How to make a language

How to Create a Language

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From the Klingon language in the Star Trek universe to the Na’vi language from James Cameron’s Avatar, fictional languages can go a long way towards making a work of fiction feel real. Making a fictional language can be an intense undertaking because the process is complex and requires a lot of thought. However, with some practice and commitment, anyone can create their own language for fun or as part of a fictional world.

Sample Phrases

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Basic Words to Translate

Animals: dog, cat, fish, bird, cow, pig, mouse, horse, wing, animal

Transportation: train, plane, car, truck, bicycle, bus, boat, ship, tire, gasoline, engine, ticket

Locations: city, house, apartment, street, airport, train station, bridge, hotel, restaurant, farm, court, school, office, room, town, university, club, bar, park, camp, shop, theater, library, hospital, church, market, countries, building, ground, outer space, bank

Clothing: hat, dress, suit, skirt, shirt, T-shirt, pants, shoes, pocket, coat, stain, clothes

Colors: red, green, blue, yellow, brown, pink, orange, black, white, gray

Ways to Practice Your Language

Keep a diary in your new language. This is a great way to practice your new language every day. Start a journal just for writing in your language, and recount your day.

Teach your friends how to speak your language. Once they learn it, try holding an entire conversation with them. Keep a «dictionary» of your words nearby so you can reference it as you talk.

Recite poems in your language. They might not sound as pretty, but this will give you good practice for speaking your language out loud.

Translate the Babel Text or another piece of writing into your language. Choose a favorite book, article, or novel to translate, or use the Babel Text, which is a piece of text commonly used by people who construct their languages. It contains words and phrases that are supposed to test the limits of your language.

Creating a Language, or How to Conlang

Creating a language for your novel? Or maybe you’re conlanging – that’s creating a language – for your TTRPG game? Cam, linguistics specialist and creator of Vulgarlang Cam, takes us through how to get started!

If you’re jealous of Klingons and Dothraki, with their beautiful, deep languages – don’t fear! I’ve got a great step by step guide to creating a language for your world. Language forms a pretty huge part of a culture, so it stands to reason that your cultures should have their own way of speaking. These are conlangs (constructed languages).

I’m Cam from Vulgarlang, and we’re going to take you through some steps to make your own languages!

CREATING A LANGUAGE: SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION

When creating conlangs, you’ll quickly realise English spelling is the worst invention ever.

Because English adopted an alphabet that was made for a totally different language (Latin), it has ended up with more irregular spellings than you can poke a spear at. As a result, you need to carefully clarify how each vowel is pronounced in your conlang. Even if you say “a is pronounced like in father”, well, I’m from Australia. If you’re from the US, you pronounce “father” differently from me.

This is why linguists and conlangers use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which uses dedicated symbols for each vowel and consonant in every language in the world. It can even account for different regional accents!

Your language can use any alphabet that you like (the Roman alphabet, Chinese characters, or your own custom-made alien script). But any good conlang should document how these letters are pronounced using IPA, before getting into the meat and potatoes of vocabulary or grammar.

Vulgarlang uses IPA for everything, so you’ll need to learn a little bit. Don’t try to learn it all! Just familiarise yourself with the IPA used in English, particularly in your regional accent. This guide is good for that. After that, you may want to add some more unusual sounds for flavour.

A word of advice though, don’t add too many unusual sounds! Less is more.

CREATING A LANGUAGE: THE VOCABULARY

The biggest trap beginner conlangers fall into is making every single word translate to a single English word. This doesn’t happen in real languages. 1:1 translations just aren’t possible sometimes.

Some random examples that come to my mind are: The Spanish word hoja means “leaf”, but it’s also the word used for a sheet of paper. And the word bomba means “bomb”, but can also be used to mean “balloon”. Some Languages use the same word for “hand” and “wrist”, or the same word for “beard” and “chin”.

On the other hand, a language might have two words for one English word. In Czech they say bratranec for a male cousin and sestřenice for a female cousin.

Lots of fun things can happen with pronouns. Malay has two words for “we” depending on whether the person you’re talking to is included: kita means “me and you” while kami means “me and them, but not you”. Meanwhile, Japanese has dozens of pronouns based on levels of formality (informal vs. formal vs. very formal) and the gender of the person being referred to. They even use different pronouns for “I” depending on gender.

If you want your conlang to feel real, it can’t just be English vocab with different words substituted in. Vulgarlang already does a lot of this stuff automatically when it’s building the dictionary, but you can come up with your own creative translation ideas too. Think outside the square/box/limit!

CREATING A LANGUAGE: GRAMMAR

Grammar is another area where you don’t want to copy English in every single way. Here are a few concepts to get you thinking.

If I tell you “the dog bit the man” you know who bit whom because of the order of the words. Flip the participants around and you have a news story.

But not all languages use word order the way English does. In some languages “the man bit the dog” is the actual order you would say to communicate that the dog bit the man! The doer of the verb comes after the verb. Alternatively, many languages will put the verb last “the dog the man bit” (Korean), or first “bit the man the dog” (Hebrew).

Playing with word order is a quick way to add some flavour to your conlang. You can move the articles to after the noun: “dog the bit man the”. Or move the adjectives: “the dog big bit the man fat”.

Some languages don’t even rely on word order, and instead use affixes. In Hungarian, the noun having the verb done to it gets an -t suffix. So, “dog bites man” would look something like: dog bites mant. But mant bites dog communicates the exact same thing, and so the language allows it! It only becomes a news story when man bites dogt.

English has affixes too! Past tense is typically formed by adding -ed to a verb: “I walk” vs “I walked”. In the future tense we use a separate word: “I will walk”. So, what do other languages do? Many strategies are possible.

Spanish uses suffixes for both past and future:

yo caminé – “I walked”

yo caminaré – “I will walk”

While Vietnamese uses different words for both:

tôi đã đi bộ – “I walked”

tôi sẽ đi bộ – “I will walk”

Many Asian languages don’t even have tense, and just use context to understand when something occurred.

You might have heard that languages like Spanish and French have different genders. Many English speakers really struggle with this concept. How exactly is a baguette feminine?

In French, gender rules show up in a few places. The word “the” is le for masculine nouns and la for feminine nouns. And adjectives gain an -e on the end in the feminine form:

le petit appartement – “the small apartment”

la petite baguette – “the small baguette”

We’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible in language. It’s up to you how different from English you want your language to be. If you want to get more ideas for grammar head on over to VulgarLang and check out the kinds of grammar it creates. Another great resource is the Language Construction Kit, which has sections on Sounds and Grammar.

USING VULGARLANG TO CREATE A LANGUAGE

But if you’ve ever tried to sit down and construct a language (a “conlang”), you’ve probably realised that creating the right look and feel for words is hard. It’s also a mammoth task. You’ll need a few thousand words before you have enough vocab to have a fluid conversation. All that data needs to be tracked and documented.

VulgarLang is a website that helps you speed up this process. It generates a unique language for you, by selecting the sounds for language, formulating rules about how words are formed and making a 4000-word dictionary, along with grammatical rules, all in the click of a button. It also has a translator for each language, and the whole dictionary can be exported to World Anvil.

If you really need a language made fast for a campaign, Vulgarlang can do it all for you. You can use the information from this article to help you make it even more awesome. And finally, you can now import your whole language into a World Anvil language template, so you can reference it in your worldbuilding whenever you need to!

Looking for more resources for Conlanging? Try out The Language Construction Kit or The Conlanger’s Lexipedia! These books have been recommended to us by experienced conlangers!

(Some links here may be affiliate links. This costs you nothing, but allows our blog to earn a small commission – usually a couple of cents – from the seller!)

Want more posts like this? Subscribe to the World Anvil blog!

Create a Language

Welcome to the Conlang Wiki
A Wiki for development and hosting of constructed languages. A constructed language is a language made for a specific purpose, own enjoyment and more. Constructed Languages are usually linked to constructed cultures and other kinds of inspired settings.

Head Direction: Final

Number of genders: 4

Umbrean is a highly inflectional language and semi-polysynthetic as very simple sentences are possible to render into a single word. Most word clases are inflected in accordance to something to represent their meaning and position.

Head Direction: Mixed

Number of genders: 1

Quai’op is an analytical language isolate spoken in East Asia in Taiwan and the Philippines, with origins unknown, but possibly Chinese. Its vocabulary, for the most part, is unique, but some grammar traits entered the language from Min Chinese and Tagalog. It is unique in that common contractions tend to form new words, and thus, for example, a case-like system exists for nouns, although truly not all nouns carry any of these cases at all, besides the nominative. Being an isolating language, the word order is only flexible within certain boundaries, but the amount that can be expressed precisely exceeds that of English. In addition, there is a large number of aspectual particles to tell what time of the day something took place, and a large amount of evidentialities to tell where a speaker took his or her information. The language heavily use glottalization, and a strict timing exists. The language would be moderately difficult for an English speaker to learn and pronounce, but the grammar is simple enough not to have to learn it, immediately beginning with vocabulary.

Want to create a language? It can take a lot of work to make it presentable, but the results can be amazing. To make your own, decide what sounds you want, create words, and hold it all together with a grammar. (Not necessarily in that order.)

Use the input text below to start the creation of your language. break=no preload=Template:NewLang buttonlabel=Start creating your own language now! See also: New conlangs

Expanding your language

After you have created an extended dictionary of your language, you can start the building of a constructed culture. Your constructed culture can include its own myths and legends, poems, religions, tales, etc. they all written in your new language. You have to build a very good dictionary if you want to start a good conculture!

Worldbuilding

Some constructed languages are based on Conworld-wiki worlds. You can find them on List of Conworld-based Conlangs

How to Create a Simple Language

About This Article

Posted on October 19, 2013 August 11, 2021

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By its nature, speculative fiction takes us to strange new worlds, and with strange new worlds comes the potential for strange new languages. This probably brings to mind Tolkien’s Elvish languages or Marc Okrand’s Klingon. These are such rich, lifelike languages that they give an additional level of depth to those cultures. Most of us, though, aren’t scholars and linguists like Tolkien and Okrand. Don’t worry. You don’t need to be to add some linguistic depth to your worldbuilding. Creating a relatively simple naming language can do the trick.

What’s a Naming Language?

A naming language is a basic constructed language (conlang) with limited vocabulary and grammar. Naming languages are used primarily for naming places and characters. A solid, well developed naming language could also be used for phrases. A naming language could develop into a full conlang eventually, but only a few steps are needed to get naming.

1. Pick Your Sounds

Decide on what sounds you want to include in your language. You could use the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) here, but it’s not necessary. You could choose your sounds based on and described by English, but it’ll be harder to make it interesting and different. For the middle road, you need to know that linguists define consonants by two characteristics: place of articulation and manner of articulation (mostly characterized by the degree of closure of the lips). This creates a grid.

English has gaps in the grid, so choosing sounds that fill those gaps and deleting sounds to create new gaps is a great way to make it so your naming language doesn’t sound like English.

Vowels can also be organized in a basic grid, defined by height (of the tongue in the mouth) and frontness (the tongue’s position front to back). More layers of vowel distinctions include the shape of the lips (o vs. e) and the length (long or short in English).

2. Build a Lexicon

In real languages, place names tend to be descriptive and people’s names mean something, or at least did at one time. Thus, a good place to start your lexicon is with geographical terms, like river and mountain, and common nouns, like tree and bird. Then add to your vocabulary some associated modifiers. Basic adjectives are great — you can put together names like rocky mountain or tall tree. You could also add some verbs and adverbs to get singing river or silly bird. As you continue with your worldbuilding or storytelling, add new words to your lexicon. Just remember to be consistent with the sounds you chose earlier.

3. Write a Grammar

For a naming language, you won’t need much grammar. You probably won’t need rules for complicated sentence structure or multiple vowel tenses. Even for names, though, you’ll want to determine some basics. In English, adjectives come before nouns they modify, so we have the Great Lakes — but in Spanish, it’s reversed, thus the Rio Grande. Plurals and capitalization are also likely to come up in naming, so create a rule for how to handle those situations.

You may find you need to make additional grammar decisions as you build your naming language, like whether to use compound words or not. As you do with your lexicon, keep track of whatever grammar rules you invent so you can stay consistent.

Try to think through the implications of rules as well, since grammar can get complicated over otherwise simple ideas. In English, plurals are simple when you just add an s to the end, but get difficult when combined with words that already end in s.

4. Choose a Writing System

This step is not necessary in all cases. If you are looking for a language that sounds different, you’ll have one by the end of step three. At this point you can do everything (map labels, names, phrases) with an English alphabet translation. The result will be like English maps or guidebooks of foreign places. But if you also want it to look different, you can go a step further and create a simple writing system too. There are three basic writing systems:

Within each are different varieties and subsets, and natural languages can use a combination of elements. After you decide what system will work best for you, you can choose or create the characters to fit. For ease and clarity, it’s a good idea to make each character unique. In natural languages, cultures tend to add distinguishing features to characters that are too similar.

Making Your Own Language

Introduction: Making Your Own Language

So you seen James Cameron’s «Avatar» and was fasinated that he and Frommer had created a fully functional language, or maybe you are writing a book and wanted the same. or maybe you just wanna drive your friends and family nuts (unless your teaching them) by talking in a foreign tongue, well no need to worry. *we do not live in the Dark Ages so people shouldn’t beleive you are possesed*.

I have found a site that may explain somethings i do not and will be able to help you with the Grammar of your language.
— http://www.zompist.com/kit.html#lexicon

So some things we will have to do are as follows:
-Alphabet (doesnt have to have english characters)
-Sounds
-Word Creation
-Grammar
-Style
-and what ever else you think will help make this unique

Disclaimer:
I am of no way held responsible for anything that may or may not happen to you using your own language. i dearly apologize if you are abducted by 9 ft tall blue people, get slapped by your girlfriend cause of mistranslation or if you are beleived to be possesed by your Crazy Great Aunt. please use these tools responsibly.

now then, lets move on.

Step 1: The Alphabet

Haha this part is quite literaly easy as abc.
All you have to do is choose how many vowels you want, how many constanants you want and write/draw out the symbols. In Frommer’s Na’vi there are words with two characters instead of one like «aw» or «kx» these can be created to make one letter (vowel or constonant) for your language.Note this can vary the complexity of your Language, for example: in english «c» and «k» can both make the same sounds and «c» and «s» can make the same sounds so the need for «c» is not entirely needed. It can also vary the complexity in that you can have one letter for every sound you can think of or maybe some, like «c» can share sounds. with that in mind you could have a 100 letter alphabet or mabey only a 15 letter alphabet, what ever you decide.

I know this seems like a lot so take your time and when your ready continue on.

Step 2: Sounds (Sa-ow-n-dz)

So now that you have your alphabet. and how wonderful it is, you can go on to creating a sound, or sounds, for your alphabet, this is where your accent will come from and this will also help with the complexity of your language. Just try creating unique sounds or use ones you already know and match them up with the symbol/letter of your choice. simple i know.

So when you have all the sounds to your hearts conempt. let go on to the next step.

Step 3: Creating Words (and Worlds)

Ok so here is where you start taking your letters and sounds and making words.
Before you start, you may want to place some rules like only a vowel can start a new syllable, or maybe every word must start with a possibilitie of 5 letters, create whatever rules you want this step is optional. So now you start randomly smackin’ letters together and sound them out from front to back. if it doesnt work (and occasionaly it wont) try either starting a new one or replace the trouble letter with one that will fit. it does help to use vowels here. How often do you see a language with a word pronounced «ghrtljwqurtghl». Now creating these words will take a while, Frommer’s Na’vi started in 2005 and is still expanding today. Just keep note of all the words you create and refer back to them when your going to create a new word you dont have. you dont want two totally different words sharing the same spelling.
You may want to move on to the next step before continueing this one. If you get tired you may want to stop writing words and come back to it later. Trust me, you will start to see the letters all mush up and make no sense. if this happens please take a break.

Step 4: Grammar

This is where your language really puts some meat on that skeleton. This is where your language creates verbs, nouns, adjectives, plurals and everything else. Some things to consider is do your nouns include genderism. Is there past, present and future tense in your verbs. And everything else. this part can be complicated so please take your time.

Step 5: Style

Step 6: Extras

This is where you add anything else that comes to mind like slang or dialect. all those extras that help create something new. Please send me your creations. as i am just starting mine, i may post an instructable later on my language, how to speak it, spell it and everything else.

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81 Comments

Reply 7 months ago

savannic is better

Reply 5 years ago

it is similar from the German language. it has different types of language:

Germanic English-Savannic Lang.

Germanic Savan’ Lang.

American Savan’ Lang.

Slavic-Savan’ Lang. (The State of Slavic Savania lang.)

Reply 4 years ago

hhh.. well.. i’d say I like the first name.

call it Savannic. I mean. English is Germanic, but there’s no reason to add sprinkles to it.

My Own Language:

Moonsterous Language/ Münstær Dili/ Мүнстæр Дили

W/W A/А Ā/Ā Æ/Æ B/Б C/Ҹ Ç/Ч D/Д E/Э Ē/Ē Ə/Ə F/Ф G/Ҝ Ğ/Ғ H/Һ X/Х I/Ы İ/И J/Ж K/К Q/Г L/Л Ł/Љ M/М N/Н Ñ/Њ O/О Ö/Ө P/П R/Р S/С Ş/Ш T/Т U/У Ü/Ү V/В Y/Й YA/Я YE/Е YO/Ё YU/Ю Z/З ‘/Ь “/Ъ

Language Family: Turkic

Ā/Ā makes the a sound like aa like sāt/сāт meaning hour.

Æ/Æ makes the sounds of a and e in order like in Maykæl/Майкæл(Michael in English).

С/Ҹ makes the j sound in “jet”.

Ç/Ч makes the sound ch like in charge.

Ə/Ə makes the a sound in “cat”.

G/Ҝ makes the same sound as the azerbaijani G.

Ğ/Ғ makes the same sound as the azerbaijani Ğ.

X/Х makes the ch sound in loch

Q/Г makes the g sound in good.

Ş/Ш makes the sound sh like shoes.

Ü/Ү makes the same sound as a the Azerbaijani ü.