One of the more curious aspects of humans is the trouble they have communicating. But even that isn't enough for some insane people, and they invent new languages.

What? you say. A new language? How is that possible? Well, you start at the beginning and go from there.

How do they go about it?

These people, calling themselves conlangers, often begin with making a formal phonology. The first step is the inventory, or set of acceptable sounds in the language. Usually, the pronunciation is modified after creation, and sometimes sounds are removed or added. Syllable style is how these sounds can be arranged, and this too can be changed.

After these are somewhat set, conlangers diverge. Some prefer to begin making words at first, while others enjoy the morphosyntax (that is, grammar) more. However, very few conlangers choose one to the exclusion of the other. Grammar is useless without words to apply it to, and words are difficult to use without grammar.

Of course, few are the constructed languages (conlangs) that have grown in vocabulary to a speakable level. Many conlangs end at a young age. Some of them have several thousand words before their creator ends, as the creator is usually very attached to a language if it manages to become so large. Others entertain the maker for just a few dozen words.

Types of Conlangs

The easiest conlangs are pidgins, made because people are not fluent in the same languages. If I, being an anglophone (one who speaks English), married a Dutch woman who spoke only a little bit of English, we would probably end up speaking a mixture of the languages.

Artlangs are made for pleasure. These are most of the fully constructed languages, estimated to be over 90% of them. They are almost all beautiful by the creator's standards, except perhaps for Maggel, which was created by the famed Christophe Grandsire. Artlangs are usually personal, private projects, and many artlangers haven't yet come out of the closet. So if you meet someone that might be dabbling in linguistic creations, be supportive and don't press them to reveal too much. Also remember that beauty is subjective, so while one person might like the word 'crwth' (pronounced 'krooth' with the th from 'think'), another might think it ugly, and while one might think 'aiwe' is beautiful, some would believe it to be too vocalic, like a cup of sugar.

Auxlangs (International Auxiliary Language candidates) are created to be spoken by everyone, whether or not they intend to replace existing languages. These are but a small portion of all conlangs, though they get tremendous amounts of publicity. Strangely enough, none of these have succeeded. (Do you regularly converse in Ido or Volapük? Can you communicate in both Solresol and Esperanto at once?) One of the problems with auxlangs is the 'Highlander' factor: There can be only one. Otherwise, it simply doesn't work. You'd be speaking Latino Moderne to a tourist, and he'd reply in Ido, producing no benefits.

Engelang stands for 'engineered language'. It generally refers to a language made to test something, such as a linguistic feature not entirely present in any natural language. For instance, there is no purely ergative language (though Euskara or Basque comes very close), so a linguist might create an engelang to demonstrate ergativity fully. These are not very common among constructed languages, though sometimes an artlanger (one who makes artlangs) will make one as a predecessor to an artlang.

Loglangs are logical languages, such as Loglan and Lojban. They attempt to reduce every statement to a logic statement such as causes nightmares in high school math students. This document will not debate the plausibility of logical languages.

Just who are these crazy people?

Or, where do I sign up?

Anyone could be a closet conlanger. They don't hold conventions more than once or twice a year, and never more than five of them get together at a time. They can be in any city, contribute to any website or magazine, write any book. But if you see something with gratuitous apostrophication¹, it probably isn't from a true constructed language.

But a good place to start looking for conlanging information is Mark Rosenfelder's site. It includes a guide for making languages, though he has some things wrong. Check out this site for information on phonetics, or sounds that a human can make using his/her mouth. The Conlang List is a mailing list devoted to the creation of languages, but be careful; it has a high volume of messages (about 120 per day). Also check out Daniel Andreasson's site.

Armed with these and Describing Morphosyntax by Thomas Paine, anyone can make a language. Dear Chomsky, what have I loosed on the world?