language
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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 2: Vowels
In the last part of this series, I discussed how to create a consonant inventory. So in this part, I will be covering vowels. One major misconception about vowels is that English has five vowels. Actually, written English has five letters that represent vowels (sometimes ‘y’ can as well), but…
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The Fall of Memrise and My Search for Alternatives
Memrise is a language learning app that I started using a just over a year ago. I liked using it as it offered a large range of courses made by its community. However, on the 20th of February 2019 Memrise announced that they will be moving the community-made courses to…
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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 