Glossary
Here you will find an alphabetical list of terms that are commonly referenced in linguistics and the conlang community along with a brief description and links to other pages like Wikipedia or Frathwiki (a conlang wiki).
If there's any terms you come across on this website that you're not familiar with and are not listed in this page you can feel free to reach out and ask me to add them.
Alternatively if there's terms that I've defined wrong in this page feel free to also reach out to correct me, my sources are mostly Wikipedia, Frathwiki, and my experience conlanging and consuming pop-linguistics content over the years, so it's possible I might get some details wrong, but I'm willing to correct them.
Also, this page is a work in progress, so it doesn't have many terms right now, I'll add new ones as I think of them.
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z
A
• A posteriori
Used to describe a conlang that was derived from an already existing language, the vocabulary and grammar could be fairly similar to the language being used as a base.
An example I created is Osrican which is derived from the ancient language known as Proto-Germanic, you can see their relationships in their vocabulary and grammar, for example the Proto-Germanic word *rattaz corresponds with the Osrican word "ratë" both meaning rat (you can even see that these words are related to the English word "rat", because English also descended from Proto-Germanic).
Not all a posteriori languages are meant to look as if they naturally evolved from a language, they don't have to be naturalistic (see Naturalism).
External links: Frathwiki
• A priori
Used to describe a conlang that was made from scratch, as in, it doesn't base its vocabulary or grammar on any already existing languages.
Conlangs that are meant to be used in fictional settings tend to be a priori, because these fictional worlds usually have no ties to the real world, so it wouldn't make sense for them to be based on natural languages (see Natlang).
For example Klingon from Star Trek is a language for aliens, so it's not based on any already existing languages.
External links: Frathwiki
• Accent
The ways that the same language gets pronounced differently in different places (see Dialect).
The term accent is also used to refer to a syllable that is more emphasized than the surrounding syllables (see Stress).
The term accent is also used to refer to the little marks that go above or below some letters (see Diacritic).
External links: Wikipedia
B
C
• Character
A unit of information that typically corresponds to a letter or grapheme (see Grapheme), for example the following symbols are all examples of characters:
External links: Wikipedia
• Cipher / Code
A system used to encrypt or obscure information, these can be complex and require convoluted algorithms to work, or they may be simple and just require you to substitute a letter for another symbol. An important point here is that a cipher is not a language, a cipher encodes an already existing language, but it does not have its own unique vocabulary and grammar independent of the language that is being encrypted, that being said it's not a bad thing to make a cipher if that's what you're going for.
Examples of ciphers and codes include the Standard Galactic Alphabet, Morse Code, the Caesar cipher and the various Splatoon alphabets.
External links: Wikipedia
• Conlang / Constructed language
Short for "constructed language", a conlang is any language that was created intentionally by one or more people, typically for the purpose of worldbuilding but not always, for example High Valyrian, Klingon, and Sindarin. Conlangs contrast with natural languages which are languages that naturally developed and evolved over time without anyone having to consciously invent them, for example Japanese, French and ASL.
Note that linguistically speaking the following things don't count as languages (and so they don't count as conlangs either):
- Programming languages (java, C++, python)
- Language games (pig latin, cockney rhyming slang)
- Codes or ciphers (the caesar cipher, morse code, the Standard Galactic Alphabet)
External links: Wikipedia - Frathwiki
• Conlanger
Someone who constructs languages (see Conlang).
External links: Frathwiki
• Conlanging
The act of constructing a language (see Conlang).
D
• Diachronic
Meaning "of, pertaining to or concerned with changes that occur over time" this word is used in linguistics to refer to a way of analyzing languages that considers their development and evolution through history, instead of looking only at the way the language is at a singular moment in time.
In the conlang community this term is generally used to describe a method of conlanging that simulates the evolution of languages, creating an ancestral form of the language and then evolving it phonologically and grammatically. This word can also describe conlangs created using the diachronic method.
External links: Wikipedia - Frathwiki - Wiktionary
• Diacritic
Extra marks that get added onto base glyphs, for example the following list shows letters without diacritics and with diacritics.
These are also sometimes called diacritical marks, diacritical points, diacritical signs, or accents.
External links: Wikipedia
• Dialect
Languages tend to be spoken differently in different places, for example a native English speaker from Texas won't use the same pronunciation, vocabulary or sometimes even spelling as a native English speaker from London, however they're able to communicate with each other without much difficulty, in this case you would say that they're speaking two different dialects of the same language.
The line between what counts as a different dialect vs a different language can be blurry at times, the division is not as clear as some people might think, a common saying you hear in linguistics circles is "a language is a dialect with a navy and an army" because oftentimes the way people determine what counts as a separate language or a dialect comes down to politics.
Colloquially people refer to dialects as "accents", but linguists prefer avoiding that term in order to avoid making value judgements or implying that one variety is the proper, correct way to speak while others are off, weird, or accented.
External links: Wikipedia
E
F
G
• Glyph
Typically this term is used to refer to a symbol of writing, for example the letter F or the Japanese character for tree 木. More specifically the term glyph refers to "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character" so for example the look of the letter F in different fonts would constitute different glyphs, even though they all represent the same letter.
External links: Wikipedia
• Grapheme
The smallest functional unit of a writing system, like the letter F or the Japanese character for tree 木. Regardless of the font or style in which the grapheme is written it's still the same grapheme.
External links: Wikipedia
H
• Hard naturalism / Hard naturalistic
This is a term I coined on the "Conlanging should be fun" article, and it is a subset of naturalistic conlangs (see Naturalism). Basically if a naturalistic conlang is meant to be similar to natural languages (see Natlang), a hard naturalistic conlang tries to be as similar as possible to natural languages, it is not enough for it to look naturalistic at first glance, in such a conlang things like realism and complexity are more important than aesthetics and convenience. This contrasts with soft naturalism where the opposite is true (see Soft naturalism).
In order to create a hard naturalistic conlang you may need to do research thorough enough that you read actual scientific papers on linguistics and look at many examples of natural languages to try to see all the little bits of nuance and complexity that exist in them, so that way you can emulate those details in as much realistic detail as you can for your own language, a very well developed hard naturalistic conlang could potentially trick a linguist into thinking it's an actual natural language.
I would compare it to drawing fantasy maps, sure you could simply try to draw an appealing map and keep in mind certain tips to make it look realistic, but if you want your map to be as realistic as possible you would want to create the plate tectonics and their movements, determine the ocean and wind currents, the weather patterns, and all sorts of details before you even begin drawing the actual map. The conlang community at large seems to prefer this style of naturalism but if this doesn't sound fun don't feel pressured to follow it, soft naturalism exists as an alternative (and I personally prefer it).
External links: "Conlanging should be fun" article
I
J
K
L
• Linguistics
The scientific study of language. Linguistics doesn't study the meanings of literary works, but rather the way that languages themselves function on a technical level, in spoken, written and signed form.
External links: Wikipedia
M
N
• Natlang / Natural language
Short for "natural language", a natlang is any language that naturally developed and evolved over time, without anyone having to consciously invent them, for example Japanese, French and ASL. Natlangs contrast with constructed languages which are languages that were created intentionally by one or more people, for example High Valyrian, Klingon, and Sindarin.
External links: Wikipedia - Frathwiki
• Naturalism / Naturalistic
Used to describe a conlang that is intented to be similar to natural languages (see Natlang). A naturalistic conlang is typically meant to emulate or approximate the level of complexity that you would see in the languages that developed in the real world, as such it would typically have features like irregularity, historical spelling (if they have a script) redundancy, ambiguity, among others.
I like to divide naturalistic conlangs into two categories: soft naturalistic conlangs (see Soft naturalism) and hard naturalistic conlangs (see Hard naturalism), and these are not a binary, they exist in a spectrum, so depending on how much emphasis is given to realism and complexity in any given conlang you could place it on the scale between soft naturalistic (less emphasis) and hard naturalistic (more emphasis).
External links: Frathwiki
• Neography
"Neography is the art and craft of creating new writing systems, often called constructed scripts." The term "constructed script" also typically gets abbreviated as "conscript", these can be created for conlangs and natural languages alike.
External links: Frathwiki - Neography.info
O
• Orthographic
Relating to orthography, the conventions for a writing system (see Orthography).
• Orthography
"An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and emphasis." The term is similar to script or writing system but it also refers to the actual rules of how the glyphs in the system are used.
External links: Wikipedia
P
• Phoneme
Not just any sound but specifically a speech sound, that is to say, a sound that is linguistically significant in that it allows you to differentiate words from one another, for example the reason why we know that the /n/ consonant and the /m/ consonant are considered different phonemes in English is because we have words that are differentiated only by using that sound, e.g.
This term is also used to describe the articulation features of signs in sign languages.
External links: Wikipedia
• Phonetic
Relating to speech sounds and signs (see Phoneme), or relating to phonetics (see Phonetics).
This term is also used to describe writing systems that spell out pronunciation in a clear and direct way.
External links: Wiktionary
• Phonetics
"Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign."
As I understand it phonetics differs from phonology in that the former studies speech sounds and signs in general, whereas the latter studies how these behave in languages.
External links: Wikipedia
• Phonology
The branch of linguistics that studies the systems of pronunciation of oral languages, or in the case of sign languages the constituent parts of their signs.
Phonology can also refer to the specific system of pronunciation of a specific language variety, for example "Japanese phonology" refers to the sets of sounds used in speaking the Japanese language, along with the rules for how they are put together and how they behave in speech.
As I understand it phonology differs from phonetics in that the former studies how speech sounds and signs behave in languages, whereas the latter studies the speech sounds and signs in general.
External links: Wikipedia
• Proto-language
A proto-language is the ancestor to another language, specifically used in linguistics for when we don't have any attested samples of the language and instead it has been carefully reconstructed using historical linguistics.
For example Spanish, Italian, and French evolved from Latin, however Latin isn't a proto-language because we have actual inscriptions and codices that survived. English, German and Danish evolved from a common ancestor, but there aren't any attested samples of it, all of the knowledge we have on that ancestor language comes from a lot of linguistic detective work, so we say that they evolved from the Proto-Germanic language.
In conlanging it's common for people to start their languages by first making a proto-form of their conlang, for example Dothraki evolved from a language called Proto-Plains.
External links: Wikipedia
Q
R
• Relex
A relex exists in the blurry edges between what counts as a conlang (see Conlang) and what counts as a cipher (see Cipher). When two languages are different they won't share vocabulary that is perfectly equivalent and you won't be able to translate things word-for-word because their grammars will be different, for example let's look at the following sentences:
Even though English and Spanish are quite similar and share a lot of similar vocabulary these are not phrased the same, the number of words is different and the meaning is very subtly different (for example in the Spanish example a more accurate way to translate the second part is "I'm called Mark" but no one introduces themselves like that in English).
What a relex is is basically when someone tries to create a conlang but the end result is just an already existing language but with different words, so to translate the example sentence above in an English-based-relex you would look up the word for "nice" then the word for "to" then the word for "meet" then the word for "you" and so on, so everything would be translatable word-for-word, it's basically using new words but with English grammar.
External links: Wiktionary
S
• Script
In linguistics a script is a writing system; it is the set of symbols that are used to write down a language.
External links: Wikipedia
• Soft naturalism / Soft naturalistic
This is a term I coined on the "Conlanging should be fun" article, and it is a subset of naturalistic conlangs (see Naturalism). Basically if a naturalistic conlang is meant to be similar to natural languages (see Natlang), a soft naturalistic conlang only tries to be somewhat similar to natural languages, it doesn't seek to be as close as possible to them, in such a conlang things like aesthetics and convenience are more important than realism or complexity. This contrasts with hard naturalism where the opposite is true (see Hard naturalism).
For example if you wish to create a language for your novel and you want it to be spoken by a fictional people it makes sense that you'd want it to have some naturalistic features, after all you want the audience to be able to believe that this is a natural language in your world, but if you don't care so much about all the little technical details and the complex grammar of your language you could focus more on the aesthetic side and not let realism be the main guiding force.
I would compare it to drawing fantasy maps, sure you could go through the process of making the plate tectonics and their movements, determining the ocean and wind currents, the weather patterns, and all sorts of details before you even begin drawing the actual map, but you could also make a perfectly serviceable and appealing map without doing all that complex stuff, you can make it look vaguely realistic by keeping in mind certain tips (like the fact that rivers always flow downhill from high elevation to low elevation) but you can skip all the complex stuff if you don't find value in it, the same goes for conlanging (even if the community at large may not always agree, but I think this is a perfectly fine way to make naturalistic conlangs).
External links: "Conlanging should be fun" article
• Stress
When a syllable is more emphasized than the surrounding syllables we say that it is a stressed syllable or that it has stress, for example "record" (as in "a new record") is stressed on the first syllable, while "to record" (as in "I'm going to record a video") is stressed on the second syllable. This is also a concept that overlaps with the term "accent" as used in linguistics (see Accent).
External links: Wikipedia