Language in your hands: The guide to creating your very own language

Conlang bog e1763121026399

uto aveyalaza
for my students

This is what can be read as one of the first things in Jessie Peterson’s (née Sams) book How to Create a Language: The Conlang Guide. You won’t be able to find the origin of the language in italics in any common resource. You can try putting it into Google Translate  and have it detect a language for you, but the translation will most certainly not result in “for my students”. This is because the sentence is not written in any of the languages spoken in the world, but rather one of Peterson’s constructed languages (conlangs).

Conlangs are languages created by people for a variety of reasons, be they aesthetic, for a literary project, …

ŋitu:ni napa klapateka! A game to create a new language quickly. Your Christmas present?

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The game Gibberers seems to have become an instantaneous cult game among language nerds, but also among more ordinary people – and for a good reason. The goal of the game is to create a new ‘language’, or perhaps a medium of interethnic communication, so that your group or your created civilization can communicate with some kind of invaders from far away. Could it be aliens? Yes. The guests could also be refugees or imperialists from elsewhere on Earth.

It took us a long time to get hold of a copy when I first heard about it on May 31st this year. At the UK Games Expo 2025 this fall, the 100 copies the seller had brought were all …