The Language Construction Kit

O Kit de Construção de Línguas (em português; traduzido por Gustavo Pereira)
Il Kit di Costruzione di Linguaggi (in italiano; tradotto per Daniele "MadMage" Calisi)
Der Sprachbaukasten (auf Deutsch; übersetzt von Carsten Becker)

This set of webpages (what's a set of webpages? a webchapter?) is intended for anyone who wants to create artificial languages-- for a fantasy or an alien world, as a hobby, as an interlanguage. It presents linguistically sound methods for creating naturalistic languages-- which can be reversed to create non-naturalistic languages. It suggests further reading for those who want to know more, and shortcuts for those who want to know less.
--Mark Rosenfelder

The above is a sample of an artificial language of my own, Verdurian. If you're curious, it reads, "Ďitelán mu cum pén veaen er mësan so Sannam", meaning "Go forth in peace to love and serve the Lord." The accented sounds like the th in then; the vowels should be pronounced more or less as in Spanish.

How about a suite of webpages? Does that sound better?
Chico: OK, you're the Swede of Webpages, an' I'll be the Mexican of Usenet.

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Before I could write this little inscription I had to:

• Decide on the sounds of the language
• Create the lexicon
• Create the grammar
• Design an alphabet
• Decide how the alphabet is modified for cursive handwriting
• Translate the desired text

You may have two reactions to this:

1. "Cool! I want to do that!"
2. "What a geek you must be. Get a life!"

The order of the steps above is significant. Working backwards (e.g. creating a text and then devising a grammar to match) will lead to an inconsistent if not incoherent work. A bad example is Hergé's Syldavian; since he basically made it up in pieces, as he needed it, it's impossible to create a consistent phonology or morphology for it, based on the scraps of the language provided in the Tintin books. (This didn't prevent me from coming up with my best attempt at a Syldavian grammar.)

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The rest of the document is organized as an outline. Click on the topics you're interested in (or pick the first one and read sequentially).

If you're looking for a quick download, this scary outline reduces to just two files, this one and this one.
 

Models Natural and unnatural languages Non-Western (or at least non-English) models Sounds Types of consonants Inventing consonants Vowels Stress Tone Phonological constraints Alien mouths Alphabets Orthography An example Diacritics Fancier writing systems Word building How many words do you need? Alien or a priori languages A few half-recognizable borrowings Languages based on existing languages Sound symbolism Some guidelines for not reinventing the English vocabulary Grammar Is your language inflecting, agglutinating, or isolating? Do you have nouns, verbs, and adjectives? How do you indicate plural, case, and gender forms of adjectives and nouns? Do nouns have gender? Does the verb inflect by person, gender, and/or number? What distinctions are made in the verb? What are the personal pronouns? What are the other pronouns? What are the numbers? What about adjectives? Are there articles (a, the)? What order do the various components of a noun phrase appear in? What order do the various components of a sentence appear in? How do you form a relative clause (the man who...)? How do you form yes/no questions? How about other questions? How do you negate a sentence? What about conjunctions? Style Politeness Poetry Language families How do you do it? Dialects

Where do I go from here?

I get plenty of mail saying roughly "OK, but how exactly do I do it?" I advise reading the Kit again, and working on the language as you go, section by section: i.e. create a phonology, establish phonological constraints, work on nouns, verbs, etc., ending with complex clauses. Don't be afraid to go back and revise. Don't look for shortcuts; if you don't enjoy the process of creating a language, this may not be the hobby for you.

All you could want to know about Verdurian is on the web; the language information is just part of that encyclopedia of Almean life, Virtual Verduria and even more at Almeopedia. There's a dozen or so languages there, each of which is doing something a little different. Cuêzi is a pretty, Greco-Latinish language; Wede:i is wonderfully agglutinating; Kebreni is designed to be not very much like English while still being typical of human languages; Elkarîl is a non-human language which violates several human universals. Axunašin has a particularly well developed syntax, while Xurnese goes into great detail on semantics and pragmatics.

You can meet other conlang enthusiasts-- and get help when you're stuck-- at the zompist bboard.

Good reading on dead trees: see my list of recommended books for conworlders.

(+) in the following list indicates victims of linkrot that I couldn't fix by Googling (June 2009).

Jeffrey Henning writes and posts regularly on the process of creating model languages and reviews a number of projects. Check it out. (+)

Rick Harrison has an elegant page with a respectable conlang, Vorlin, and a renunciation of IALs that IALers will dismiss at their peril. Esperantists will not like Justin Rye's critique of Esperanto, but for others it contains much to think about while constructing a language.

Richard Kennaway has many links to descriptions of conlangs and resources for creating them, and it's annotated (something not enough linkmeisters bother to do).

If you read French, see Christophe Grandsire's page of conlang reviews: meaty descriptions of quite a few conlangs.

Pablo Flores has some nice Tolkienesque languages, plus his own guide to language creation (based on this one).

If you're thinking of generating vocabulary by machine, take a gander at what Chris Pound has done.

The master of the secret vice is J.R.R. Tolkien, whose conlangery is lovingly annotated here. Don't miss the Harvard Lampoon parody.

See a bunch of constructed alphabets (including Verdurian), and contemplate supporting them with Unicode, at the ConScript Unicode Registry.

Newsgroups: try alt.language.artificial. There's a number of mailing lists, such as Conlang, Auxlang, Tolklang, and k.d. lang. Or were. Best to Google them to see if they're still extent.

If you're interested in constructing whole worlds, you might like Juuha Vesanto's huge list of fantasy worlds (+), or Geoff Eddy's guide to creating worlds, or Patricia Wrede's list of questions for world creators.