What is a conlang anyway?
To paraphrase that bloated monstrosity, Wikipedia:
A conlang is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary have been devised by an individual or group, instead of having naturally evolved as part of a culture.
Of course, part of the fun in devising a conlang is devising the culture in which the language "evolved", from an intratextual point of view. Such an activity is known by aficionados as conworlding. Elsewhere on this site can be found links to other people's works, which demonstrate both of these disciplines ("art" is a bit of a poncey word, really). This page, however, is devoted to my own efforts in the field.
My own conlangs: how and why?
My interests in conlanging largely reflect my interests in linguistics: primarily diachrony with a bit of syntax thrown in. My earlier conlangs in fact acted almost as self-study courses in those areas as I did a hell of a lot of research in order to make my languages more believable and realistic. Today, I seem to be unable to create a conlang without giving it at least a cursory diachronic history, and (in my opinion) my best works are those which have elaborately detailed histories.
Conlangs in general can be divided into two types: a priori and a posteriori. The former term describes conlangs which have been created ab initio, not based on any pre-existing natural language (natlang), while the latter describes those which are the other way around- based on a natural language.
a priori conlangs
A priori conlanging isn't something that I engage in all that often. The languages of my fictional world, Telmona, are all a priori, but as yet only two Telmonic languages are online, and they only have (extremely) brief sketches.
- Tailanca (unavailable)
- Tailanca is a synthetic language with unusual tripartite alignment. Phonologically, it was inspired to a degree by Finnish.
- Saraka (unavailable)
- Saraka is a largely isolating ergative language, with Austronesian influences.
- Adata
- Adata is a language derived from my friend Radius' Ndak Ta, as part of the ZBB Derivation Relay
- Proto-Western
- Located in the same conworld as Adata and its relatives, Proto-Western is a vaguely Native American-inspired language.
a posteriori conlangs
Much of my work is a posteriori in nature: I enjoy the challenge of using regular soundchanges to create a fictional daughter language of a pre-existing family, giving it its own feel while still trying to remain both unique and plausible. Unsurprisingly, given that my interests in comparative linguistics are Indo-European in general and Celtic and Romance in particular, my three main a posteriori conlangs are designed to be part of these families.
- Arvorec
- Arvorec is a Celtic language, derived from Gaulish. It forms part of the Ill Bethisad project.
- The Satric family (unavailable)
- The Satric family is an entire fictional subbranch of the Indo-European family. Satem languages, their development has been inspired by that of the Germanic, Slavic and Tocharian families.
- Dravean (unavailable)
- Dravean is an ongoing project to create an Eastern Romance language, with particular influence from Vegliot Dalmatian.
I also have two languages in the pipeline which, gods-willing, will eventually end up in this category: Mušeyic, a Semitic language and Norreyna, a language descended from Old Norse.