Conlanging should be fun
Disclaimer: as always I'd like to remind you that I'm not a linguist or a professional conlanger, I'm just a hobbyist talking about the things I've learned from conlanging and consuming pop linguistics content over the years, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
(Oil Painting titled "The Critic" by Luis Ruiperez from Wikimedia commons)
Table of contents
Preamble
This article isn't so much about conlanging itself as much as it is about the nature of art, hobbies, and how to engage with any community that is centered around art, and of course this is all just my opinion, feel free to disregard this entirely if you wish, I just want to share my perspective on this topic because it's something I don't see being discussed very often at all and I think some beginners would benefit from keeping these things in mind as they get into conlanging.
Differing tastes
The way I personally approach conlanging is different from the way that most people seem to do it, it is not very academic or thorough and instead it's a lot more casual and vibes-based, and at first I felt pretty insecure about this, none of the conlangs I've worked on have gotten to the same level of complexity that other people's languages have, and it seems like everyone in the conlang community loves complexity, so I felt like there was something wrong with me, otherwise why would I be struggling to meet other people's expectations, right?
But eventually I had the realization that I simply do not engage with conlanging for the same reasons that other people do, my preferences are different and that's fine, I'm allowed to enjoy a hobby for different reasons to others, so let me take you through a little journey where I explain how I approach things differently and how I ended up realizing that there is no one true way to conlang.
(Photograph titled "Into the rabbit hole" from Wikimedia commons)
None of the languages I've worked on have enough grammatical rules for me to be able to translate much beyond simple sentences, because most of what I do when I conlang is create words, write sound evolution rules, and work on writing systems, that's what I have the most fun doing so that's what I spend my time on.
My grammatical rules tend to be simple stuff like "sentences start with a verb, then an object, and then a subject" or "this particle is placed after the noun it's attached to" without having any exceptions or nuance behind it, and whenever I pick which verb tenses or noun cases I want I don't tend to write long descriptions on how these work, I just go with the default definitions and don't really consider the exceptions or extended meanings of these word forms.
And that's really what I preferred, I didn't necessarily mind that my languages weren't the most hyper-realistic things out there, they were still more complex than a simple cipher or plain relex would be (if you don't know what those are see the glossary section of this site) and I got to feel excited about them, but eventually I started to realize that the conlang community doesn't tend to like my types of conlangs, they prefer hardcore naturalism, that is to say they prefer when a conlang tries to match the level of complexity found in actual natural languages that exist on earth, with the same level of exceptions to every rule and complex systems that interact with one another in unpredictable yet logical ways.
The only long translation I've ever made was very gramatically similar to English, at first I was proud of it but the more I realized that it wasn't nearly as complex as people would generally expect it to be the more insecure I felt about it, and I still feel embarrassed enough about it that I've only shown it to two conlangers I've met and no more (it is available online but I'll let you find it yourself, shouldn't be too hard to find if you know where to look).
(Painting titled "The Tower of Babel" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder from Wikimedia commons)
Despite the fact that I like to share my art online I've never posted any of my languages to the r/conlangs subreddit, that's because based on their preferences I am almost certain that my posts would get deleted for being "low quality" or even "low effort", I simply don't create the level of detail that that subreddit demands for their posts so I can't really engage with the community much beyond commenting every now and then and looking at other people's work.
Now, this is fine, different people can have different tastes and different communities can be aiming for different things, if the r/conlangs subreddit is a community specifically for people who not only enjoy conlangs but also a specific type of conlang with a certain amount of detail then that's perfectly fine, the thing that ended up affecting my confidence is that this is usually framed as a thing to do with "quality" or "standards" rather than taste.
Recently I saw a post on that subreddit which mentions that a common criticism the mods of r/conlangs get is that the moderation is too strict, and it seems that indeed around one third of the posts made end up being deleted. The reasoning behind this is that they "hold themselves to high standards" and that the community at large would rather see posts of "higher quality", and I think the sentiment behind those words is understandable but it does end up leaving the impression that anything but their preferred style of conlanging is low quality or even devoid of merit.
The veteran conlangers of r/conlangs are tired of seeing posts where people are simply sharing the sounds of their language without explaining the rules for how they can be put together or how they shift based on context, or translations that lack the linguistic-y details that conlangers are used to including in their translations, or even stuff like memes, and that's fair, I think they should have a space where they can have more high level discussions about deep grammatical concepts if they want to, that's very valuable, but some conlangers (including myself) are less interested in creating complex things like that, and I can't speak for anyone else but I ended up having the impression that I just wasn't a very good conlanger due to my lack of interest in these deeper linguistic topics.
(Photo of thumbs up symbols and smiley faces by George Pagan III from Unsplash)
But ok, that's one singular community online, what about one to one interactions I've had with conlangers? I like making friends who have shared interests with me, and the idea of meeting people aside from myself who make conlangs was exciting! After all if I met someone who was familiar with conlanging I'd be able to say things like "the velar consonants become palatalized before front vowels" and they'd be able to figure out what that means without me having to launch into a long explanation, if I show them my conlang documents they'd be able to just read them and maybe even tell me if there's things they like about it, and I'd be able to see their work and get inspired!
Once I met a few conlangers though I realized that there was a bit of a disconnect between our conlanging abilities, typically their level of understanding of linguistic concepts would be beyond mine, and sometimes they would talk about all sorts of high level knowledge and little details that I don't find particularly exciting (probably in part because I would have no idea what they were talking about, it's hard to be excited about a thing you don't understand).
At first this felt a bit demoralizing, perhaps there's something wrong with me, or maybe conlanging isn't really for me because I'm not usually excited to read actual linguistics papers, maybe in order to conlang you have to be interested enough in linguistics that you would actually study it at a university, and I'm afraid to say that's not me, I can have some fun learning about linguistics in a casual way, but I'm not interested in many of the more advanced topics, or at least not interested enough to read a textbook or actual scientific papers.
SIDE NOTE: one time I did meet a conlanger who knows advanced linguistics concepts and she actually managed to get me excited about them, I even learned a few new things that I had never heard of before (if you're reading this hi Lucy!! you're awesome!) so I'm not trying to say that I don't enjoy learning about linguistics or that I dislike when people are into the more theory-heavy stuff, I'm simply trying to convey that I used to feel a bit insecure about my own approach to conlanging due to the fact that everyone around me seemed to be a lot more into the actual science of linguistics than I was.
And it's not like any conlangers I've met have been mean to me or even judgmental of my work, not at all, but I noticed that I tend to avoid sharing most of my work with any of them because I almost always feel embarrassed at how simple my stuff is, how non-naturalistic and unrefined it is, but at the same time I don't feel particularly interested in "improving" my skills by reading academic texts and writing paragraphs upon paragraphs of text detailing exactly how each of the grammar points in my language work, or adding dozens of allophony rules and complex phonotactics, that's not why I conlang.
I've only recently started to grow my own confidence in my style of conlanging, something that helped a lot is a video I watched by Mariah Pattie Worldbuilding called Worldbuilding: my terrible 1st conlang (and the naming-language framework I use now, 2 years later), in that video Mariah revisits an older video where she introduced her first conlang and expresses some embarrassment at how bad it was (a very common experience for artists of all types, I often look at old drawings and cringe at how bad they were) but then something interesting happened.
She brings up the fact that her first conlang got a lot of criticism back when she originally shared it, some of that criticism includes that it's 1: "too english-y" and 2: that she should be using IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet), and her response to this was somehow both unexpected and also inspiring to me, she said, and I quote:
"Let me be very clear, you are correct, I just don't care"
Mariah mentions that she didn't even dislike the ideas she had for her old language, she dislikes the way she presented those ideas, the fact that she lacked the vocabulary to properly explain what she was trying to do, but she had no problems with the conlang being too "english-y" or not having enough complex grammar or even not using IPA, and as one of the comments says "The 'You are correct, I just don't care' attitude was like a fresh breeze. I absolutely love it."
In that video Mariah says that she is not interested in "proper conlanging" or in "making a technically good conlang" because she's been told that a "technically good conlang" has complex grammar and requires you to use IPA and all that fancy stuff, but I want to make the case that she is a good conlanger, just because she's not aiming to make a fully speakable language and she's mostly working on the conlang for naming things in her fiction it doesn't make her work less appealing, skilled or interesting.
(Thumbnail of Mariah's video)
In the same way I can look at my work and say to myself "I'm not a bad conlanger, I just prefer regular grammar and simpler systems" even if it ends up being "English-y" or not naturalistic enough for some people, I have fun with it and I see its appeal, and at the end of the day that's what hobbies are for, that's what art is about, it's about self expression and exploring different skills, if someone is interested in the complex high-level concepts that's fine, if someone isn't interested in it that's also fine, we're allowed to have different preferences.
If you also find yourself drawn to simpler conlangs, or even just relexes and ciphers, that's perfectly fine and doesn't make your work any less interesting or valuable, don't let anyone (not even me) tell you how you should be conlanging, there is no one true way to conlang, I'm only here to give advice and guidance but this website is not the end-all be-all of conlanging, it is just my approach.
Stylization
In this last section I want to talk about something that I don't see being discussed in the conlang community, and that is stylization. Before I did conlanging my main hobby was art, I've been drawing for most of my life and I've been watching content by artists, a lot of which is advice and tutorials for other artists to improve their craft, and I think there's some important concepts that apply not just to drawing but to every type of art in general.
Ever since I was little I liked anime and manga, so that's what my main inspiration was growing up, I would even imagine myself drawing my own manga, and even during periods of time when I was more inspired by western art I always gravitated more towards the cartoon-y, simplified styles rather than realism.
That's not an uncommon experience, many people like this end up going to art school or taking art classes because they want to become professional artists, and something that tends to happen in these cases is that these kids start drawing in the style they know and love only for their teachers to go on a rant about "kids these days" or talk about how anime styles are bad or inferior to realism, so many art classes straight up ban anime styles entirely and the kids end up being resentful, after all one of the main things that got them into art was anime, so it sucks to not be able to express that joy or excitement.
(Da Vinci drawing from Wikimedia commons)
Now, I understand (to a certain extent) that in the case of an art class it could be good to focus on realism, or even that it can be good to encourage artists to step out of their comfort zone if they wish to become professionals, because if you want to draw for a living there are many different styles that the market may want from you, so focusing on only one could be limiting or make things harder for you in the long run, and also studying realism can help you to develop certain skills which will be useful when drawing in some other different styles, but I want to highlight a couple of things:
1: People act like learning to draw realism is necessary in order to become a good artist, or even that being good at realism is helpful no matter which style you want to draw in, and I'm sorry to say but that's just incorrect, the skills involved in drawing realistically are different from the skills involved in drawing appealing stylized pieces, and some of these skills can overlap sometimes, but that's not always the case.
In fact I'd argue that if your preference leans more towards simple, 2D, Sanrio style art then learning about shading, anatomy and perspective might be entirely useless to you, in the same way that if your interests are making intricate realistic works then practicing a very stylized flat Sanrio style would be useless to you, treating realism as a necessary stepping stone in all styles is foolish in my opinion and ends up wasting a lot of people's time.
And I think it's sad that often people have this perception that someone who only does Sanrio style art is less skilled or puts less effort into their work than someone who does realism, because that's not necessarily the case, you may be surprised but learning how to stylize and simplify in a way that is appealing takes a lot of work, I've met artists who mainly do realism who have told me that they tried drawing cartoon characters assuming it'd be easy and were surprised at how frustratingly difficult it was, because they hadn't practiced the skills needed to simplify and stylize.
2: Not everyone wants to be a professional, yeah versatility can be good for people who do art for a living, it will open more job opportunities and help you sell yourself as adaptable and whatever, but some of us draw mainly as a hobby, as a thing we like to do for fun, and that doesn't mean that we don't push ourselves to learn or improve but it does mean that we're doing it because it's fun
By laser-focusing on "improvement" we can end up sucking all the fun out of a hobby and if we're not enjoying it anymore then why do it at all? Yeah I'm sure there's people out there who find it fun to study their fundamentals and if they really like realistic styles then they probably enjoy gaining the skills necessary to draw in those styles, but for a lot of us we simply don't care, that's not where the fun is in art.
And I think that it's sad to think of art made professionally as being superior or more worthy of praise than art made non-professionally, money does not determine how appealing or interesting a piece is, I've seen plenty of professional art that is completely uninspiring and boring to me, and I've seen some art from people who only do it as a hobby that left an impact on me and made me feel all sorts of emotions.
Now let's bring it back to conlanging a bit.
(The conlang flag from Wikimedia commons)
In the conlang community if you were to ask someone what the equivalent of "art styles" is for conlangs they'd probably say conlang types, you know, like naturalistic conlangs (ones that try to be as realistic and detailed as possible), logical languages (ones whose grammars are based on predicate logic), personal languages (ones that are made to satisfy the creator of the language and no one else), etc.
And sure, that is partially true, when you see a language like Toki Pona (a minimalist language) you can tell it has its own style, it's not trying to be like Dothraki (a naturalistic language made for the universe of Game of Thrones) but I think that's not quite the equivalent of art styles.
Most people who are into conlangs got into the hobby because of stuff like Star Trek or Game of Thrones, perhaps Avatar (the blue cat people one) or Lord of the Rings, most of us fell in love with the idea of a language that is spoken in a fictional world, but I think there's an assumption in the conlang community that if you want to make a language for your fictional world it has to be as naturalistic as possible, it has to have all of the features you would expect to see in a natural language, but I don't think that's a good approach.
When it comes to writing I've come across the concept of "hard sci-fi" vs "soft sci-fi" and apparently these concepts can be exemplified using Star Trek vs Star Wars (I've never watched either of them so I'm not sure how good the examples are though) but the idea is that hard sci-fi is concerned with giving scientific explanations for everything that happens, it's trying to convince you that what you're seeing could be real and is plausible (like in Star Trek apparently), whereas soft sci-fi is more concerned with story telling, it doesn't try to explain why something like "the force" exists, it just does, you have to suspend your disbelief as a ticket to entry, you're not supposed to question it.
I've noticed that in terms of worldbuilding I tend to enjoy more of this "soft" approach, I like worlds where strange unexplained things happen, for example there's the game "The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask" where plenty of things about the fictional world don't really stand up to scrutiny, like how the moon can fall on the earth without affecting the tides or being torn apart by the earth's gravitational pull, or how there's magical songs that seem to be able to do all sorts of things from summoning rain to turning back time to even turning emotional wounds into masks, and yet I fell in love with that world.
Yeah, it can be impressive to look at a fictional world that is super scientifically accurate and has a fully detailed map of how the plate tectonics interact, their history, the weather patterns, wind and ocean currents, and all that sort of stuff, but that's not usually the stuff I tend to enjoy consuming, I'm much more interested by worlds that tell compelling stories or have interesting concepts behind them, in fact most of my favorite alien designs that I've seen in media are the ones that throw biology out the window and just try to make an appealing design, without regard to realism.
Of course this is not a binary, there is a sliding scale between the "hard" worldbuilding that seeks to explain everything and the "soft" worldbuilding that is more interested in aesthetics, ideas and stories, and I've noticed that this scale applies to naturalistic conlangs too, but I've never seen anyone actually voice this, so I will:
When people want to make a language for their fictional world many assume that the "hard" end of the scale is the way to go, they assume in order for their conlang to be appealing or interesting it has to have the same level of complexity as any natural language would have in the real world, and that's a reasonable assumption, imagine how good it'd feel to trick a linguist into thinking your conlang is a natural language, or getting to brag that your language is complex enough that it requires entire textbooks to be able to fully describe its features and history, but I think it's not the only approach.
When I described earlier how I tend to enjoy making simpler languages without complex grammar descriptions I bet a lot of conlangers reading thought "oh simple, just make stuff like Toki Pona, just make non-naturalistic languages" but I want to make this very clear: that's not what I'm interested in, yeah sure I've had some fun making some non-naturalistic languages every now and then, but naturalistic conlangs keep calling to me, I keep wanting to make them, and I'm realizing that that's because what I truly want is to make a naturalistic conlang on the "soft" end of the scale.
What I like (and I'm sure many other people do as well, they just may not have the vocabulary to express it) is languages that are used in fictional worlds, and perhaps they even have some interesting features, but are not nearly as complex as natural languages are, I like conlangs that possess a certain level of naturalism but they are simple enough to be more approachable, to be used and translated a lot more easily. In a way it's like how anatomical features are simplified in anime styles, a lot of the detail is still there, but it is simplified in such a way that it is more appealing.
That is what I think is the equivalent to art styles in conlanging, even within the one category we call "naturalistic conlangs" there are probably a bunch of different styles that people have made and will continue to make, naturalism doesn't have to mean that we aim for maximum naturalism, it doesn't have to be an expectation we put on every fictional language, it's ok if that's what you prefer but different people are allowed to like different things and I personally prefer not focusing so much on naturalism, I like having some naturalism but I've realized that stressing out about it and comparing my work to others is not going to do me any good, I want to make semi-realistic stylized conlangs, not the hyper-realistic portraits that other people are aiming for.
(Art style challenge drawings by Loish from Facebook)
I'd like to coin the terms "hard naturalism" and "soft naturalism" to describe these types of languages, so I'd personally say that I'm more interested in creating soft naturalistic conlangs, while the conlang community at large is more interested in hard naturalistic conlangs.
Once again this isn't a strict binary, more of a sliding scale, and where we draw the line is very subjective, but I would say if a naturalistic conlang aims to be as naturalistic as it can be or it holds naturalism as one of its main goals, even above aesthetics, then I'd consider it to be hard naturalistic, whereas a conlang that does seek to have a certain level of naturalism but is more concerned with aesthetics or ease of use would be considered soft naturalistic.
I lastly want to mention that the conlang community tends to have a heavy preference for simulating the evolution of a language, so often you see people making what's known as a "proto-language" and then going through a process where they evolve all the sounds and grammar and even writing system for the language until they arrive at a "modern" form of the language, this is known as the "diachronic method" of conlanging and while I think it's fun and it also gives some cool results I've noticed that not everyone is into it, my evolution processes are often not the most realistic and I know people who prefer avoiding evolution entirely, even when they are making a language for a fictional people, and once again I think this is a case of people being at different points of the sliding scale between "hard" and "soft" worldbuilding.
There is a popular youtuber who makes conlanging related content (Artifexian) and from what I remember (do let me know if I'm wrong) on a podcast he once said that he tends to prefer teaching conlanging concepts without going into simulating evolution, because that is something that can be off-putting to beginners, it's an absolutely gargantuan process that not everyone enjoys, and if we only accept naturalistic conlangs that simulate evolution as valid I think we're scaring off plenty of amazing conlangers who would have tons of fun and produce very interesting work but are not interested in simulating evolution.
So I think as a community we need to be more open to understanding that not everyone is interested in hard naturalism, and that includes understanding that non-diachronic, simplified conlangs are not devoid of merit simply for not conforming to the norm.
Every time I hear of a situation like Mariah's where she shares her work only to be told by a bunch of people that it sucks it makes me upset, this community is not as welcoming to beginners as it perhaps should be, we need to stop pressuring every beginner to learn IPA and go for hard naturalism and embrace more of the diversity that could exist if we appreciated more differences in taste.
Conclusion
I want to make sure I'm clear that I'm not trying to disparage other conlangers in this article, I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with the r/conlangs subreddit for liking complexity and there isn't anything wrong with people spending their time reading linguistics papers and scientific texts, nor is there anything wrong with enjoying hard naturalism in general, I'm just trying to point out that I think that style is really not for everyone, I'm sure other people feel the same (in fact I had a conversation about this with a close friend - who is a conlanger - and she also told me she feels similarly).
If you're new to conlanging what I want you to take away from this article is that you should find what is fun and fulfilling to you, I know it's not always easy to not care what others think but if you're enjoying your work and you see the appeal in it don't let others discourage you from continuing, this really is just a matter of taste.
And also I know I have an article on how to read the IPA but don't feel pressured to learn it if you don't want to, I will make sure to go back to it and edit it to make sure the wording doesn't imply that I think every conlanger needs to learn IPA, it's just a tool that I personally found really useful, it's like learning to read musical notation for a musician, it's helpful but it's not really necessary in order to engage with the hobby.
Remember, I'm not here to try to dictate how you should conlang, I'm only here to provide guidance and show you the way I do things, you can choose if the advice I'm giving you serves you at all or not.
Don’t forget to stay hydrated and have a good timezone ✨