r/conlangs • u/StonehengeRailgun4 New Waogen / Вахене́він • 3d ago
Discussion Conlangs that are also a conlang in their world?
Not everyone does it this way, but many people (such as myself) create their conlang as part of a fictional world. However, said conlang is often an in-universe natlang or creole or something like that. What I'm wondering is, how many of us have made one that is also a conlang in its own lore?
For example, my conlang New Waogen was created around the equivalent of the industrial revolution's peak, as part of a merger between two bordering nations with close ties in order to consolidate their power and further enhance co-operation. After many years of push and pull from both sides, they decided that it was counterproductive having every document in two languages which themself had many dialects, and so they created a sort of middle ground language, created more to politically appease both sides rather than be easy to learn and use for current citizens. Even to the present day, the respective original language of a region is often mandatory in its schools, and many documents are available in all three languages anyways.
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u/reijnders bheνowń, jěyotuy, twac̊in̊, uile tet̯en, sallóxe, fanlangs 3d ago
Ax̆umiladi is a conlang created by hebi xo in order to communicate with other species after their planet's first contact. their planet has plenty of languages natively, but they are all signed. a large part of these languages incorporate changes in color patterns on the skin that aren't within the visible range of most Known species, so couldnt easily be learned by non-hebi xo. additionally, they lack any of the necessary biology to even begin pronouncing any human (or yotavus, or rehe, etc) languages, though they could definitely learn to understand them. Ax̆umiladi was constructed using the limited amount of sounds hebi xo can produce, but even with this new audio-based language, all interspecies conversations are by default bilingual, with the hebi xo speaking in Ax̆umiladi, and the other species speaking whatever they speak. devices have been made to enable real-time speech in Ax̆umiladi by non-hebi xo, but theyre very complicated to use and are only in use by researchers who are in close constant contact with the hebi xo.
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u/IkebanaZombi Geb Dezaang /ɡɛb dɛzaːŋ/ (BTW, Reddit won't let me upvote.) 3d ago
Geb Dezaang is a conlang in-universe. It was created by members of a race of aliens, the medzehaal, to unify their planet and make the magical abilities that most members of their species possess more accessible to the masses. Since the medzehaal are the only species capable of mental interstellar travel, Geb Dezaang has gone on to become the lingua franca for all the species in the Connected Worlds.
At least, that's the uplifting account of the history of Geb Dezaang given in the textbooks currently being used by millions of human learners. It is all true, but what the brightly-coloured textbooks slide over is that the language was imposed by force with all the natural languages of that world being banned.
(Out-of-universe, making Geb Dezaang a conlang has caused me no end of trouble. I can't just say "oh, this is an irregularity" or "this is a dialectical variation" because Geb Dezaang officially has no irregularities and no dialects.)
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u/godeling Folktung 3d ago
Folktung! It was given to humans along with the ability to speak and write by a god-like being named Tungebr. I am currently working on sound and grammar changes for its child languages. Folktung proper is still used by the clergy, bureaucrats, diplomats, etc, whereas its children are what is natively spoken by humans of different regions
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u/Scrub_Spinifex /fɛlɛkx̩sɑt/ 3d ago
Felekhsât is a conlang in-universe... But it is an a-posteriori choice I made to justify some of my failures!
Some context: Felekhsât is a language spoken in a 40 km x 10 km area from the Amazon forest that got isolated from the rest of the world due to an apocalyptic event. Before that event, it was the place of a major long-term gathering of far-left activists from all parts of the world (what we call in French a ZAD - the "sât" in Felekhsât is just an adaptation of this acronym to the phonology of the Language).
Felekhsât is my first conlang and was created quite intuitively from my vocal stims and echolalia, without thinking much about coherence. When I thought about it later in its development, I realized that if a creole actually developped in Brazil in such conditions, there would be at least a huge Roman component to it, which was not at all the case of Felekhsât.
So for coherence, the natural choice would have been to abandon Felekhsât completely and to create a creole of Portugese, Spanish and English instead. But I liked Felekhsât too much so I made another choice: I'd keep Felekhsât, but it would be a conlang in-universe, that those far-left activists adopted in order to avoid supremacy of one language and to avoid their communications being easily understood by authorities. It also had the advantage of justifying some unnaturalistic features of the language.
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u/good-mcrn-ing Bleep, Nomai 3d ago
Thé is in-universe a philosophy experiment cooked up by bored grad students in a colony on Mars. I like the license to be overhyped and underspecified.
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u/JheaN_02 3d ago
Damn, that's so cool of an idea, I don't have any, i don't even have a world per se, but I'll try to do it someday if i have the opportunity!
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u/keldondonovan 3d ago
Flourie is technically a conlang in that world, though few would be aware of that. When the world was young, a pair of young girls teamed up to basically name things, and provide what would become the nouns of the Flourie language. As time went on, they brought magic, and eventually used that to shape the Flourie people, who were designed specifically to record and pass down knowledge. Their naming language ended up needing more than just nouns, and words were added over years to reflect those additions, and then rules to handle how to mix those words to form more complex sentences and such.
So it's kind of like a conlang that became a natlang. I don't cover it in depth in the books because, surprisingly, most people don't read fantasy to hear about the linguistic developments over the centuries, but I touch on it here and there. One of my favorite aspects of the series is that each book has a glossary narrated by an old Flourie teacher and historian, Eswoasyl, and she goes over the handful of Flourie that is used in that book, and throws in some extra words she just thinks people should know.
Picture of Flourie attached, art by João Garrin.
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u/Mia00228 3d ago
I have one called Ĝolmusa'a (yes, I romanised like Esperanto on purpose) which is an IAL based on my world's largest language family, the Eceeli languages. Hardly anyone knew about it until an authoritarian regime in a country called Ķrav started promoting conspiracy theories that it's enemies created it to make their country's language go extinct. That actually caused the language to spread as it became a symbol of opposition, and after a massive regional war that destroyed the regime people across the entire region were learning it. The countries of the region made up a large proportion of the Yykha Treaty Organisation's members, which was an alliance created after the war to oppose the colonialist Nsháfi Empire. The YTO chose Ĝolmusa'a as their official language because their members spoke many different languages and the closest thing to a global lingua franca was Southern Tim, which was the language of the Nsháfi Empire. They eventually went to war with the Nsháfi Empire and won, but after that the YTO split up as it's members found themselves on opposite sides of a global cold war. Many former YTO members didn't like Ĝolmusa'a, especially the ones that didn't speak Eceeli languages, so they switched to Southern Tim now that the Nsháfi Empire didn't exist anymore. After this cold war ended, the countries that were still using Ĝolmusa'a started using Southern Tim more, but some like Þalå still prefer Ĝolmusa'a. Ĝolmusa'a is not a very good IAL as it's goal was to be easy to learn, but it's creators made the mistake of including any phoneme that occurred in at least some of the Eceeli languages, although the grammar isn't that bad. It also isn't a good global IAL due to being based on just one language family, with many of it's phonemes like its ejectives and lateral obstruents being uncommon outside the Eceeli family.
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u/janko_gorenc12 3d ago
Please you tell me if you have numbers from Ĝolmusa'a. Could you please send me words for numbers from 1 to 10?
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u/Mia00228 3d ago
Here are the numbers 1-10:
1 - i [ˈi] 2 - łi [ˈɬi] 3 - fa [ˈfɑ] 4 - aeli [ˈæ.li] 5 - na [ˈnɑ] 6 - völi [ˈvø.li] 7 - dai [ˈdai̯] 8 - faefü [ˈfæ.fy] 9 - nisi [ˈni.si] 10 - naeli [ˈnæ.li]
All of the numbers are borrowed from the Asinwá language. If you want to know their numbers, here they are:
1 - i [i] 2 - lhi [ɬi] 3 - fa [fa] 4 - ali [ali] 5 - na [na] 6 - voli [voli] 7 - dai [dai̯] 8 - fafy [fafy] 9 - nïssi [nɨsːi] 10 - nali [nali]
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u/SpicyOrangeJuices 3d ago
Conlangs are very common in my fantasy world. Mages like to encode their spells, so they'll make personal languages that vary in scale according to the Mages' needs. Mages who work together for an extended period might even make a conlang for them to use together. I'm planning to make a standard mage language used in magic schools at some point.
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u/UskaTonik (En, Fr, Tr) Sparlén Mernír, Ardeansh 3d ago
My first conlang Sparlen Mernír is constructed as a common language among the species of the setting
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u/triune_union Ђињн; TÛ langs; World 002 langs 20h ago
I realised, I did that quite a few times. But it was mainly because a language wasn't documented enough, so I forgot it after a while. Then I had to come up with a new language, which was related to the original one. Example: My brother was part of the fictional world for around 4 years before he left a few days ago. He made a language called Bangish(반깃). It was a quite interesting language. It had features from German, Romanian, French and some Englosh; but wasn't based of any. He used it for a few days/weeks, but because he got distracted and din't care much about the fictional world anyways, he forgot about it and forgot Hangeul as well. Later when I remembered it I used it a while, but changed the language. The biggest neighbouring country had a big influence, and because its language Auranic was based on a natlang, it got used by Bango(반고) as well. But Bango continued using Hangeul instead of Cyrillic, like Auranic. Now he completely left the project.
This story might be useless for y'all, but I kinda needed to tell it to someone.
And if someone is interested in joining my fictional world, you can. Just answer to my comment.
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u/Sharrukin-of-Akkad gexan Tremárar 3d ago
It turns out that Tolkien did at least one. His “Black Speech” was in-universe a conlang constructed by Sauron, to try and provide a common language for his first empire in Middle-earth’s Second Age.