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There’s a kind of charm that speaking a language other than English has. It might be that the language uses an incredibly complex writing system, like those which Japanese languages use: Hiragana and Katakana are both syllabaries, meaning that each symbol represents one syllable in the language, and Kanji is a logography, where each character represents an entire word or concept. It might also be that the language has interesting consonant clusters: Georgian (from the country of Georgia, not the US state) has consonant-heavy one-syllable word, “gvprtskvni”, with only one vowel. Or, it could even be the way that words are built: Semitic languages, like Arabic and Hebrew, build words on “triconsonantal roots”, sets of three consonants that are expanded upon with vowels and additional consonants, which create many words with similar concepts attached – take, for example, “K-T-B”, relating to writing, that can be expanded to create Arabic “maktabat”, meaning “library”, or Hebrew “michtav”, meaning “postal letter”.
What fascinates me more is when a language is not created by natural evolution, but by a single person or small group. “Conlangs”, or “constructed languages”, can be incredibly elaborate or simple. It’s likely that most people have heard one before – Klingon (Star Trek), Quenya and Elvish (The Lord of the Rings), and Na’vi (Avatar) are all examples of constructed languages in popular media. Another popular conlang is Esperanto, created by Dr. L. L. Zamenhof, created as a means for global cultures to easily communicate with one another by removing the linguistic barrier. It’s reported to have more than 200,000 speakers worldwide, possibly up to 2 million, and there is a multitude of media using Esperanto.
People make languages for many reasons, which generally fall into just two categories. The first is for function: the language is meant to connect people who speak different languages. The other reason is for fun: creating a language for artistic expression, or to create a code between friends. There are innumerable resources for creating your own conlang, from online forums to books and articles. If any of this is just as fascinating to you as it is for me, I highly recommend Mark Rosenfelder’s The Language Construction Kit, which provides a solid basis for building your own language.
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