Step 0 - Goals and foundations
Description
Making a conlang can be very exciting so I bet you're aching to get your pen to paper, but first it's important to make a solid base to work from.
A lot of the time beginners get lost or confused because they don't know exactly what it is they're trying to accomplish with their languages and that leads to a lack of direction and sometimes end results that aren't very coherent.
There's lots of different types of conlangs classified depending on the purpose they were made for. For example if you want to make a secret language for you and your friends that'd be called a stealthlang. If you want a language to facilitate communication between groups of people who don't share a common language we call that an auxlang (or auxiliary language), and so on.
The most common type though (and the one we'll be focusing on in this series of posts) is the type of language that is made for artistic purposes, known as an artlang. More specifically we'll make one that is meant to exist as part of a worldbuilding or writing project, these are sometimes called fictional languages.
A lot of people get excited to give the elves, dragons, aliens, whatever in their setting their own unique language and that's where this kind of project starts.
Now, you could go about this any number of ways, but the way that tends to make the most sense is to make a language that is believable. After all when you're designing things like maps and costumes for your world you typically want them to be at least somewhat grounded in reality. You want your readers/audience to be able to suspend their disbelief that this is a world that makes sense.
So when creating a language for a group of humanoid figures you generally want something that resembles a human language not just on a superficial level but also in the way that it works. That's where we get to one important goal these projects tend to have: naturalism.
A naturalistic conlang is one that tries to emulate the different quirks and complexities that natural languages have in the real world.
Side note: natural languages are the ones that arose naturally in our world, like English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Thai, Swahili, even sign languages like ASL.
Pretty much every natural language has things like irregularity, they tend to have some degree of redundancy baked into the way they work, they all change over time and reflect the culture that speaks the language through their vocabulary and idioms, they have different dialects, if they're written down they're basically guaranteed to have some quirks in their spelling (these stem from the way the language has shifted over time), etc.
So for this series of posts we'll be making a naturalistic conlang for a fictional setting. That's important to keep in mind because the features we add will depend on how well they conform to that goal. If a feature is cool but doesn't really show up in any natural languages it'll make the language less naturalistic and so that has to be taken into account.
I don't always prioritize naturalism as the main goal though, things like aesthetic appeal can play a role but we ideally want to maintain a certain level of naturalism in order to keep the language believable.
In the same ways that you can take some artistic liberties and design characters with huge swords that don't make sense in real life you can sometimes forego realism in your languages, but it's generally good to know when you're breaking away from the norm so it's a deliberate choice and not something you did on accident. And generally even if I don't hold naturalism as my main goal the language is meant to look fairly realistic at least on a first glance.
So if you're making a conlang along with me this is the time for you to think of all the different worldbuilding aspects that will affect the language.
It's important to establish in broad strokes what your setting is, if your speakers are different from humans in any way and how, what their environment looks like in terms of geography, weather, flora, fauna, etc. A lot of the basic vocabulary of a language will be based on body parts and common things its ancestral speakers came across, weather it is certain terrain features, weather patterns, bugs, diseases etc. Which is why this information is important.
Don't feel like you need a whole encyclopedia or worldbuilding bible before you start your conlang though. We want a general idea of what we have to work with but you can leave a lot of the finer details for later.
How I'm approaching it
So unlike my other langs I'm going to share my whole process for making this one on tumblr, bluesky and here! So if you think that'd be interesting or fun feel free to follow. These post will attempt to be beginner friendly though be warned that if you've never made a conlang before following my method might not be super easy.
So let's start with step 0: setting goals.
As well as making the language somewhat naturalistic I also want to make a language that is beautiful (to me). Of course this is subjective but I just felt it was important to establish this from the outset.
Lore-wise this will be the language of demons, and to make things simpler I'm deciding they're quite reclusive, they don't exit from the underworld often.
This won't be set in the same worlds as my other languages. And I actually don't think I'll expand too much on it beyond the relevant areas.
The reason them being reclusive makes things simpler is I won't have to worry about how other languages influence this one, so I don't have to make other complementary langs to borrow vocabulary from. I might make other languages in the future but for now I won't worry about it.
If you're new to conlanging I recommend you also start with just one language and maybe expand later if you want to. Settings like isolated islands can be good for that reason, though of course if you want to you can always make something less isolated and just not worry too much about loanwords and outside influence from other languages.
As for the speakers I'm thinking of mostly regular style demons: they're humanoid but they got horns, tails, wings, and maybe some draconic or snake-like features would be cool, like scales in some areas and forked tongues. I should make a sketch or smth to solidify their appearance a bit more.
I'm thinking they'll live for a long time and will be able to use magic that they possess innately, perhaps some form of necromancy would be fitting. The ability to control something like fire also makes sense.
And finally their home. The underworld is in a separate plane from the human realm and while many souls can end up there they're kept secluded, so most demons don't really interact with humans.
The place is desolate, cold, I'm imagining like a massive cave with lots of dark rock, sand and ice.
So I guess I'm going for a slightly less conventional version of hell. There isn't quite a day-night cycle but they got some weather in the form of wind and fog. They have earthquakes and sinkholes.
And there wouldn't be a lot of plants and animals but I imagine u cld find a few here and there.
Mostly little bugs I think, given it's not the most hospitable environment I should look into creatures that can survive harsher conditions.
But yeah that seems like a pretty good base to start working on the language proper soon!