for different cases: while "ad astra" (accusative) means "to the stars," "ad astrīs" (ablative) means "in the stars." While Hindustani only has two true cases, nominative and oblique, its adpositions function essentially as case markers. "Ne" marks the ''ergative'' case, "ko" marks the accusative-dative case, "kaa" marks the genitive case, "ke" and "par" mark two different locatives, and so forth.

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. For the purposes of this article, we are defining "tense" loosely to include things that linguists would rather call an aspect, mood, or voice.

A realistic conlang is likely to have some differences with the tenses compared to English. English has two manners of expressing the present, distinguished by ''aspect''; where "I stop" signifies completion, "I am stopping" signifies incompletion. The former is ''perfective'' and the latter is ''imperfective''. English subdivides this aspect further in the past, where you could say "I was stopping" (''progressive'' or ''continuous'') or "I used to stop" (''habitual''). Few languages use progressive tenses in the present as often as English, and many have none at all. German, for instance, completely lacks aspect, while Hindustani distinguishes perfective, continuous, and habitual in the present ''and'' past. Mayan languages even lack tense altogether, instead opting to simply using imperfective and perfective aspect for telling stories[[note]]this is not as complicated as one may think; compare "I stopped when he said" vs. "I was stopping when he said"[[/note]].

The ''conditional'' revolves around what ''would'' be if a certain condition were met. In Romance and Germanic languages, this is often expressed using future verbs inflected for past modality; "would" is actually the past tense of "will" in English. However, languages like Hindustani prefer to express it as the past tense of a subjunctive verb; in that sense, it functions more as a ''counterfactual'' mood.

* '''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]].

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

Most poetry does not rhyme. In fact, most spoken English poetry does not rhyme either, but people will be more familiar with the forms that do. Latin poetry does not usually rhyme, because so many words have the same endings and therefore a rhyme is not impressive. In English poetry, it is harder to find rhymes, which makes them sound in more impressive. And that highlights an important part of how poetry works: it works if the poet can impress the listener (or reader) by coming up with lines within the constraints of its pattern. The pattern may be a popular poetic pattern, such as sonnets and limericks, some poems create their own patterns and constraints.

* '''Abugida:''' An abugida is an alphabet in which the letters are consonants, and the vowels are shown as markings on the consonants or changes to them. Since most languages have more consonants than vowels, no language has been known to do it in reverse, although it is theoretically possible. Devanagari and most other writing systems that originated in India are abugidas, as is the Ge'ez (Ethiopian) alphabet.

* '''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''.

* Paul Frommer's Na'vi language, created for ''Film/Avatar''.

#First, you should start with the ''phonology'', deciding which sounds are used in 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]].

A realistic conlang is likely to have some differences with the tenses compared to English. English has two present tenses (''I stop'' and ''I am stopping'', the latter is the progressive present). Many languages have just one. Few languages use progressive tenses as often as English, and many have none at all. Conversely, languages tend to distinguish between more forms of the past than English, most often between imperfective (continuous, habitual, or interrupted actions) and perfective (completed or isolated actions). Spanish distinguishes the perfective past (''preterito'') from the imperfective past (''copreterito''), while Hindustani distinguishes perfective, continuous, and habitual.



Here are some other forms that exist:
* Pluperfect: ''I had stopped'' –- Also called the ''past perfect'', used to describe events that were relevant or recent in the past but are not anymore.
* Imperative: ''Stop!''
* Passive voice: ''I was stopped by the police'' -– Allows the subject and object to switch places.
* Conditional: ''I would stop'' –- Used to describe the future from the point of view the past (e.g. ''He said he would visit the next day''), but it also has other uses (e.g. ''I would stop by if I wasn't so busy'').
* Subjunctive: Some languages like French and Spanish have separate tense(s) to signal that the action is hypothetical or uncertain. This has mostly gone from English, but it appears in formal speech and sayings like ''If I were you''.
* The default form of a verb is called the ''infinitive'', which in English and some other languages, looks the same as the simple present form.

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. Most European languages have singular and plural nouns, but some, like Welsh, also follow collective-singulative morphology, where the plural is unmarked and one part of a whole is marked instead[[note]]sometimes the plural in these systems is explicitly marked, and is then called the ''plurative''--many of a whole[[/note]]. Still others have completely different numbers, like Arabic's dual for specifically two of something, or Kurmanji's paucal for a few of something; the Na'vi language in ''Film/{{Avatar}}'' also has a mandatory trial number for exactly three of something. The dual is by far the most common of the non-singular/plural numbers, given that many things come in natural pairs, such as the parts of the body. Even languages that don't have the actual dual often distinguish it; think ''both'' vs. ''all''; ''between'' vs. ''among''; ''either'' vs. ''any''.

Some languages have inflections for nouns based on their role in a sentence, called ''cases''. A simple example is Esperanto, which states that if a noun is the direct object of a sentence, the suffix '-n' is added. This is called the accusative case. Another example is how English inflects nouns to show possession. (Other languages get by without this. For example, 'the girl's jumper' is said in French as 'the jumper of the girl'.) This possessive form is formally called the genitive case.

Other languages have a more complex system of cases, usually by changing nouns for different types of object–-German distinguishes between accusative for direct objects and dative for indirect. Latin also distinguishes motion away from someplace--the ablative--and address--the vocative--in five patterns, with some irregularities. But that's not even the most complex language. Uralic languages like Hungarian distinguish between '''''18''''' different cases!

Many languages use case marking to differentiate how nouns act. Those most often distinguished are the experiencer of an intransitive verb (E), agent of a transitive verb (A), and patient of an action (P). These are divided into separate forms based on which is marked.
* Nominative-accusative (Accusativity): Experiencer like agent, patient differentiated. Most Indo-European languages, including English.
** Nominative-absolutive (Marked-nominative): Experiencer and agent marked, patient form used as dictionary form.
* Ergative-absolutive (Ergativity): Experiencer like patient, agent differentiated. Basque.
* Split-ergativity: Marking of subject vs. object depends on verbal aspect, tense, or mood. Hindustani and other Indo-Aryan languages.
* Direct alignment: No distinguishment. Iranian languages.
* Transitive alignment: Agent like patient, often differentiated from experiencer. A few Iranian languages.
* Ergative-accusative (Tripartite): Experiencer, agent, and patient all differentiated. Na'vi.
* Active-stative: Experiencer sometimes like agent, sometimes like patient. Agentive experiencer more often marked. Lakhota.
** Split-S: Depends strictly on the verb.
** Fluid-S: Depends on the subject's volition.
Note that these are not stark divides. While English clearly has nominative-accusative alignment, some verbs have ergativity. Compare: "The documents burned." with "They burned the documents."

Aside from the morphosyntactic cases, the most common noun cases are:
* Genitive: Shows possession or relation. English.
* Dative: Indirect object, beneficiary, goal of motion. German.
* Locative: Location, object of preposition. Polish.
** Inessive: Location inside something. Finnish.
** Adessive: Location nearby something. Estonian.
* Ablative: Motion away from something, source. Latin.
* Instrumental: Means of doing something. Russian.
* Comitative: Accompaniment or association. Finnish.
* Vocative: Direct address.
The reason why the Uralic languages have so many cases is that they use them in many places where other languages would use a preposition (e.g. "from [Noun]" and "as [Noun]").

Pronouns are far more inflectional than their respective nouns. Sometimes, pronouns change for gender (whether actual or grammatical) or for human/inanimate nouns. As in English, this is often limited to the third person, though Arabic also distinguishes it in the second. Pronouns usually change for case (''I'' for a subject, ''me'' for an object), even in languages that do not have noun cases, as in most Romance languages. Some languages which lack a dual number for nouns may have them in pronouns, like Hawaiian. Some may distinguish between relatives and strangers in the third person. One of the more common distinctions is whether 'we' includes the addressee or not--inclusive vs. exclusive.

!!!'''Adjectives, Adverbs, and Adpositions'''

Adpositions are words that describe relation between nouns. These tend to be used more often with languages that do not have extensive case systems. For instance, while Latin had five cases for each noun, prepositions such as "cum," "ad," "ab," and "in" filled semantic roles that could not be filled by the case system. In fact, prepositions could mean different things for different cases: while "ad astra" (accusative) means "to the stars," "ad astrīs" (ablative) means "in the stars." While Hindustani only has two true cases, nominative and oblique, its adpositions function essentially as case markers. The postposition "ne" serves to mark the ergative case, "ko" to mark the accusative-dative case, and "kaa" to mark the genitive.

!!!'''Articles'''
Articles are words for "the" and "a"/"an". Words meaning "the" are definite articles, and words for "a"/"an" are indefinite articles. They could arguably be seen as a special type of adjective. As with adjectives, some languages, but not English, change the article depending on the noun being singular/plural, its gender, and (more rarely) its case.

Although they are very common words in the languages that have them, ("the" is the most common word in the English language) other languages don't use articles. Russian is one example, hence the stereotype of Russians not saying "the" when speaking English. Chinese and Japanese also don't use articles. And when languages without articles learn ones with them, the distinction may seem arbitrary--what difference really is there between "the thing" and "this/that thing?" Conversely, French requires articles to be used for all nouns unless they are the name of something and has another set of articles for uncountable nouns (i.e. you can't just say "add sugar" in French, you have to say "add some sugar"). The Scandinavian languages have replaced the separate definite articles with suffixes that are added to the nouns.

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. In Spanish and Latin, subject pronouns are usually dropped, because the verb tends to make it clear what the subject pronoun would be.

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. Occasionally, some verbs are irregular (like ''to be'' in English) because they were formed by different conjugations of verbs merging.

A realistic conlang is likely to have some differences with the tenses compared to English. English has two present tenses (''I stop'' and ''I am stopping'', the latter is the progressive present). Many languages have just one. Few languages use progressive tenses as often as English, and many have none at all. Conversely, languages tend to distinguish between more forms of the past than English, most often between imperfect (continuous, habitual, or interrupted actions) and aorist or perfect (completed or isolated actions). English, French, German, and Spanish all allow a past tense to be formed with the word ''to have'', but what that tense means compared to other past tenses can be very different. Most often it means that the action is relevant to the present--this is called the ''perfect'', and in some cases, it may form a distinguishment between the recent and remote past.

!!!'''Animacy Hierarchy'''
Some languages, such as English, don't really have these, but there are those that do, such as Navajo. 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:

* 1
* 2
* 3
* names
* 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 a 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.

* '''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]].

* Instrumental: Tool by which something is done. Russian.
* Comitative: Person with which something is done. Often combined with instrumental.

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

* The best way to get prepared to is to learn another language. It's the best way to allow you to get to grips with some of the concepts described here and to move beyond the confines of the English language. As the Language Construction Kits notes, conlangers who only know English are "doomed to produce ciphers of English."

* '''...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.

A conlang has to be very well developed before you can have a realistic idea about how poetry — including song lyrics — would work in the language. You need to have an idea on how its prosody works. It may also help to have some idea on the fictional history of the language. However, an exception can be made if you just want to throw in some brief poetry to a story are not planning to develop your conlang in detail, and therefore don't need a detailed understanding of why it sounds poetic.

Poetry is designed to have a rhythm, with lines having matching lengths or at least following some sort of pattern. Exactly what makes a workable rhythm varies by language. In French, every syllable has equal length and stress, and so it is important in French poetry to have matching numbers of syllables. The different with Latin poetry is that some syllables are longer than others. In English, syllables get stretched and squashed because it's ''stress'' rather than the precise number of syllables that determines the rhythm of the line.

Most poetry does not rhyme. In fact, most spoken English poetry does not rhyme either, but people will be more familiar with the forms that do. Latin poetry does not rhyme at all, because so many words have the same endings and so a rhyme is not impressive. In English poetry, it is harder to find rhymes, which makes them sound in more impressive. And that highlights an important part of how poetry works: it works if the poet can impress the listener (or reader) by coming up with lines within the constraints of the poetic format. The format may be a popular poetic structure, such as sonnets and limericks, but the constraints may be something created and implied by the poem itself.

* The best way to get prepared to is to learn another language. It's the best way to allow you to get to grips with some of the concepts described here and to move beyond the confines of the English language.

* '''Logography:''' Each word has its own symbol. Examples of this include Chinese and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Learning to read and write Chinese means learning 2-3,000 symbols. The earliest writings were logographies. Writing was invented independently in at least four human civilizations and in all four cases, it started out as picture symbols. Over time, many symbols (and symbol meanings) changed so that for many of them, it was no longer obvious what they represented. In addition, new symbols were created by merging other symbols, sometimes more based on their sound rather than their meaning.

* '''True alphabet:''' Some linguists limit the word 'alphabet' to mean not just any writing system, but one which has consonants and vowels as letters. Almost all of these alphabets used in the world today are descendants of the Greek alphabet, apart from the Hangul (Korean) alphabet.

* '''Don't try to do or have everything.''' There is a lot of different sounds and concepts in linguistics. Don't try to shove everything into a language. This is not to say you can't have languages that involve a lot of sounds or concepts—just don't bite off more than you can chew.

An alien language may come from a species whose mouths have different features to humans, and therefore they may not have consonants that are common in human languages, while also having consonants that are either rare or completely new. For example, an alien species with no tongue will only be able to make consonants that involve the lips and throat, and will also be able to create less vowels. It may take a more detailed knowledge of how consonants to have a realistic idea of what the differences might be.

* Bilbaridion's conlangs. Although not much information is available beyond what is shown in his showcase videos on [=YouTube=], even that alone shows how much effort and ideas he has put into making them.

* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjDqBz7kw1M Bilbaridion uses his first attempt to create a conlang]] as an example of how not to do it.

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. Some famous conlangs, such as [[UsefulNotes/EsperantoTheUniversalLanguage Esperanto]] and Lojban, were designed to be as logical as possible, rather than to feel like natural languages. Not all conlangs made for artwork have been naturalistic either. One example is [[Franchise/StarTrek Klingon]], one of the most famous fictional languages, which is deliberately designed to sound alien.

* '''Syllabary:''' Each possible syllable has its own symbol. The Linear B system from Ancient Crete is a pure example. Japanese is a hybrid system, combining a logography (''kanji'') with a syllabary (''kana''). Japanese is suited for a syllabary because it only permits CV syllables (one consonant, one vowel). For languages which allow more complicated syllables like CVC and CCVC, a syllabary quickly becomes impractical. A syllabary is likely to originate from a logography. Other forms of writing system are likely to come from a syllabary.

* '''True alphabet:''' Some linguists limit the word 'alphabet' to mean not just any writing system, but one which has consonants and vowels as letters. Almost all pure alphabets used in the world today are descendants of the Greek alphabet, apart from the Hangul (Korean) alphabet.

* 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.

A conlang has to be very well developed before you can have a realistic idea about how poetry — including song lyrics — would work in the language. You need to have an idea on how its prosody works. It may also help to have some idea on the fictional history of the language.

* The less the symbols represent, the less complicated they should be.

English does have another inflection for nouns: to show possession. Other languages get by without one. For example, 'the girl's jumper' is said in French as 'the jumper of the girl'. This is an example of a noun ''case''. In English, this would formally be the genitive. 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 direct object of a sentence, the suffix '-n' is added. This is called the accusative case. Other languages have a more complex system of cases, usually by changing nouns for different types of object–-German distinguishes between accusative for direct objects and dative for indirect. Latin also distinguishes motion away from someplace--the ablative--and address--the vocative--in five patterns, with some irregularities. But that's not even the most complex language. Uralic languages like Hungarian distinguish between '''''18''''' different cases!

* redditor /u/yaesen's "'''[[https://www.reddit.com/r/neography/comments/2kxofa/on_generating_ideograms/ On Generating Ideograms]]'''" can [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin help with creating ideograms]].

There are many, many possible consonants. There are slightly fewer vowels. A realistic conlang is unlikely to use the 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/.

Sometimes, pronouns change for gender (whether actual or grammatical) or for human/inanimate nouns. As in English, this is often limited to the third person.

Pronouns usually change for case (''I'' for a subject, ''me'' for an object), even in languages that do not have noun cases, as in most Romance languages.

Some languages which lack a dual number for nouns may have them in pronouns, like Hawaiian. Some may distinguish between relatives and strangers in the third person. One of the more common distinctions is whether 'we' includes the addressee or not--inclusive vs. exclusive.

Although they are very common words in the languages that have them, ("the" is the most common word in the English language) other languages don't use articles. Russian is one example, hence the stereotype of Russians not saying "the" when speaking English. Chinese and Japanese also don't use articles. Conversely, French requires articles to be used for all nouns, unless they are the name of something, and has another set of articles for uncountable nouns (i.e. you can't just say "add sugar" in French, you have to say "add some sugar"). The Scandinavian languages have replaced the separate definite articles with suffixes that are added to the nouns.

English leans towards being analytic. Most verbs have only four forms (''walk'', ''walks'', ''walking'', ''walked''). Some have five (''do'', ''does'', ''did'', ''done'', ''doing''). The odd one out 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'').

A realistic conlang is likely to have some differences with the tenses compared to English. English has two present tenses (''I stop'' and ''I am stopping'', the latter is the progressive present). Many languages have just one. Few languages use progressive tenses as often as English, and many have none at all. English, French, German, and Spanish all allow a past tense to be formed with the word ''to have'', but what that tense means compared to other past tenses can be very different. Most often it means that the action is relevant to the present--this is called the ''perfect'', and in some cases it even overtakes the simple past.

* Pluperfect: ''I had stopped'' – A 'double past' tense.

* Passive voice: ''I was stopped by the police'' – Allows the subject and object to switch places.
* Conditional: ''I would stop'' – Used to describe the future from the point of view the past (e.g. ''He said he would visit the next day'') but it also has other uses (e.g. ''I would stop by if I wasn't so busy'').
* Subjunctive: Some languages like French and Spanish have separate tense(s) to signal that the action is hypothetical or uncertain. This has mostly gone from English, but it appears in sayings like ''If I were you''.
The default form of a verb is called the ''infinitive'', which in English and some other languages, looks the same as the simple present form.

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.

The morphological typology of a language determines how many 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 very few inflections, instead opting for word order 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").

* '''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".)

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. Most European languages have singular and plural nouns. 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 are inanimate objects. Others like German, Russian and Latin add 'neuter' as a third gender. And others like Swedish and Dutch 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 adjectives it takes, and what pronouns replace it. Occasionally it can affect verbs as well.

English does have another inflection for nouns: to show possession. Other languages get by without one. For example, 'the girl's jumper' is said in French as 'the jumper of the girl'.

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 articles and 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!

Pronouns usually change for case (''I'' for a subject, ''me'' for an object), even in languages like French that do not have noun cases.

More exotically, some languages have different pronouns for two people, for relatives and strangers, or for whether 'we' includes the person being spoken to or not.

It is worth noting that while English adjectives, adverbs, and adpositions are prepositive (before the noun), some languages prefer postpositions. Adjectives in the Romance languages are postpositive with adverbs coming before them, and adpositions in Turkish are postpositive.

Articles are words for "the" and "a"/"an". Words meaning "the" are definite articles, and words for "a"/"an" are indefinite articles. They could arguably be seen as a special type of adjective. As with adjectives, some languages, but not English, change the article depending on the noun being singular/plural, its gender and (more rarely) its case.

Although they are very common words in the languages that have them, ("the" is the most common word in the English language) other languages don't use articles. Russian is one example, hence the stereotype of Russians not saying "the" when speaking English. Chinese and Japanese also don't use articles. Conversely, French requires articles be used for all nouns, unless they are the name of something, and has another set of articles for an uncountable nouns (i.e. you can't just say "add sugar" in French, you have to say "add some sugar"). The Scandinavian languages have replaced the separate definite articles with suffixes that are added to the nouns.

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. For the purposes of this article, we are defining "tense" loosely to include things that linguists would rather call an aspect, mood or voice.

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. Occasionally, some verbs are irregular (like ''to be'' in English) because they were formed by more than one word merging.

A realistic conlang is likely to have some differences with the tenses compared to English. English has two present tenses (''I stop'' and ''I am stopping'', the latter is the progressive present). Many languages have just one. Few languages use progressive tenses as often as English, and many have none at all. English, French, German and Spanish all allow a past tense to be formed with the word ''to have'', but what that tense means compared to other past tenses can be very different.

Here are some other forms that exist in English alone: