Conlanging
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How to Create a Romanisation System for Your Conlang
I like IPA a lot, and I always highly recommend using it when creating and describing your conlang’s phonology. However, most people don’t even know what the IPA is and they may interpret that first sentence rather differently. In some situations, it is more useful to have a system for…
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An In-Depth Guide to Creating a Phonology – Part 5: Phonotactics
So far in this series, I’ve been explaining the various kinds of sounds that you can include in your conlang. But in addition to having a limited inventory of sounds, languages also have restrictions on how those sounds can be arranged in a syllable. These restrictions are called phonotactics. The…
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An In-Depth Guide to Creating a Phonology – Part 4: Tones and Pitch Accent
In the previous part, I explained the various different types of suprasegmentals that you could include in your conlang. However, I intentionally left out pitch accent and tone because I wanted to talk about them more in-depth. A lot of people see tone as a difficult concept to grasp, but…
artificial language, Chinese, conlang, Conlanging, constructed language, contour, contour tone, downstep, fictional language, floating tone, language, linguistics, Mandarin, phonetics, phonology, pitch, pitch accent, register, register tone, suprasegmentals, syllable, tone, tone sandhi, tone terracing, tonogenesis, upstep, Worldbuilding -
An In-Depth Guide to Creating a Phonology – Part 3: Stress and Timing
In the previous two parts, I have been talking about consonants and vowels. These are both segmental in nature, which means they can be analysed as distinct segments of speech. In the next two parts, I will be talking about phonetic features that cannot be analysed as discrete segments but…
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An In-Depth Guide to Creating a Phonology – Part 1: Consonants
I’ve decided to open this blog with a tutorial on how to construct an artificial language (also called a conlang). I’ve been creating conlangs for several years now, and I feel that I have a lot of advice to share. This will be the first in a series of articles…
Stephen Escher 