My Journey in Conlanging
Since I was a kid, I have been fascinated by codes and fictional languages. Even though I never heard the term “conlanging” until I was in my teens, I attempted to make languages for characters to speak in my worlds. They weren’t good. But since then, I have been working on a new conlang, Salog Kari. It’s nothing great, but it’s miles ahead of my other projects. I’m excited to continue exploring this topic and improving my work!
Nassan
I can’t write about my journey in conlanging without first paying homage to my first “conlang,” Nassan. Okay, this wasn’t really a conlang. It was a code, English with a ne
w alphabet. I’ve always been rather proud of the majority of this alphabet, but I honestly began to run out of ideas towards the end. I would love to redesign some of these characters in the future!
Later, I played around with reversing the alphabet and using the resulting English words as Nassan words. Some translated nicely, like “Portal” translating to “Kligzo.” Other words, however, did not translate so nicely, like my main character’s name “Yeelanda” translating to “Bvvozmwz.” I now know that this idea of reversing the alphabet is called the Atbash cipher, and has been around for millenia. Apparently it was sometimes used in ancient manuscripts, for example, encoding “Babylon” as “Sheshach” in the Bible by reversing the Hebrew alphabet.
Coroniilian
This is the earliest real conlang that I created. It began as simply a code, like Nassan – a cool writing system to write English in. But then I began coining new words for t
his language. Perhaps my inspiration to do this came from beginning to learn Spanish, or learning about how cool compound words can be. Whether or not that’s true, I certainly wanted this language to be full of long, complicated, compound nouns.
For example, “wniileauncna” (pronounced “oo-neel-e-ounc-na”) was one of the longest words I coined. “W” (“oo”) meant water, “niil” (“neel”) meant in (or on), “e” meant the, “aunc” meant land, and “na” meant attached. So, wniileauncna is water in the land but attached to the ocean, otherwise known as an inland sea. Those words, and a few others, are the ones I plan to keep when I overhaul this language in the future. But most of the other words simply didn’t make sense and need re-designing.
(Untitled)
I labeled this conlang as untitled, since I want to change the name of the world and the language. I had the idea for this conlang early on, but it’s actually one of the most recent conlangs I’ve worked on. Originally, I was going to call the world “Phirwo,” combining the words “Fire World” but with a “ph” and without the “rld”. When I was a kid I thought th
is was edgy, but now I think it’s just cringy. The only word I’m sure I want in this conlang is “praktal”, which means fire.
As for the writing system that I designed recently, I love the aesthetic (I was inspired to make it look like unintelligible scribbles), and I love that I thought to create two different versions, perhaps from different time periods. But as I continue to revisit this project moving forward, I believe I should take a deeper dive into the phonology and make it more unique.
Najdan
When considering what to do for my Najdan language, I briefly toyed with the idea of creating a pictographic language, inspired by the glyphic language of the ancient Maya. It didn’t get very far, but I hope to revisit the idea eventually.
Then I wrote something on the map of this world using a cool writing system idea, but I neglected to write the actual writing system. The map remains undeciphered to this day.
Salog Kari
In highschool I began drawing my first serious fantasy map, inspired by the Youtube channel WASD20. When looking into how to name places on my map, the most intriguing advice I found told me I ought to do a little conlanging to make my placenames unique. So, researching conlanging, I discovered the the Youtube channels jan Misali (maker of the Conlang Critic series) and Biblaridion (who makes videos on conlanging and worldbuilding), and started creating another new language. Salog Kari was my first (and most recent) big step-up in the game of conlanging.
To get started, I attempted to follow Biblaridian’s How to Make a Language series, but a lot of the concepts went over my head. The result was a half-organized, but still somewhat satisfying creation. One issue I may need to address in the future is the phonology, where I didn’t think through some of my decisions very well. Since it’s been a few years, I plan to go through those videos again, and be a bit more thorough in my design process.
The writing system for Salog Kari uses 15 characters, 14 of which are mirrors of each other. These mirrored characters have certainly been confusing at times. There is actually a major spelling error on my map of Salog Kar due to this fact! Other than that, I love the design of the
alphabet. Each character’s name represents a different interesting concept, like “tor” meaning peace, where the mirrored characters are the opposite, like “per” meaning war.
I have also toyed with the idea of making Salog Kari read either right-to-left or left-to-right, and flipping the characters over when you switch between orders. That may be too confusing for readers, but it could could also be an incredible opportunity for poetry! Salog Kari could have a special form of poetry that reads every line both directions. But that requires designing words that are meaningful when read both forwards and backwards, which might be difficult. I plan to look into that at some point, though!
Conclusion
Moving forward, I would like to try and devote a lot more time to worldbuilding in general, including conlanging. Before starting new conlang projects, I really want to go back and rehash my older projects. These are some of the core languages of my worldbuilding project, and it would be amazing if some of my future conlangs built off of them in some way. Of course, I still have so much to learn on this topic. But if I’ve learned anything from my experiences, it’s that practice is the most important tool in conlanging!
If you have a cool conlang that you would like to share, you can submit an image to our showcase competition!