Creating a Fictional Language Family Part 0: Introduction
Let’s start this off with a friendly note: For those of you who don’t know conlanging (or at least some basic linguistics), this will probably be completely incomprehensible. I could explain about phonology, morphosyntactic alignment, word order, etc., but it’d take a long time, I wouldn’t do it very well, and there are many people on the internet who have already done a great job. If you are new to conlanging (or linguistics in general), but want to learn more, I highly recommend:
https://www.zompist.com/kit.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2SiY0EF_3E
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6xPxnYMQpqsooCDYtQQSiD2O3YO0b2nN
And of course, my old friend https://www.wikipedia.org/
If you don’t know about/want to research conlanging, that’s great, and there will still be some stuff in here that might be of interest. I’ll be translating some important texts for the constructed cultures that speak these languages and making a writing system which hopefully at least looks pretty. Right now, I’m firmly in the charts & jargon phase of the process.
The Context
If you’ve been following my worldbuilding project, you may be thinking: “Why on earth are you doing a conlang now? You’ve barely even got a map!” This is reasonable, but I’m impatient, and I got to work on this conlang family before I forgot all my ideas for it.
Because of this, some of the historical elements won’t be coming into play yet. For now, I won’t be dealing with creoles or imported words, and my lexicon will be mostly pretty fundamental. That being said, I have a rough idea of the people who are going to speak these languages, which will influence some decisions I make. Importantly, this language family originated among humans, and the language family was primarily spoken by humans until present day. This is important because it means that I won’t be dealing with nonhuman mouth shapes, and thus my phonology needs to be naturalistic for a human language.
The Origins of this Project
This language family is loosely based off of my first completed conlang, Yiksighe, which I started in early 2021. For a first full language, it was honestly not bad, but there were definitely some things that could have been done better. I felt that some othe ideas in it were good enough that I wanted to give them a second chance, applying some of the lessons I learned while creating it to make a better final product.
I will also be posting some stuff about Yiksighe itself, because it’s probably the most polished of my conlangs right now. However, the posts will be much less polished and detailed than the ones about the languages currently under construction; I’ve reached the point with that project where it pains me to look at it, and I just want it out of my hair.
The Plan & Terminology
I’m not yet at the point in this process where I can give these languages endonyms, and I don’t have enough worldbuilding around them to give them exonyms either. As such, I’ll be referring to them like this:
