But the funnest thing about designing a language...WRITING SYSTEM!!! LOVE LOVE LOVE. You've got Alphabets like ours, where each character makes a sound. You can have a syllabary where each character makes a syllable (kana in Japanese). Then you've got glyphs, where each character is a word or idea (chinese or egyptian).

The favorite one of mine is a mix between an alphabet and a syllabary. Each consonant and each vowel has a character, and then vowels stack on the consonants to make an individual character for each syllable. It looks like a mix between cursive, arabic, and elvish. I call it Phiqar.

I've tried.

Take a word like . . . alphabet.

1. divide it into sounds al- pha - bet.

2. Take off the last letter.

3. al - pha -be - now for the first letters. Switch the first two sounds.

The result phaalbe.

For me this was a fun way to create my own language. Though no one else will understand it unless your race has a translator that will help the main character or if you weave into the context clues.

Lleudloch tekir vik gaiia esii!

(That's "good luck with your languages", or "good luck with your talks" literally.)

Yeah, there's so much that can be covered in conlangs. I'll focus on the feel of a language.

Tolkien is, by far, the most famous writer to create his own language. What I find interesting is that he made multiple languages and each one had a different feel to it. Elvish was flowing and light, while Dwarvish was dark and choppy. How did he do that? Two ways:

1. Use of Vowels. All vowels are pronounced by moving your tongue. If your tongue is towards the back of your throat, you make a sound that is 'dark'. These are vowels like in the words "up", "book", "boat", "but", "stop", etc. Each one is a 'back vowel' and for some reason, readers subconciously associate these sounds with dark sounds. So, if you want a light language, use 'front vowels' like in "feet", "cat", "head", "fit", etc. Granted, not all words are just one type of vowels (look at the name "legolas", which has two front vowels and one back. It's a mix, but the majority is still light.), but the overall pattern is that 'good' words get plenty of front vowels while 'dark' words get plenty of back vowels.

Don't quite believe it? Look at Rivendell (front vowels-3, back-0) versus Mordor (front-0, back-2) or Moria (front-1, back-2). I'm not saying that you need to use this, I'm just saying that this is a pattern that shows up in Tolkien's languages. Light languages were geared towards front vowels while dark languages were geared towards back vowels.

2. Use of Consonants. A consonant is anything that isn't a vowel, and there are so many different ways to pronounce them. However, looking at flowing languages versus choppy languages, we'll look at the fluidity of those sounds. If you can hold out a single letter then we'll call it flowing (try say sssssssss, or lllllllllll, or mmmmm). If you can't hold out a single letter then we'll can it choppy (you can't say ttttttt, or kkkkkk, or bbbbbb). Therefore, flowing letters are: z, s, r, f, v, h, n, m, l, sh, th, etc. while choppy are: d, t, g, k, p, b, etc. Therefore, Elvish used a lot of flowing letters (Legolas again, flowing- 3, choppy- 1) in order to sound so graceful.

Most people associate flowing languages with culture and refinement, while they associate choppy languages with barbarism. Yeah, I know that that's overgeneralizing, but it's the pattern that shows up in Tolkien. You can break the pattern and do your own thing, I'm just showing you how he looked at letters and figured out how he wanted to use them.

I agree with the first comment on taking one linguistics class. It helps you see language outside of the english mindset. However, for those that don't have the time or money for such, find books about language theory and such to find out how it ticks.

Gah, I love this topic too much to just leave it alone.

I find that anyone is capable of creating a conlang, but many people are daunted by the task and never try. Why? Simply because they're not sure how to do it. That being the case, I'll cover how I make conlangs and we can go from there.

Step 1-Phonetics. You have to determine which sounds your language uses, both vowels and consonants. I usually sit down and write out a list of all the sounds they use, such as: i,e,a,o,u,b,p,t,d,k,r,l,m,n,s,z,f,th,dh,sh,zh. You may think that this list is a bit long, but you'd be amazed at how short it is compared to English. English has about 16 different vowels and I'm only going to use 5.

Step 2- Phonology. This means mapping out how my sounds come together. I usually like to map it out as syllables, so let's say that in this new language, you can only have syllables that start with a consonant and end in a vowel (CV). So my syllables can be bi, pe, ta, do, ku, ri, le, ma, no, etc. As it stands, all my words are going to end in vowels. However, in your language, you can change this to whatever you want AS LONG AS YOU CAN PRONOUNCE IT. I can't tell you how much I hate words like Xctodcsje. How do you pronounce that?!

Step 3- Morphology. This one is tougher since I have to start assigning meaning to small suffixes. In plenty of European languages, verbs are shown by a little tag right on the word, so let's do the same. We'll assume that all verbs begin with sali-. In this portion, we also determine how to conjugate those verbs (assuming that the conjugation is simply altering the verb) and how to negate it, as well as a few other suffixes that may affect meaning.

Step 4- Syntax. How do words come together to form a sentence? In a basic sentence, you have Subject (S), Verb (V) and Object (O). English is SVO (The boy threw the ball), while Arabic is usually VSO (Threw the boy the ball), while Japanese is SOV (The boy the ball threw). Simply choose a pattern and go from there. Most languages will follow their pattern unless they have an additional way of showing who did what, such as cases in German. Unless you're a great grammarian, I wouldn't suggest tinkering with cases just yet.

Step 5- Semantics. This means sit down with a list of words that you want to translate into your language and start making up words. Make sure that they follow the rules that you made in Steps 2 and 3 (i.e. verbs start with sali-, nouns end in -o, etc.). Once you have a list of words in your language (make sure you have pronouns such as I, you, we, on that list), you can start stringing them together and forming sentences.

Step 6- Orthography. This part isn't going to show up in your writing unless you create your own customized font that our computers can read, but let's admit it, everyone who creates a language sits down and makes up a cool way of writing it out. This step is optional and completely up to you.

Enjoy!

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