All Questions

What problems arise when creating a language with an extremely simple phonology and what are some good strategies for dealing with them? I'm calling this type of phonology extremely simple for the ...

I'm trying to create a new language, but I need some advice. How do you determine what a new letter sounds like? Is there a pattern, or do I just make it up?

Interlingua's official site claims that speakers of all Romance languages will immediately understand the language on paper when first exposed to it. Is this true? Can I really understand Spanish, ...

The book "Always Coming Home" by Ursula K Le Guin is an anthropological account of the Kesh, a people that "might be going to have lived" in future California. It includes short ...

I'm about creating my first conlang grammar, I know a few general characteristics yet I don't truly know where or how I should start to outline it. I only have messy pieces of informations about. From ...

A noun classifier marks on the verb some information about the form of one of its arguments. For example, Atili has a handful of "stationary" classifiers that produce semantic distinctions: ...

I saw a post on twitter about creating a "Japanized" version of toki pona. Has anyone done that? toki pona certainly seems to be influenced at least a little bit by Japanese anyway (word ...

Coming up with new kinds of pragmatics is sort of fun, but it's hard to tell when an idea is incompatible with how people work psychologically. For instance, what are the limits or universals around ...

What are some alternative direction systems besides egocentric direction systems (left, right, &c)? Some natural languages use {north, south, east, west} like Guugu Yimithirr and Tzeltal (Maya) (...

I'm interested in the idea of a conlang which could be used to create extremely information dense statements - such that, for example, a single word could be built up from morphemes to express a ...

I and other people are making a collaborative conlang. It features mood/evidentiality contrast. There are 4 moods: Indicative Imperative Optative Conditional There are also 6 evidentials: Direct ...

I'm thinking of a system where all fricatives look similar to each other, all plosives look similar, etc; the same base shape could be used for similar sounds using the dots placed above/below letters ...

I believe or assume that Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, Interlingue, and Klingon each have at least a few translations of important literature such as the Bible or Hamlet. What other ...

I feel less and less comfortable with the incoherence of natural languages, so I'm looking for a constructed language that suits me. semantically close words must share a common affix (not like ...

How could a language evolve such that the vowels are biphonic (like in throat singing)? Note: Biphonicity is when two notes/tones are sung simultaneously. There are languages that are whistled or ...

English uses an independent verb to encode desiderative meaning, namely want. It normally takes an infinitival complement, although I can take a direct object as well if the subject of the infinitival ...

Most people will be familiar with the idea that naturalistic spelling can be tricky. Some examples of natlangs with annoying spelling that come to mind are English ("ough" can be pronounced /...

Renglish/Рэнглиш (not mine) is an adaptation of Cyrillic for English. Most of the sounds seem ok, but how would you normally differentiate [i] in bit from the [iː] in beet using Cyrillic or would they ...

I have not encountered many con-scripts encoding information in knots, rather than by marking flat media. I imagine that many conlangers would enjoy the inspiration of Andean khipus, which, going back ...

My conlang Atili is written in a vertical script. I'm having a hard time trying to imagine how to write out words in the Atili script within my dictionary. This is important because Atili spelling is ...

Bijective base-k numeration (or k-adic numeration) is a system of writing numerals such that the digits are 1 through k. Thus counting in bijective base-12 (such as my conlang Atili has) works as ...

I'm trying to design a conscript for my conlang Atili and would like to create punctuation in order to deliminate sentences and transcribe limited prosody. However, I don't just want to create new ...

Some languages feature noun incorporation. Here's an example from Lahkota from the Wikipedia article on incorporation. I suspect the difference in meaning is similar to the man chopped the wood vs the ...

I apologize if similar question has already been answered, I tried to look for it but didn't find anything. I'm trying to make a simple naming language that looks/sounds vaguely like nahuatl (if I ...

I was under the impression, until recently, the la in Toki Pona is a topic marker of sorts similar to the Japanese topic marker wa but used less frequently since Toki Pona is not topic-prominent. In ...

I would like to translate Bismillah Ir-Rahmani Ir-Rahim into Toki Pona. The parts I'm struggling with are the Rahma part, and the Raheem part, as they encompass similar but subtly different meanings ...

This is a bit subjective problem. As a Hungarian who knows English, I have the high ground when it comes to making up words, as I can mush the English and Hungarian words together with some outliers (...

For the purposes of this question, I'm specifically interested in marking theta-roles of verb arguments and possessive constructs, i.e. the things prototypically marked by case in languages that have ...

In English, it is necessary to use a syntactic expletive ("it") when talking about weather: It is sun-ny. EXPL COP.3S sun-ADJ Pro-drop languages can easily avoid the explicit expletive by ...

In my conworld, months are divided into twelve-day weeks. That seems a bit too long (since I recall that people complained that the ten-day weeks of the French Republican calendar were too long), so I'...

The closest I could find was jan ike | awen pali e ona | pilin ike tawa enemy | continue | hate But I've not figured out if that the right way to combine those phrases

Taja is a language with Verb-Subject-Object word order. However, emperor Kai wants to always be the first, so, he wants all sentences where he is the subject to have a Subject-Verb-Object word order. ...

So, draconic in the setting is used to name places, people, and communication in general. I skipped through most of the phonotactics as I'm using the Hungarian template. So as I filled out entries in ...

Does anyone provide a freely available or licensable template that conlangers can use to develop a lesson plan? Specifically, I'm thinking about how a lot of language books divide vocabulary and ...

Let's assume a language once had an extensive plural system, indicating singular/dual/paucal/plural distinctions on nouns, pronouns, verbs, et cetera. Over time, as has happened in real languages, ...

According to WALS Feature 27A, 278/368 languages surveyed have productive full and partial reduplication. Chapter 27 gives the following example of partial reduplication in Pangasinan: báley "town" -&...

Most, if not all natural languages have some form of morphology, such as noun case or poly-personal agreement. However, these features are usually evolved from prepositions and auxiliary verbs, and ...

I'm currently working on an NLP project using toki pona, analysing and generating sentences. I was wondering if there was a structured dictionary available for it, or whether people have attempted to ...

My conlang is predominately head-initial (SVO, n-adj, mostly suffixing), but has postpositions because I'd though that the noun was the head of an adpositional phrase. Wikipedia, however, says that ...

I am aware that adjectives can pattern like verbs in some natural languages. Is it reasonable for numerals to do the same? Thus Some balls four. There are four balls. Fouring the balls were orange. ...

In English, noun phrases are det-num-adj-n-rel (e.g. "The five orange balls that John saw"). In Spanish, noun phrases are (mostly) det-num-n-adj-rel (e.g. "Las cinco pelotas naranjas las que Juan vió,"...

I'm from South Florida and noticed that my Haitian neighbors speak a language called Creole. Then It got my fantasizing a possibility that is well within our reach of no more than a decade. Using AI ...

I'm wondering about the naturalness and intuitiveness of marking tense in negative clauses but not affirmative ones. I'm also wondering whether a language with this hypothetical feature would be ...

I know that Simlish language is not fully created. It is just a list of words and sentences. Where can I find the full list (official source)? P.S I wanna create this language as fully created ...

Is there a name of a group of languages that try to remove instead of adding things? Examples: Newspeak: reduces words (e.g. bad will be ungood (prefix "un" meaning not), eliminate expression that ...

What are some strategies for making boundaries between top-level clauses obvious? I think the most straightforward strategy is some kind of collection of sentence-final particles, but I'm curious ...

My vowel phonemic inventory would be just /a/, /e/, /o/ and /u/ with no /i/ sound. Is this possible or not?

If a language limits its relative clause heads to core arguments of a verb such that item 1 below is ungrammatical, it may become necessary within discourse to use an applicative to promote an ...

Is there a type of conlang which tries to combine and simplify French and English? (Few word examples) I- Mi You- Vu We- Nu This- Di That- Do Who- Ve What- Ku No- No Note:- This language is not ...

I learned that in the real world Amlonde is a given name of South African origin (I cannot be more precise on linguistic background or meaning). But the word looks suspiciously like a word from ...