Constructions, Concoctions, Conjurations: A Reading List on the Curious World of Conlangs

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AIGONZ is the first word, God. Diuueliz, Devil, is not far behind. 

“Ignota lingua per simplicem hominem Hildegardem prolata.” “An unknown language brought forth by the simple human Hildegard.” This invented language, the Lingua Ignota, had an extensive vocabulary to cover matters pertaining to all realms—spiritual, human, and natural. Over a thousand words.

The 12th-century German mystic Hildegard von Bingen was no “paupercula feminea forma,” or “poor little womanly shape,” as she referred to herself. Seer of visions, pioneering poet and composer, abbess of a Benedictine nunnery, counselor of kings and popes, and knowledgeable about history, zoology, botany, herbal medicine, painting, and architecture, she was a towering medieval figure. She was also the world’s first conlanger.

Closer to our own times, J. R. R. Tolkien, an Anglo-Saxon philologist by day, wrote the high-fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings just to have somewhere to put his writing systems and invented languages—Quenya, Sindarin, Khuzdul, and others. He called this obsessive predilection his “secret vice.” He was not the only one: George Orwell made Newspeak for 1984; Anthony Burgess made Nadsat for A Clockwork Orange; Ursula K. Le Guin made Kesh for Always Coming Home, complete with poetry and music.

Or perhaps you first heard of this phenomenon through the granddaddy of all sci-fi conlangs, Klingon, Marc Okrand’s much-hallowed and much-mocked alien tongue from Star Trek. (To  be fair, much of the derision was directed at its hardcore fans rather than the language.) Or Paul Frommer’s Na’vi from Avatar, or David Peterson’s Dothraki and High Valyrian from Game of Thrones.

For all their ingenuity, peculiarity, and beauty, why are we talking about constructed languages when natural languages are in peril? Why build a new Tower of Babel?

“Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities,” says anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis in The Wayfinders. The death of a language is a catastrophic event, the extinguishing of a world, and no one hears it go.

But languages are also being born anew, and biological and linguistic evolution often share features. What if we looked at language creation as a necessary, fruitful part of this cycle of death and rebirth, a human impulse that seeks to understand and be understood? 

As for whether a constructed language could ever match a natural language with its deep history, rich culture, and centuries of textual nourishment, we can take heart from what Umberto Eco has to say in The Search for the Perfect Language: “When the poets of medieval Sicilian courts wrote in a vernacular, when the Slavic bards sang The Song of Prince Igor and the Anglo-Saxon scop [minstrel] improvised Beowulf, their languages were just as young—yet still, in their own way, capable of absorbing the entire history of the preceding languages.”

Language Birth (Karson Elmgren, Asterisk, March 2026)

A bastion of nerdy loserdom. That’s what the curious subculture of conlangs looks like to the average person on the street. I enjoy language and many of my lists are, indeed, tagged “delightfully nerdy,” but some of the alleyways I wound up in researching this list, oh. 

But consider another possibility.

An unknown number of languages have already become extinct. Out of the 7,000+ languages now active, more than 3,000 are endangered. Acknowledging this sobering fact, Elmgren, a research analyst in emerging technologies, counters with an optimistic, transformative way of looking at language invention (conlangs, jargon, and slang) for a changing world: “a rather new kind of human linguistic activity: the intentional creation of new linguistic diversity, on a grand scale . . .”

Conlangs are typically regarded as playthings for the uncoolest possible variety of nerd. J.R.R. Tolkien referred to conlanging as his “secret vice.” It would not score you points in a typical happy hour anywhere from London to Los Angeles to admit to learning a conlang, or—much worse—creating one yourself. Many people have a sense that the loss of a natural language is something poignant—at least as regrettable, perhaps, as the extinction of a species of small frog whose ecological niche would nevertheless be easily filled by one of his amphibian brethren. But nobody seems to think that constructing a language is like bioengineering a species of frog de novo as a living, hopping, ribbiting part of the human cognitive ecosystem. The more common view is that conlangs are either exercises in comically failed utopianism (Esperanto’s sad and somewhat unfair fate in public opinion), or embarrassing frivolities, like an over-zealous passion for cosplay. But I believe conlangs do represent new linguistic diversity in some significant senses. Some of them much more so than others.

Utopian for Beginners (Joshua Foer, The New Yorker, December 2012)

At best: constructions, concoctions, conjurations. At worst: confections, confabulations, cons. And much fun in between. Banana!

But there’s a conlang that makes jaws drop in awe, and that’s John Quijada’s Ithkuil, with its “two seemingly incompatible ambitions: to be maximally precise but also maximally concise, capable of capturing nearly every thought that a human being could have while doing so in as few sounds as possible.” 

In philosophical, structural, and functional terms, this language made by an amateur (in the old, best sense of the word), “may be the most complete realization of a quixotic dream that has entranced philosophers for centuries,” Foer admits, “the creation of a more perfect language.” Perfection is no guarantee it won’t have to survive Kalmykian self-optimization conferences, Russian militaristic cults, and middle management jobs. And meeting Quijada’s hero, George Lakoff.

“Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn’t mean they’re optimal,” John Quijada, a 53-year-old former employee of the California State Department of Motor Vehicles, told me. In 2004, he published a monograph on the Internet that was titled “Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language.” Written like a linguistics textbook, the 14-page web site ran to almost a hundred and sixty thousand words. It documented the grammar, syntax, and lexicon of a language that Quijada had spent three decades inventing in his spare time. Ithkuil had never been spoken by anyone other than Quijada, and he assumed that it never would be.

In his preface, Quijada wrote that his “greater goal” was “to attempt the creation of what human beings, left to their own devices, would never create naturally, but rather only by conscious intellectual effort: an idealized language whose aim is the highest possible degree of logic, efficiency, detail, and accuracy in cognitive expression via spoken human language, while minimizing the ambiguity, vagueness, illogic, redundancy, polysemy (multiple meanings) and overall arbitrariness that is seemingly ubiquitous in natural human language.”

The Conlangers’ Art (Annalee Newitz, The Believer, May 2005)

Some essays provide a clear, affectionate window into a particular era without sounding at all dated, even two decades hence. This is one. 

Newitz discusses the art of conlanging, covering (in the magazine’s uniquely helpful tagging style): “Unambiguous Communication, William Faulkner, Constructed Cultures, Elegant Computer Code, The Klingon Language Institute, The Aesthetic Power of Calculus, Matriarchal Language, Post-Structuralism, Creative Historical Revisionism, Quasi-Fictional People, Elvish, Feminist Science-Fiction, Warlike Buddhists, The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.” 

Creating a new language re­quires a very specific form of consciousness. William Faulkner wrote compelling and gorgeous novels without knowing the first thing about the subjunctive mood, but comparable conlang geniuses cannot build a syntax with­out considering everything from verb positions to whether they will grant speakers access to a derogatory prefix. For this reason, conlangers tend to be people who are already im­mersed in specialized forms of sym­bolic communication. They are professional and amateur linguists, logicians, mathematicians, engineers, and software developers. They find elegance in a line of computer code; they feel the aesthetic power of calculus.

And they are all, in one way or another, idealists.

Whether a conlanger has contributed new idioms to Klingon in order to participate in a favorite science-fiction fantasy, or invented a tongue designed solely to reflect women’s consciousness, he or she is expressing an implicit wish to change the world with language. This urge was codified in what linguists call the Sapir-Whorf Hy­pothesis. Popularized in the mid-twentieth century, roughly the same time period when conlangers began forming their own communities and interest groups, this hy­pothesis holds that consciousness is structured by language. To change the way people think, all you have to do is change the language they use to do it.

Communism in Words (Gregor Benton, Jacobin, May 2017)

Most people have heard of Esperanto, but little beyond its name, and a vague notion that it has some kind of utopian ideals built into it. 

Leizer Ludwik Zamenhof, growing up as a Lithuanian Jew under Russian occupation amid multi-ethnic, multi-national chaos, sought a way out. Universal harmony demanded a universal language, and thus was born Esperanto, “the hoping one.” It was built to be an auxiliary language, a political instrument for peace.

Benton’s bus-conductor-turned-revolutionary father tells him about the language he loves: “It’s communism in words.” Now a professor of Chinese history, Benton maps, through an explicitly leftist perspective much like the language’s own, Esperanto’s fraught real-world life—through Soviet cycles of tolerance and violent suppression; through Nazi persecution; through fascist bans in Portugal, Spain, and Italy; through acceptance during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and more.

Communists in China also learned Esperanto, and used it after the Japanese invasion to seek out foreign support for the resistance. The Japanese female Esperantist Hasegawa Teru—also known as Verda Majo or Green May—went to China and joined the Klara Circle, named to honor both Zamenhof’s wife Klara and Marxist theorist Clara Zetkin. Hasegawa tried to interest Chinese women in proletarian Esperantist writing and urged her comrades in Japan to call for a world boycott of their country.

The new Communist government in Beijing rewarded the Esperantists for their role in language reform by letting them teach their language in state schools. As in the Soviet Union, this government support didn’t last long. In the early 1950s, the Esperantists were suppressed, but they were later allowed back. They suffered again in the Cultural Revolution, like many Chinese people with foreign contacts.

In general, however, the Cultural Revolution promoted Esperanto. 

On Gibberish (Jenni Nuttall, Aeon, May 2020)

There’s a beast that inhabits the no-man’s-land between sound and sense, and that beast is “gibberish,” which, as Jenni Nuttall writes, “probably comes from ‘gibber,’ one of a clutch of verbs such as ‘gobble,’ ‘gabber,’ ‘jabber,’ and ‘gab’ that onomatopoeically imitate the sound of unintelligible babbling.”

But gibberish is not always nonsense; it’s proto-language, it’s quasi-language, it’s demi-language. Nuttall, an English scholar, takes us on a romp through the margins of language—baby babbling, lullabies, muttered prayers, Shakespeare, Dante, word salads, conlang bits, shepherd gossip, nonsense verse, jazz bebop, carols, folk songs. 

“Hey, trolly-lolly!” What gibberish accomplishes is serious cultural business.

Linguists call these fragments of sung gibberish “non-lexical vocables,” sounds we can vocalize but that aren’t words in any usual sense. You might think of the scat-singing of jazz, or music such as doo-wop or bebop in which the vocables themselves provide the style’s name. In jazz, the human voice competes with other instruments in improvised sections, and it is much easier to improvise in gibberish than with real lyrics. Similarly, swaying and singing to lull a fractious baby to sleep when you are so tired you can hardly think straight creates the perfect conditions for gibberish to emerge. Words aren’t important to a pre-verbal infant: What has mattered since time immemorial is voice-made music. Medieval lullaby carols in the voice of the Virgin Mary comforting the Christ child preserve some of the earliest of these sung non-lexical vocables in English in their choruses: lulley, lollay, lay.

That word “lullaby” comes from a combination of two of these early English vocables: lulla-lulla and bi-bi. A 15th-century carol scruffily preserved in a fragmentary manuscript has a chorus full of the soothing gibberish a parent might sing to a child:

Lullay, lullow, lully, lullay,
Bewy, bewy, lully, lully,
Bewy, lully, lullow, lully,
Lullay, baw baw, my barne [child],
Slepe softly now.

This Ancient Language Has the Only Grammar Based Entirely on the Human Body (Anvita Abbi, Scientific American, June 2023)

So far we’ve been looking at artificially constructed, or invented, languages (and gibberish), as opposed to those that have developed organically over time. But what if there were a natural language with a visible, decipherable philosophy, an organizing principle unlike that of any known language? 

The Andamans are an archipelago of over 300 islands in the Bay of Bengal, off the eastern coast of India. After long periods of work in the islands, Abbi, a highly experienced linguist, uncovers something utterly unique—the structure of an ancient, near-extinct language family that had developed in isolation for millennia, that has “the only grammar based entirely on the human body.” 

When I first came across this essay, I was so amazed by what it describes that I made notes, corresponded with the author who pointed me to her materials and language inventory, and made new work in homage. 

Whenever I got a break from my teaching and other duties, I would visit the Andamans, for weeks or months at a time. It took me a year of concerted study to see the language’s pattern—and when I did, all the puzzle’s scattered pieces fell into place. Very excited, I wanted to test my made-up sentences right away. I was at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, but I phoned Licho and said to her, “a Joe-engio eole be.” Licho was overwhelmed and gave me a cherished compliment: “You have learned our language, madam!”

My sentence was simply, “Joe sees you.” Joe was a Great Andamanese youth, and -engio was “only you.” My breakthrough was to realize that the prefix e-, which originally derived from an unknown word for an internal body part, had over eons morphed into a grammatical marker signifying any internal attribute, process or activity. So the act of seeing, ole, being an internal activity, had to be eole. The same prefix could be attached to -bungoi, or “beautiful,” to form ebungoi, meaning internally beautiful or kind; to sare, for “sea,” to form esare, or “salty,” an inherent quality; and to the root word -biinye, “thinking,” to yield ebiinye, “to think.”

The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species (Ken Liu, Lightspeed, August 2012)

If you’ve been a reader of my lists (thank you), you may have noticed that I often close with some fiction. Fiction is no panacea, but it can often go where factual nonfiction cannot, and this can do good things for the list, and hopefully, for you. 

Here, for instance, I wanted to give you Ted Chiang’s unmatched “Story of Your Life,” with its spoken Heptapod A and semasiographic (communicating via written symbols without spoken correspondences) Heptapod B, the latter inducing—in an unapologetically Sapir-Whorfian way—a nonlinear, synchronous perception of time. The film Arrival is based on it. The story isn’t available in a legit fashion online, but there are other aliens about.

What happens when the language-making impulse itself is examined, along with the thinking that prefigures or accompanies it? How is knowledge stored and passed on? How is meaning made? In this story that approaches xenolinguistics at an oblique angle, Liu imagines worlds and words very different from our own. 

This stone is the seat of the Quatzoli mind. The stone organ is filled with thousands, millions of intricate channels, forming a maze that divides the water into countless tiny, parallel flows that drip, trickle, wind around each other to represent simple values which, together, coalesce into streams of consciousness and emerge as currents of thought.

Over time, the pattern of water flowing through the stone changes. Older channels are worn down and disappear or become blocked and closed off—and so some memories are forgotten. New channels are created, connecting previously separated flows—an epiphany—and the departing water deposits new mineral growths at the far, youngest end of the stone, where the tentative, fragile miniature stalactites are the newest, freshest thoughts.

Kanya Kanchana is a poet and philologist from India.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Peter Rubin