When WordPress prompted me for a tagline for my website as I was editing the footer, the first thing that popped into my head was “exploring language since ’89.” Why ’89? Because that was the first year I remember actually meeting and speaking with someone who spoke Spanish. That isn’t to say it was the first time I’d met a Spanish speaker—it was just the first time I remember someone telling me about it and then trying to teach me a bit of Spanish. They even gave me a little song booklet of campfire-church-style songs translated into Spanish (think “Kumbaya” and other such songs).
I was fascinated by it all. I had been minimally exposed to Spanish and ASL through Sesame Street as a kid, but that experience was my first real-life interaction with another language, and it left me desperately wanting to learn Spanish. My first explorations into language learning weren’t successful (most involved me reading my mom’s old Spanish dictionary and later a textbook my dad brought home from the high school where he worked), but language hooked me.
I’ve studied many other languages since then (though I don’t claim fluency in any of them, and my favorite way to study a language is to learn its structures and then move on to another one to learn more structures). Some of my favorite experiences have been studying Mandarin Chinese as a student at a German university (so I was learning Mandarin in a course taught in German), sitting in on Ancient Greek classes in graduate school, auditing ASL courses as a professor, and, more recently, using Duolingo to learn a bit of Finnish.
Every new language-studying endeavor adds to a foundation of linguistic awareness and knowledge that supports my conlang work. The more I learn about natural languages, the better my conlang craft becomes.
Some of my older conlangs include Hiutsath, Gnóma, and Wóxtjanato. More recently, I have been working on two personal projects near and dear to me. Zhwadi is a language I began during a dark time when I needed more ways to instill hope in my life. The language still needs a lot of fine-tuning for more grammatical constructions and vocabulary, but it’s got a solid base, and it achieves its job of making my heart smile every time I work on it (the name of the language comes from a phrase that literally means “the soul smiles”).
Another project is Ishglen, which I began after David asked me if I still had any notes on the “language” (ahem, code for English) I attempted to create when I was a kid. Sadly, I do not. But I remember most of the basic principles that went into creating it, so I decided to create a more grown-up version of my childhood pursuits. It’s more “grown up” in the sense that while it honors the spirit of the code I made as a kid, I’ve infused many language features that reflect my current understanding of and experience with language. It’s a code-turned-language kind of project.
And now that I’m starting the Conlang Year project, I’m going to use it as an opportunity to start a new conlang. It’s going to be another gnome language, but these gnomes will have a completely different backstory and language than the gnomes who speak my Gnóma language. Other than deciding it will be a language for gnomes, I haven’t thought through any other details yet so that I can participate in the day-by-day conlang fun, too. I’m excited to get started!