Goal: Determine your speakers and conworld
Note: You will have five days to describe these in more detail. Focus on the big picture for today.
Tip: Start a “vision board” or collection of images that can inspire you as you fill out details.
Work focus: Learn/Brainstorm/Try
Now that you have set intentions for creating a language and sharing your work, the next step is to provide a context to situate your language. A language needs speakers (replace this word with “users” if your language is not a spoken one), and speakers use the language within an environmental context. They live in a world somewhere, and that world is the context for their language use.
Today is earmarked as a brainstorming day, giving you space to consider a lot of possibilities before settling on your final decision. It gives you space to consider the bigger picture before diving in to the specific details, which will be the focus of the next five days.
You may choose to create a “fanlang,” or a language intended to fit within an existing, published fictional world that someone else has created. For instance, you might be creating a language for the air benders of the Avatar: The Last Airbender universe. Or perhaps you want to create a language for the flower people of the animated film Epic, the citizens of Florin in Princess Bride, or the citizens of Pelican Town in Stardew Valley.
You may also choose to create your language for a fictional world that you have already created (or a friend of yours has created), such as characters in a DnD campaign or creatures living in a fantasy world in a novel you’ve written.
However, you don’t have to be creating your language for a specific work, and, in fact, most conlangers begin their projects without the context of an existing world. J.R.R. Tolkien is famous for his Lord of the Rings books, yet those books grew out of a language creation project. Tolkien wrote the books as an extension of all the ideas he had for his conlangs. You, of course, don’t need to go to those extremes to have some fun with creating a world and speakers to support your conlang goals. Most conlangers don’t (and have no interest in doing such a thing).
Your answers for today may be as simple as “humans living on an undiscovered island in the Pacific Ocean” or “alien life forms inhabiting a planet similar to Venus” or “squirrels living in Central Park.” The goal is to nail down the basic ideas you have for speakers and their world so that you can build on those in the upcoming prompts. I encourage you to also use today to collect images (or sketch your own) that you can reference for inspiration as you write more details about the speakers and their world.
Whatever you do, have some fun with it! What you are working on now will play vital roles in decisions you make as you begin building vocabulary in the weeks ahead.