A Congeries of Conlangeries

A Conlang is a Constructed Language, like Esperanto, Interlingua, and Lojban. Constructing languages, for fantasy and science-fiction stories and games especially, is a popular hobby -- and, if you're lucky, like the creators of the Klingon, Na'vi, or Dothraki languages, occasionally also a profitable one.

What conlangers do is called, unsurprisingly, conlanging. They study linguistics, especially typology, on the lookout for weird features to build into their langs, and their stories and games, to help generate that essential "Sense of Wonder". The entire movement is heavily influenced by Whorfian memes, which often makes for interesting stories.

I learned these facts, and many others, while attending F/SF conventions and giving talks there about how lame most of the "languages" that appear in fantasy and science fiction are, by comparison with the true weirdness of real human natural language. Eventually I put up a couple of web pages about my adventures at NorWesCon, a convention that takes place annually in Seattle on Easter weekend:

• 2010 NorWesCon page
• 2011 NorWesCon page


including links to the handouts I gave in my two lectures (they call them "panels" at cons):

• Fictional Linguistics
• Language Fossils

There are a lot of resources available for conlanging; one that I can recommend especially is Mark Rosenfelder's

• online Language Construction Kit,
• and his much-expanded book version, of the same name.

Others include:

• The Language Creation Society
• Conlangery, a series of podcasts on conlangs
• Omniglot links to conlang writing systems
• CONLANG, the movie (really!)
• Volapop -- Volapük lives!
• Conlang Resources
• Software tools for conlanging
• Conlang development resources, including sets of sentences to test the syntax.