Conlang guide

External resources

Here you will find a list of resources that will help you with the different aspects of conlanging, everything from simulating language evolution to picking what sounds you want in your language.

Some of these tools are fairly specialized, so the terms I use to describe them may not be the simplest, if you come across words you're not familiar with you can search for them in the glossary page.

Also, this page is a work in progress, so it doesn't have many links right now, I'll add new ones as I think of them.

Evolution · General language creation · IPA · Specific features · Word generators · Other

Evolution

This is a massive pdf file written in a choose-your-own-adventure style, and while this does not walk you through how to create your own language it does help to illustrate how language evolution works by allowing you to choose between different options and showing you how each of those affects the next.

A Conlang-Venture: A Select-A-Feature Adventure

This is a website that catalogues all sorts of sound changes that have happened in many of the world's languages, so you can learn how the phonologies of natural languages evolve in the real world.

When you open the site there's IPA symbols, diacritics and features that you can click on, and each of them will take you to a page that shows how that sound has evolved in different languages. There's also a downloadable PDF with the same sound changes listed.

As far as I can tell the original Index Diachronica wasn't made by any one person, it was made by different people on the Zompist Bulletin Board, but eventually it got adapted into a searchable format by chridd.

The Searchable Index Diachronica

This is a sound change applier, that is, you can feed it words, define what types of historical sound shifts you want your conlang to have, and then it will output the words you gave it with all of the sound shifts applied, so basically this allows you to simulate the way the phonology of languages evolve in the real world in a fairly quick and convenient way.

I find Lexurgy incredibly helpful, and I use it for basically all of my languages, even when a conlang isn't naturalistic you can use it to automatically output the phonetic transcription of words based on their romanization, or the other way around, outputting the romanization based on the phonetic transcription, and I even use it to figure out historical spelling, it's incredibly versatile because all it basically is is a thing you can feed characters and you give it a series of rules for how to turn those characters into different ones.

Lexurgy is available as a web app but you can also install it as a command-line tool, which means that if it ever goes offline (like it's happened to other web based conlanging tools) you could still run it on your computer.

Lexurgy

General language creation

This is a series of 366 prompts for making your own conlang, there is a prompt for every single day of the year and they're all fairly short, beginner friendly and simple.

Conlanging can be very intimidating, creating a whole language from scratch is a huge undertaking, so breaking it down into tiny tasks can make it a lot more manageable. The prompts in the first couple of weeks don't even have to do with the actual language itself, they're for thinking about the fictional speakers of your language and your goals for the project.

While it is called "Conlang Year" you can start whenever, you don't have to start on January 1st, and you don't even need to do one prompt per day. If you want to go a bit faster you could do multiple prompts in one day, or even have many days when you don't do any prompts, this is a tool and you can use it in whatever way is more convenient for you.

Conlang Year

This book is written by Jessie Peterson who has also made other conlanging resources like Conlang Year and A Conlang-Venture: A Select-A-Feature Adventure, she's also worked on languages for shows and movies such as Dune: Part Two, Elemental, Shadow and Bone, Vampire Academy and Motherland: Fort Salem. I should point out I haven't read this book (yet) but based on other resources I've seen from Jessie and the stuff I've heard about it it sounds like a fantastic conlanging resource unlike any other before it, it is essentially a textbook that walks you through the process of making your own language and it's full of examples and cute drawings.

How to Create a Language: The Conlang Guide

This is a playlist with 8 videos, each ranging in length from around 7 to 20 minutes, where Biblaridion walks you through the process of making your very own naturalistic conlang.

If you're not very familiar with linguistics you may find it a bit hard to follow since a lot of concepts are introduced at a pretty quick pace, but I found it really helpful when starting out, and it's also a fun way to learn about the different aspects of naturalistic conlanging.

How to Make a Language

This book is written by David J. Peterson who for a while was basically the only person who got to create languages for a living, he's worked on tons of shows and movies, just to name a few: Dune, Game of Thrones, The 100, The Witcher and even some stuff for Pixar and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. David is one of the conlangers I look up to, he actually studied linguistics and has been a member of the conlang community for many many years.

The book explains so many things from the history of conlanging itself to the basics of phonology, grammar, language evolution, and so on. It even has anecdotes of various shows he's worked on. Also if you can do try to get the newer edition, the one with the black letters on the blue background, I only read the older edition with the color scheme of the cover reversed, but there's even more content in the new edition.

It's worth pointing out that this book is in large part entertainment and doesn't really take you through a step by step process to create your own language, however it's still a pretty good introduction to the topic and can serve as a pretty useful reference for when you conlang, I learned most of the basics of conlanging by reading this book so I still recommend it.

The Art of Language Invention: From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves to Sand Worms, the Words Behind World-Building

This is a follow up to the book released by David, there's only so much stuff you can cover in a single book, so this series of youtube videos goes more in-depth into specific topics, I learned a ton from watching these videos.

There are various playlists on the channel and I recommend you check them all out, here I'll link to the "Conlang 101: The Basics" playlist because it's a good starting point for beginners, but if you want to see the whole series you can check the videos of the channel and sort by oldest (or you could just scroll down, there aren't that many videos).

Also, I recommend you check out the "Talks and Interviews" playlist, I also learned a ton not just about conlanging itself but about the community and the history of the art form.

The Art of Language Invention | Conlang 101: The Basics - David J. Peterson | Talks and Interviews

IPA

The IPA is the alphabet used by linguists to transcribe the exact pronunciation of any language, there's a detailed explanation of the IPA in the deep dives section of this site, but this Wikipedia article gives an explanation along with audio files for each letter and examples.

Not only does each letter have an audio file but they also have links so if you click on them you will be taken to a page with descriptions of the sound and a list of languages where that sound is used, along with examples.

Help:IPA

This is similar to the "Help:IPA" article but it only focuses on the consonants, it has them displayed in a table format just like they are organized in the actual IPA chart.

IPA consonant chart with audio

This is similar to the "Help:IPA" article but it only focuses on the vowels, it has them displayed in a table format just like they are organized in the actual IPA chart.

IPA vowel chart with audio

Specific features

This is the first part in a series of videos which adapts a thread from the zbb (the zompist board, an old conlang forum or listserv if I'm not mistaken) in which the feature of ergativity is explained to conlangers so they know what it is and how to incorporate it into their languages.

I recommend checking every part, not just the introduction, I linked the intro because it's where you'd need to start anyway and you can find the other parts in the same channel (and most likely on the recommended videos).

Fireside Ergativity for Novices, Part 0 (Introduction)

This is a video that adapts a thread from the zbb (the zompist board, an old conlang forum or listserv if I'm not mistaken) in which the feature of polysynthesis is explained to conlangers so they know what it is and how to incorporate it into their languages.

Polysynthesis for Novices, parts 1 & 2

Word generators

Lexifer is a word generator, so you can input the sounds of your language and the rules for how they come together to form syllables and it outputs a bunch of randomly generated words for you, it can even output them in a paragraph format if you want, and you can pick how many words you want it to generate.

This is one of the coolest word generators I've come across because it automatically simulates the statistical distribution of phonemes, so the ones that come first in your list are more common and the last ones are more rare, and you can even change the percentages however you want.

It also has an incredibly useful feature called "Cluster Fields" that allow you to forbid or modify clusters of sounds in a very easy and simple to write way, I've never come across other word generators that are as easy to use as this one.

I personally like using word generators when I'm first figuring out the evolution of my language, so I come up with the phonology of the proto-language, then I generate a bunch of random words using Lexifer, and then when I write my sound changes on software like Lexurgy I have an easy way to see how the evolution actually looks in hundreds of randomly generated words at once.

Lexifer Online

Other

Fiat Lingua is an archive of conlang articles that can be written and submitted by anyone, there's plenty of stuff that is very interesting and useful there, conlang grammars, texts that explore a certain topic, resources like guides for various things from creating stress patterns, font creation, etc. In fact the concept of a "naming language" comes from a Fiat Lingua article.

I recommend browsing through some articles and looking up keywords you're interested in in the search bar, such as "guide", "phonology" or "tone", you're bound to come across something really cool. I've considered submitting things for Fiat Lingua but I'm not entirely sure what I could share, but one day you might see some of my writing on there as well.

Fiat Lingua: An archive of conlang articles