Conlanging Habits

On By @wae

My constructed languages tend to have a lot in common.  After the fold are some of the features I tend to enjoy adding to my conlangs.

  • I like relatively limited sound inventories (20-25 sounds total, 5-6 vowels).
  • Every conlang I have ever made has a Cyrillic orthography, usually (but not always) based on the Serbian Cyrillic script for some reason.  I don’t always use it, but it’s always an option.
  • My romanizations don’t tend to have diacritics; I prefer digraphs.
  • The CV(N) syllable structure, immediately familiar to anyone who speaks Japanese.
  • The <ts> digraph in my languages’ romanizations, invariably denoting [ts]. [ts] is my favorite affricate. I tend toward coarticulations, double articulations, and affrication – hearing about [kp] and [gb] in the languages of West Africa was a revelation.
  • VSO word order. It’s so elegant!
  • Strangely, I have a tendency toward postpositions and adjectives and adverbs following the words they modify. (You’d think my love of VSO word order would lead to the opposite, since that’s how VSO languages tend to work. French and Japanese are the natlangs I know the best next to English, and the one has adjectives that customarily follow their nouns, and the other has postpositions by way of its particles.)
  • Intricate case systems, the more cases the merrier. A language I created in college had 53 cases, all appended to the words they modified by simple affixation. My current projects have 28 (Keregafa) and 20 (Uwrona) cases.
  • Verbal mode and aspect systems that would put you in the mind of Navajo. I like the conciseness these confer upon sentences where they’re used. Polysynthetic verb systems, more broadly, appeal to me, though I’ve yet to create a conlang that is truly polysynthetic.
  • The names of my languages are usually just “language” or “speech” rendered in that language. I think there’s a weak tendency toward this in the American languages moreso than in Africa and Eurasia (e.g. le français is the language originally spoken by les Français, Kiswahili is the language originally spoken by Waswahili, etc.).
  • Agglutinative morphology. I like the “ease of use” of agglutination for building complex words. (I’ve been inspired, in equal measure, by Japanese derivational morphology and English medical terminology. I’m a medical coder by trade, and medical terms are built from Greek and Latin roots according to a more-or-less predictable set of rules.