Conlang/FAQ

Here are answers to some frequently asked questions related to conlanging.

What's a "Language"?

There are many ways that people communicate with each other, but we don't usually call all of them "language". So presumably, any definition of the word should be somewhat selective.

When linguists talk about language, they usually refer to communication that uses very specific parts of the brain (the Broca's and Wernicke's areas), and that has, as a result, some very peculiar characteristics that may be due to the architecture of those areas. For example:

1. Languages can be learned "natively". As children, we learned spoken languages from our parents and friends, without any need for formal instruction. You can't say this about arithmetic or even written language — those had to be learned consciously, either by having someone teach you, or, at least, through some conscious, rigorous study on your own. This is also the difference between a language you actually speak and a language you took in school — the latter you had to memorize and so forth, so you probably aren't that fluent in it; the former you soaked up, so you speak it natively.
2. Languages have rules. No, we're not just talking about the rules you learned in English class, and hated. (Trust us, we hated those too.) Every language has intricate, complicated rules that are coded right into our brains when we learn it. Most of the time, we don't even realize we're following them.
3. Languages use words. Yeah duh, you say. But think about it this way — when someone says "bird", there's nothing in their mouth, on the "b", or the "ir", or the "d", that's got anything to do with a bird. But it means bird anyway. That's the power of words in a language, since words can abstractly represent things without actually looking or sounding like those things. (Of course there are words that break this rule, like "splash" and "crash", but the point is, not ALL words have to be like that.)

If we follow all of the above rules, then there are just two or three basic sorts of languages in the world — spoken languages, like English or French or German (it doesn't matter if they're sometimes represented in writing); sign languages, like American Sign Language; and, to some extent, written languages. Encodings, like Morse code, Semaphore, etc., aren't language in themselves, although they can be used to directly represent language.

The status of written language is a bit complicated. Writing is often treated as just a representation of spoken language, in which case it's an encoding and not language in itself. There exist conlangs that are purely written, though, with no spoken form at all, like X; these clearly aren't encodings of something else. They might fail the test of being learnable natively — but most conlangs are never learned natively by anyone (the biggest exception being Esperanto, with perhaps a thousand native speakers), so whether most conlangs could be learned natively is already a matter for speculation.

When a spoken language has an extensive literary tradition, the spoken form of the language tends to change faster than the written form, so that after a while the language has two different registers — a formal (or "literary") register and an informal (or "vulgar") register. This effect is called diglossia. The different registers aren't usually considered separate languages as such; but since, for example, written English is often the common language shared by native speakers of English and American Sign Language, some have suggested that perhaps written English should be considered distinct from both. That would mean that if you both speak and write English, you're bilingual.

Also, when any encoding is used intensively for direct communication, rather than just as a transcription of speech, the encoding tends to develop idioms of its own that don't come from the language it supposedly represents. In Morse code, for example, the "abbreviation" for laughter is HI, because of how it sounds in Morse code (not because of how the represented letters sound in spoken language):  dit-dit-dit-dit  dit-dit. That doesn't make Morse code a language, but it's one small step in that direction. Written languages may develop small flourishes like that as well, like emoticons.

Other forms of communication, like traffic signs, hand gestures (that are not structured signing), dogs barking, bees dancing (even assuming that is communication, which is debated), etc. are not languages, in the linguists' sense.

Are there simple and complicated languages?

Yes — but probably not in the way most people think.

Some languages have been written down for a long time, have lots of literature and poetry to go with them, and have thick grammars too. These languages are "richer" in the sense that they may have a bigger vocabulary and a richer library of cultural links and so on. But they are not more "complicated".

Linguists have found that pretty much all languages, from those spoken by the simplest nomads to the builders of great empires, are all about similarly "complicated", in the sense that they all have the complex structures necessary to convey human thought and reason. The aboriginal languages of North America, for example, have been found to have massive verb tables that put Latin and Greek to shame. And while languages like English and Chinese don't have these verb tables, they do have complicated systems of syntax (or sentence structures) that put those North American languages to shame.

What about people who say, for example, that "Spanish is easier to learn than German"? Well — a lot of this depends on the way the language is taught in schools, the amount of sheer memorization demanded of beginners, and how similar the language is to your native language. If you're a native English speaker, for example, you may find Japanese baffling, but Korean people usually find Japanese easier to learn than English!

Simple languages do exist, in two ways. Pidgins are broken, halting "languages" that people who can't speak each other's languages end up speaking. If these pidgins are taught to children in a community, however, they tend to become full languages within a generation — what we call creoles — so a pidgin can be seen as a new language in the process of birth. On the other hand, dying languages are languages that few people speak, and therefore aren't really being taught to children — these languages tend to get simpler and then die out.

When did language begin?

It's very hard to know, since we didn't have tape recorders back then. We are reasonably sure, however, that language has been spoken for a very very long time, tens of thousands of years at least, many centuries before agriculture or civilization began anywhere in the world. This is because all people everywhere today, in every corner of the world, speak languages as complex as everyone else's.

By the way, languages did not begin in Egypt or Sumeria (as far as we know, anyway). Those were just the first cultures we know of to write down languages that they already spoke. Languages must have been spoken by all human beings many millennia before that.

What's the difference between a language and a code?

A language has a unique grammar, phonology, vocabulary, and set of "roots" from which new words can be derived. All natural languages are descended from parent languages, as well, though for conlangs this is not strictly necessary.

A code or cipher, on the other hand, is merely a way of changing one language into something else. Codes and ciphers have no set grammar, vocabulary, or anything like that, and usually exist solely for the purpose of obscuring communication.

Too many people will get a dictionary and create a single counterpart for every word in there and then proclaim, "Look! I invented a language!" This isn't altogether a new language, though. Conlangers call this sort of vocabulary-replacement a relex, and it's one jumping-off point to get into creating languages; but there's more to a real language that just its dictionary.

What's the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis"?

If you hang around conlangers for long, you'll hear references to "Whorfianism" or the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis". Those are two names for the same thing, which also goes by other names such as "principle of linguistic relativity".

Simply put, the hypothesis says that how a person thinks depends on the language they use to think about it. Modern writers usually distinguish between a "strong hypothesis", that your language forces you to think one way rather than another, and a "weak hypothesis" that your language encourages you to think one way rather than another. Nowadays the strong hypothesis isn't really taken seriously by mainstream linguists, but most linguists believe some version of a weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Lots of conlangs explore some version or other of the hypothesis.

The idea is most closely associated with Benjamin Lee Whorf, 1897–1941, who studied native North American languages of the Uto-Aztecan family — which are dramatically differently structured from European languages — and suggested that speaking such profoundly different languages would give a person a different way of looking at the world. Einstein's theory of relativity was a recent development at the time, and Whorf likened this linguistic notion to Einstein's theory because physical relativity says that how you perceive the world depends on your physical reference frame, while linguistic relativity says that how you perceive the world depends on your language. Edward Sapir, 1884–1939, was an important figure in the early history of modern linguistics, and Whorf's mentor. Sapir too expressed ideas of this sort. It's pretty common, though, for an idea to get named after somebody without their having ever actually said it; Sapir and Whorf both said things like this at various times, but they weren't the first to do so, never coauthored a paper about it, didn't present it as a hypothesis, and dabbled in stronger and weaker forms without explicitly making the modern strong/weak distinction.

Many loglangs are at least partly explorations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; but also some philosophical languages are as well, such as Láadan, a well-known conlang attempting to support women's thinking, which was used in a series of feminist science fiction novels.

Is there a natural language with <feature>?

Some conlangers enjoy inventing weird features for their conlangs, but then discover some time later that there is actually a natural human language that has that feature. A classic case is the "Monster Raving Loony" alignment (we'll discuss alignment in the Advanced level), which was devised by members of the Conlang Mailing List who named it Monster Raving Loony because it would create inherent ambiguity in the language — making it impossible to tell which of the two arguments to a transitive verb is the subject of the sentence — and therefore seemed absurd. Only then someone noticed a language in Iran that actually has that sort of alignment.

This phenomenon is so common that conlangers have a name for it. It's called anadewism — which is an acronym for another natlang already dunnit, except worse.

So, when you're having fun with some really weird feature in your conlang, don't let it interfere with your enjoyment when you discover there's a natlang that does something like it!

Is there a conlanging community?

Short answer: There is now. A central place to look, from which to work outward to all the other parts of the modern conlanging community, is the Language Creation Society.

Before the Internet, conlanging was mostly done privately by individuals who had no way of knowing if anyone else shared their peculiar pursuit. In a (now classic) lecture about artlanging in 1931, called A Secret Vice, J.R.R. Tolkien described an experience as a soldier in World War I:

We were listening to somebody lecturing on map-reading, or camp-hygeine, or the art of sticking a fellow through without (in defiance of Kipling) bothering who God sent the bill to; rather we were trying to avoid listening, though the Guards' English, and voice, is penetrating. The man next to me said suddenly in a dreamy voice: 'Yes, I think I shall express the accusative case by a prefix!'

J.R.R. Tolkien helped make artlanging somewhat respectable: as an academic and scholar of ancient languages, he not only came out publicly as a committed designer of artistic fictional languages, but used those languages to create a hugely successful series of novels. When the internet came along, people who had never before been able to find others with the same eccentric interests began to discover each other and form on-line communities, and one of these groups was conlangers. The conlanging community formed especially around the Conlang Mailing List, created in 1991, which was the origin of the term "conlang". The first Language Creation Conference was held in 2006, and the Language Creation Society, which amongst other things now runs the conference, was formed the next year.

Are there awards for conlanging?

There is one, that the conlanging community generally respects. Since 2006, conlanger David J. Peterson has given an award he calls the Smiley Award to one conlang each year that he found especially worthy of note. The award is, he cheerfully admits, not sanctioned by any larger body, it's just his own arbitrary choice; however, the Smiley Awards are respected in the conlanging community because Peterson, and his opinions, are respected in the conlanging community.

The languages Peterson has selected are generally already fairly well-known and respected in the community. For each he writes an essay, explaining interesting features of the language and ending each essay with a section on "How [this language] Has Made Me Smile". The essays are of interest in themselves, for the insights they offer into the art and craft of conlanging.

Is there professional conlanging?

Until about 2009, it might have been tempting to answer "no", despite a few scattered cases. But, that was the year the movie Avatar was released, and the year HBO hired a conlanger to create languages for their planned TV series Game of Thrones. Since then the answer has to be, at least somewhat, "yes".

Before then, there were a few isolated cases of TV or movie conlangs. The earliest we know of was Pakuni, back in the 1970s; children's TV producers Sid and Marty Krofft hired a professional linguist, Victoria Fromkin, to create a language for a race of primitive humanoids for TV show Land of the Lost. The first widely known conlang on-screen was Klingon, created for the 1984 movie Star Trek III: The Search of Spock by linguist Mark Okrand at the behest of the movie's director Leonard Nimoy, based on some sample phrases devised for Star Trek: The Motion Picture by James Doohan. It was still largely perceived by the general public as an aberration within Star Trek fandom.

In 2009, though, James Cameron's Avatar became one of the highest-grossing movies ever, prominently featuring conlang Na'vi for which Cameron had hired a professional linguist (though not a conlanger), Paul Frommer. Then, in 2011, HBO's TV series Game of Thrones began, featuring Dothraki and Valyrian conlangs. HBO had gone through the Language Creation Society (LLC) in 2009 to advertise for a conlanger to create languages for the new series (under a tight non-disclosure agreement, of course), and LCC co-founder David J. Peterson won the contract. Peterson has since received other TV/movie conlanging contracts.

Peterson remarked in his 2015 print book The Art of Language Invention that movies and TV are a small market for conlanging skills, and suggested book authors might enrich their material by teaming up with conlangers to create linguistic backdrops for their story worlds.

What is the earliest conlang?

The earliest example we know of a constructed language, as such, is Lingua Ignota, described in the 1100s C.E. by Hildegard of Bingen, a German Benedictine abbess. Lingua Ignota has been studied by professor on English Sarah Higley of the University of Rochester, whose book on the subject, Hildegard of Bingen's Unknown Language: An Edition, Translation, and Discussion, came out in 2007. (Professor Higley is the creator, under pseudonym Sally Caves, of the highly regarded artlang Teonaht.) Lingua Ignota is apparently a partial relex of Latin, using Latin's grammar and drawing on its vocabulary while introducing more than a thousand new words, and written in a constructed alphabet of 23 characters.

Hildegard of Bingen has long been considered a saint in various branches of Catholicism. After a long and rather muddled procedural relationship with Rome, she was made a Doctor of the Church in 2012 by Pope Benedict XVI, resolving her status as a Saint of the Church as a whole, and making her only the fourth woman recognized as a Doctor of the Church — basically, a saint for her contribution to Catholic thought. Saint Hildegard's feast day, September 17, has gained some traction in the internet conlanging community as a conlanging holiday, when conlangers wish each other a happy Saint Hildegard's day.