The BG Language Creation Guide

Developed initially for English 290 at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, these steps will guide you toward the creation of an artificial language of your own. In class, we will follow these steps in sequence, but feel free to look ahead as knowledge of upcoming tasks might be useful to you as you plan.

Where appropriate, I've included a link to an example of each step. These are mainly from Liqupa, a language I have been building off and on myself for some time. These examples are reasonably complex and are provided so you can see how to format your work and get an idea what a complete answer might look like. Students, please feel free to use them for guidance and clarification, but create your own system at each step. At some points, I've included a " Just let me see your data" link for those of you who would rather see the data and figure out the rules for yourselves before reading explanations and examples. This, afterall, is at least half the fun.

For those of you who are old hands at language construction, you might find this sequence a little less to you rliking than others you have seen. The steps are designed for pedagogical rather than primarily linguistic or artistic purposes and the products reflect the strictures I've placed on them. Still, these PrenLangs of which I have hundreds now squirreled away, reveal some interesting patterns. Sorting through this wealth of data would be a terrific research project, but I'm afraid it would do serious violence to the wonderful creative energy of my novice PrenLangers. it is, perhaps, a research project for when I'm an old grey linguist with time on my wrinkled hands...

Getting Started; Culture; Phonetics' Phonology, Nouns, Verbs


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    Updated 06/11/2009