Before we get to the start of Conlang Year, I want to share some rules I’ve put together for conlangers of all ages and stages.
Conlang Rules (heck, yeah, it does!)
- Have fun and focus on your own journey. Language on its own is fun. Constructing your very own language is like taking fun and multiplying it by more fun! Conlanging is challenging, though, and it can be oh-so-tempting to compare your work to someone else’s or your knowledge of linguistics or language(s) to someone else’s. For the love of all that is precious, please don’t do that. Keep the focus on your growth and your process, and embrace and enjoy every second of it.
- Be choosey when it comes to the features you incorporate. There are so many freaking cool features out there that languages have, but they don’t all play well together in a single language system. I encourage you to keep a running list of cool features you find but didn’t include in your current project to remember for future conlang projects.
- Don’t worry about making every decision a “creative” one. Some decisions are going to feel more unique and interesting than others because you may have had a brilliant idea for a compound or a source for an inflection. But not every decision will end up feeling brilliant, and that is not only okay but is necessary for making a language that scans and resolves more naturally. There is a reason there are so many common patterns and lexical sources that show up in languages that are totally unrelated to each other—they just make sense.
- Don’t be afraid to revise… but recognize when a revision will require a major language overhaul and think through that decision very carefully. Very rarely do conlangers look at any of their languages and say, “It’s perfection!” Like all artists, we tend to see things we wish we would have done differently. Embrace the growth and use newfound knowledge to make future conlang decisions even better.
- Remember that your conlang is yours. You get to decide what you want to do with it and how you want it to look and sound. Asking people for advice and feedback is a wonderful way to grow as an artist (one I highly recommend), but remember that, at the end of the day, it is your conlang and your art.
No language is perfect or complete. All languages have idiosyncrasies and quirks. All languages have irregularities. And all living languages continuously grow and change with no end point to the growth. No conlang will ever be “complete,” but it can reach a stage where you say, “That’s enough for what I needed from this project.”
This year’s goal is for you to develop a conlang to that point of enoughness, where you will be able to use your language, whether you want to use it for translating, participating in conlang relays, or writing personal journal entries in it. After the year is over, you get to decide whether you want to grow it from there (and, if so, how you want to grow it) to reach a state of being able to look at it and say, “That’s what I need from this language right now.”