Language Construction

Made-up languages are a staple ingredient of many fantasy and SF worlds, with famous examples including Tolkien's Elvish languages and Burgess's Nadsat. I started inventing my own languages even before I read "The Lord of the Rings", probably inspired by Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy (it's so long ago, I don't remember!). My first attempt, a collaborative project with my best friend, was extremely simplistic; no more than a cipher whose vocabulary was made up of obscure (to a thirteen-year-old!) loanwords in English given new meanings. The only words I recall are the verb mir "to be" (shortened from emir) and julep "shoe".

In time I discovered there was a lot more to invented languages than vocabulary, and eventually I discovered Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit, a resource aimed at SF&F writers with little formal knowledge of linguistics. Since then I have made several attempts at creating my own languages, particularly for the non-humans in my novels. I usually work on them when I'm getting bogged down with the novel-writing itself, so they are very much a work in progress.