How to Create a Conlang: A Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Language from Scratch
Constructed languages ("conlangs") have been around a long time. J.R.R. Tolkien for example, the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, was actually a philologist - a scholar of language and literature - who created the world of Middle-earth (and all the beloved stories within it) simply to have a world in which his conlangs could live.
There are also conlangs created for real world general use such as Esperanto, but most conlangs are either just created for their own sake (for linguistic research or creative expression), or as an element of worldbuilding for a larger work such as a book, film or video game. Examples beyond Tolkien include Klingon (Star Trek), Dothraki and High Valyrian (Game of Thrones) and Dovahzul (TES: Skyrim).
So, how does one go about creating a language?
The simplest approach is to just make up nonsense words or phrases and then decide what they might mean. You might say "ashka mot fatigra" means "Hello, how are you". This approach can work to at least give the impression of a language, whether in a film, game or the like. But if the presence of the language is prominent, this quickly leads to inconsistencies which the audience will pick up on, thus breaking the illusion. So, for serious projects we need to give it a bit more thought.
This guide breaks that thought process down into concrete steps. Whether you're world building for a novel or game, exploring linguistics for fun, or something else - the same foundations will apply.
Step 1: Purpose & Cultural Context
Before anything else, define the purpose and context of your conlang. A language for a video game might need a full writing system so players can encounter it in the world - in TES:Skyrim, the Dovahzul dragon language is carved into walls for example, which is a core gameplay element in itself. A conlang for a film might only need enough spoken fragments to feel convincing in a few scenes. The depth you build to should match the role the language will play.
Who are the speakers? A language spoken by a militaristic alien civilization will sound and behave differently from one created for a peaceful island society.
Did this language evolve organically over centuries, the way all natural languages do? Or was it deliberately constructed, like Esperanto? Either way, ask yourself:
- What kind of society do the speakers live in? Hierarchical or egalitarian? Nomadic or settled?
- What do they care about? What does their environment demand they describe precisely?
- How do social relationships work - is there a formal/informal register distinction, like the vous/tu split in French, or the elaborate honorific systems of Japanese and Korean?
The answer will shape the phonology as well as vocabulary and grammar.
Step 2: Build Your Sound System (Phonology)
Phonology is the inventory of sounds your language uses and the rules governing how they combine. This is where a language gets its aesthetic identity - its sound.
Start by choosing your phoneme inventory: the set of distinct sounds (phonemes) that carry meaning in your language. English for example has around 44 phonemes, Hawaiian has just 13 and Taa, a Khoisan language, has over 100. The size and composition of your inventory will define the overall texture of your language.
A few useful axes to consider:
- Consonant heaviness vs. vowel richness. Languages like Georgian stack consonants aggressively ("mts'vrtneli" means "trainer"). Polynesian languages like Hawaiian are almost purely consonant-vowel alternating, creating that open, flowing sound.
- Tones. Tonal languages use pitch contour to distinguish meaning - "ma" in Mandarin can mean mother, hemp, horse, or scold depending on pitch. A tonal conlang will feel and function very differently from a non-tonal one.
- Rare or exotic sounds. Clicking sounds, retroflex sounds, uvulars - these can make a language feel genuinely alien or distinct.
Phonotactics: The Hidden Rules
Phonotactics are the rules governing which sounds can appear next to each other. This is what makes a language sound consistent and, in addition to the phoneme inventory, is what gives the langauge its distinct character.
A useful way to think about this is in terms of the onset and coda of a syllable - the consonants before the vowel and after it respectively. English allows complex onsets ("string", "splash") and codas ("lapsed", "text"), but not all languages do. Japanese is extremely restrictive - almost every syllable is a single consonant onset followed by a vowel, with the only permitted coda being the moraic nasal /n/. This is why English loanwords in Japanese get transformed: "strike" becomes sutoraiku.
For your conlang, decide: what onsets and codas are permitted? Can you stack multiple consonants? What combinations are forbidden?
Practical tip: Come up with words and speak them out loud. Your tongue as well as your ears can be a guide here.
A Note on Writing Down Your Sounds
As you build your phonology, you'll need a practical way to write it down. The standard tool linguists use is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) - a system where every distinct sound has its own unambiguous symbol. While you don't need to memorize the entire IPA (it's a lot) - it's worth familiarizing yourself with at least the basic idea of it should you want to share the language.
For day-to-day work though, most conlangers use a romanization - a set of conventions for representing their language's sounds using the familiar A–Z alphabet. This alphabet is called the Latin alphabet because it originated with the ancient Romans (whose language was Latin).
If you use LangWitch, this is all handled automatically.
We'll return to writing systems properly in Step 8.
Step 3: Grammar
So, we have sounds that form words which can mean things. The next step is to decide how those words combine into sentences - the grammar rules governing this is called syntax.
To stay organized, we can classify words into categories called parts of speech:
| Part of Speech | Function | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Noun | Names a person, place, thing, or idea. | cat, London, teacher, happiness |
| Verb | Expresses an action or a state of being. | run, jump, is, become, sleep |
| Pronoun | Replaces a noun to avoid repetition. | he, she, they, it, mine |
| Adjective | Describes or modifies a noun. | blue, smart, old, shiny |
| Adverb | Modifies a verb, adjective, or another adverb. | quickly, very, silently, well |
| Preposition | Shows relationships between words (time, space, or role). | under, after, between, with |
| Conjunction | Joins words, phrases, or clauses together. | and, but, or, because |
| Determiner | Introduces and identifies a noun. | the, a, this, those, my |
These categories aren't universal laws - they're useful tools. Some languages blur the lines between them, and some conlangers invent entirely new ones. But they give us a shared vocabulary to talk about how sentences are built.
Word Order
Take a simple English sentence: "The cat ate the fish."
- The cat - noun phrase, the one doing the action (subject)
- ate - verb, the action itself
- the fish - noun phrase, the thing being acted on (object)
Now scramble it. "The fish ate the cat" is still grammatical English - but it means something completely different. The cat is now the victim. In English, word order carries meaning.
What if we try "The fish the cat ate"? Technically understandable, but it sounds a bit odd.
And "Ate the cat the fish"? In English, that sounds like a question - "Did the cat eat the fish?" - even though we didn't add a question mark.
The point is that English speakers have strong intuitions about where in the sentence words belong. That intuition is what linguists call word order, and it's one of the most fundamental choices you'll make for your conlang.
Subject, Verb, Object
When words are in a sentence, they take on roles that describe the relationship between them. We use the three letters: S (subject), V (verb), and O (object). English is an SVO language - the subject comes first, then the verb, then the object.
But this is not the only option. In fact, it's not even the most common one globally:
- SOV - Subject first, then object, verb last. Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Latin. "The cat the fish ate." This is the most common word order in the world's languages.
- SVO - English, French, Mandarin, Swahili. "The cat ate the fish."
- VSO - Verb first, then subject, then object. Classical Arabic, Welsh, Irish. "Ate the cat the fish."
The other three arrangements (VOS, OVS, OSV) exist but are rare. Yoda from Star Wars speaks in something close to OSV - "The fish, the cat ate" - which is a big part of why he sounds so alien and distinctive.
No order is more logical than another (especially in a fantasy context) - they're just different conventions, and speakers of each type find their own word order completely natural and other orders strange.
A Few More Things to Decide
One thing worth noting before moving on: how freely words can be reordered depends heavily on whether your language attaches grammatical markers to words - a topic covered fully in Step 5 (Morphology). For now, just be aware that word order and morphology are deeply linked.
Beyond basic SVO order, a few related questions follow naturally:
- Where do adjectives go? English puts them before the noun ("red house"), French puts them after ("maison rouge"). Neither is more intuitive - it's just convention.
- How are questions formed? English inverts subject and auxiliary verb ("The cat ate" → "Did the cat eat?"). Some languages add a question particle instead, leaving word order entirely unchanged.
- How are negatives formed? Do you add a word ("the cat did not eat"), a prefix ("the cat un-ate"), or change the verb form entirely?
These details add up quickly, and the choices you make should feel consistent with each other. A language with very free word order and rich case marking will feel very different from a minimalist isolating language where word order is everything.
Practical tip: Try translating the same simple sentence - something like "She didn't give him the book" - into your conlang at each stage of development. It touches on word order, negation, pronouns, and object relationships all at once, and quickly exposes gaps in your grammar.
Step 4: Morphology - How Words Change Shape
Morphology is the system by which words change form to express grammatical information. It's one of the most consequential structural choices you'll make, because it determines how your language encodes who did what to whom - and how much freedom speakers have in arranging words.
Morphological Types
The major morphological types are:
- Isolating (analytic) - words don't change form; grammatical relationships are expressed through word order and separate function words. Mandarin and Vietnamese are strongly isolating. Toki Pona, a minimalist conlang, is extremely isolating.
- Agglutinative - grammatical information is added by stacking distinct, separable suffixes (or prefixes). Each affix does one job. Turkish and Finnish are classic examples: by stacking suffixes, a single word can pack in what English might need several words to express. Tolkien's Quenya leans agglutinative.
- Fusional (inflecting) - grammatical information is encoded in affixes, but individual affixes often carry multiple pieces of information simultaneously and can't be cleanly separated. Latin amō ("I love") encodes person, number, tense, mood, and voice in a single ending. Russian and Ancient Greek are further examples.
- Polysynthetic - entire sentences can be expressed in a single word, with subject, object, verb, and modifiers all incorporated into one morphological unit. Many indigenous North American languages work this way.
These aren't mutually exclusive - most languages blend types. But knowing where you want your language to sit on this spectrum will guide every other morphological decision you make.
Cases: Marking Grammatical Roles
One of the most important things morphology can do is signal the role a noun plays in a sentence - who is the actor, who is acted upon, who receives something. These signals are called cases.
In English, we rely almost entirely on word order to convey this. Move the words, change the meaning: "The cat ate the fish" and "The fish ate the cat" are very different outcomes for the cat.
But many languages attach case endings directly to nouns instead. Latin is a classic example. The sentence "The farmer loves the girl" can be written as:
- Agricola puellam amat (farmer-subject girl-object loves) = SOV
- Puellam agricola amat (girl-object farmer-subject loves) = OVS
- Amat agricola puellam (loves farmer-subject girl-object) = VSO
All three mean exactly the same thing, because the endings -a and -am signal subject and object regardless of position. Latin poets rearranged word order constantly for rhythm and emphasis - the grammar absorbed the variation.
This is the key tradeoff: the more case marking you use, the freer your word order can be. Languages with rich case systems (Latin, Russian, Finnish, Turkish) allow far more flexibility. Languages with little or no case marking (English, Mandarin) need fixed word order to avoid ambiguity. This is also why your morphological type choice from the section above matters so much - an isolating language naturally has few or no cases; a fusional one tends to have many, each packed with information.
Common cases to consider for your conlang:
- Nominative - the subject: a knight-NOM (the knight is doing the slaying)
- Accusative - the direct object: knight-NOM slew dragon-ACC (the dragon is being slain)
- Dative - the recipient: she gave knight-DAT a sword (the knight receives something)
- Genitive - possession or relationship: knight-GEN sword (the sword belongs to the knight)
- Locative - location: sword-LOC hall (the sword is in/at the hall - no preposition needed)
- Instrumental - means: knight-NOM slew dragon-ACC sword-INST (slain by means of the sword)
The labels NOM, ACC, DAT and so on just stand in for whatever marker your language actually uses. In practice that marker is typically a suffix - knight-NOM might be valok, knight-ACC might be valon, and so on. But it could equally be a prefix, an infix buried inside the word, a change to the vowels of the root (as in Arabic), or even a tone change. How cleanly those markers attach - and whether each one does a single job or several fuse together - comes straight back to your morphological type: an agglutinative language snaps them on neatly one at a time, while a fusional language might encode case, number, and gender all in a single ending that can't be pulled apart.
Cases aren't the only thing morphological markers can encode. The Scandinavian languages, for instance, mark definiteness as a suffix on the noun rather than a separate word: hus is "house", huset is "the house". English externalizes that information as a free-standing word ("the") - Norwegian bakes it directly into the noun. Both approaches are doing the same conceptual work; they've just made different choices about where the information lives. Your language can attach morphological markers to nouns for anything your grammar tracks: number, gender class, evidentiality, animacy - the list is open-ended.
You don't need all of these cases, and you may invent others entirely. Some languages handle spatial relationships with an elaborate case system; others use prepositions instead.
Derivation vs. Inflection
Morphology covers two distinct processes:
Inflection changes the grammatical form of a word without changing its core meaning: walk / walked / walking / walks. This is where your verb conjugations and noun declensions live - the paradigms that every speaker has to learn.
Derivation creates new words from existing ones: walk → walkable → walkability. A productive derivational system - a set of prefixes and suffixes that can be applied consistently - gives your language enormous expressive power without requiring you to coin every word from scratch.
Practical tip: Pick one verb and fully inflect it - every tense, every person, every mood you've defined. Then do the same for one noun. If the paradigm feels unwieldy or inconsistent, now is the time to simplify. It's much easier to reduce complexity early than to revise a thousand words later - unless you use the LangWitch app.
Step 5: Grammatical Features
Grammatical features are the categories your language tracks and encodes systematically. Now that you know how your language changes word forms (morphology), this step is about deciding what it encodes - the conceptual skeleton of the grammar.
Tense, Aspect, and Mood
Not all languages mark time the same way. English distinguishes past, present, and future tense. Mandarin doesn't use tense morphology at all - time is inferred from context or explicit time words. Some languages have only two tenses (past vs. non-past, or future vs. non-future). Some have many more, distinguishing remote past from recent past, or imminent future from distant future.
Aspect is often more fundamental than tense - it describes the shape of an action in time rather than when it happened. Was the action completed (perfective) or ongoing (imperfective)? Russian grammaticalizes aspect so thoroughly that almost every verb comes in a perfective/imperfective pair.
Mood encodes the speaker's attitude toward what they're saying - whether something is a fact (indicative), a command (imperative), a wish (optative), a hypothetical (subjunctive), or something heard second-hand (evidential). Many natural languages have evidential systems that require speakers to grammatically signal how they know what they're claiming - firsthand experience, inference, or hearsay. This is a fascinating feature to add to a conlang, especially for worldbuilding purposes.
Noun Classes
Noun classes - sometimes called grammatical gender - are a way to categorize words according to some feature, for example whether a word ends in a vowel or a consonant, or refers to a living thing, or belongs to some other category the language tracks.
Noun classes are commonly called Grammatical Gender simply because the masculine/feminine category is common in many natural languages, but the options are much broader than that:
- Masculine/Feminine - Spanish, French, Arabic
- Masculine/Feminine/Neuter - German, Russian, Latin (Neuter is non-gendered)
- Animate/Inanimate - several Algonquian languages
- Human/Non-human - some Bantu languages
- Solar/Lunar/Terrestrial/Aquatic - High Valyrian (invented for Game of Thrones)
A noun class system can be designed to reflect the worldview of your speakers. A language with animate/inanimate gender is implicitly making a philosophical claim about which things in the world have agency. A language with four genders tied to natural elements says something different about how its speakers organize reality.
Step 6: Building Vocabulary - Lexical Fields and the Swadesh List
Vocabulary is where a language becomes alive, but building it systematically requires more than making up words at random.
If your language evolved over time, it probably began with simple words for fundamental concepts, and those words were then re-used and combined in different ways to produce new compound words.
For example, to "understand" comes from the idea of "standing under" something (so you can see the foundation of it, hence "understanding" it.)
But which words should you start with?...
Start with the Swadesh List
The Swadesh list is a set of approximately 100 or 200 core concepts (there are a few different version of it, see wikipedia) - compiled by linguist Morris Swadesh - that appear in virtually every known language. It includes body parts (hand, eye, mouth), basic actions (eat, drink, walk, sleep), fundamental natural phenomena (sun, water, fire, tree), basic relationships (mother, father), and core pronouns and demonstratives.
Starting here ensures you build the foundation before the walls. These are the words that will be used most frequently and combined most productively. Spend time on them.
Practical tip: Using a word generator can help avoid "conlangers block", and avoid creating the same patterns over and over. They give you raw material to react to: you pick what feels right, discard what doesn't, and adjust. The LangWitch app uses several word generation systems and WordMage is available as a standalone playground: WordMage.
Think in Lexical Fields
A lexical field is a cluster of words sharing a conceptual domain. Rather than inventing words one at a time, build them in groups: kinship terms together, color terms together, weather words together. This has two benefits:
- Consistency - words in the same domain can share morphological patterns, roots, or sound features, giving the language internal coherence.
- Cultural expression - the boundaries between concepts in a field reveal what the culture finds worth distinguishing. Does your language have one word for uncle, or separate words for maternal and paternal uncle? One generic word for water, or different words for rain, river, ocean, and drinking water? These choices are where culture and language meet.
Resist the temptation to make every word sound exotic. Real languages have short, simple, phonologically minimal words for the most common concepts. Function words - pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions - are typically short and phonologically reduced.
More abstract concepts, in natural languages, often arise through compounding and semantic drift: two simple words are combined, then the compound gets shortened and repurposed over generations. The English word "understand" doesn't literally mean to stand under something - it evolved. Building that kind of layered etymology into your conlang, even artificially, gives it a feeling of age and depth. Imagine how speakers might informally shorten a compound over time, and let that become the word.
Sound and Meaning
Something worth knowing is that the relationship between a word's sound and its meaning is not entirely arbitrary.
In a now-famous experiment, psychologist Wolfgang Köhler showed people two shapes: a jagged one and a smooth one, asking which was called "takete" and which was "maluma". Across cultures and languages, the overwhelming majority matched the jagged shape to the sharp-sounding name. The experiment was later replicated and popularized by neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran using the names "Kiki" and "Bouba", and that version has stuck.
This phenomenon is called sound symbolism. Certain sounds seem to carry inherent connotations: sharp, front-of-mouth sounds (k, t, i) tend to feel small, pointed, or fast. Round, back-of-mouth sounds (b, m, o, u) tend to feel large, soft, or slow.
Natural languages are also full of phonesthemes: sound clusters that recur with related meanings. In English for example, words beginning with gl- often relate to light or vision (glimmer, gleam, glow, glare, glint). Words ending in -ump often suggest something heavy or clumsy: thump, clump, dump, lump, stump. You can build these patterns deliberately into your conlang to give it a coherent internal logic.
Step 8: Writing Systems
Many conlangers eventually want a script to go with their language, and this is a great way to bring the language into the visual domain.
The main types of writing systems are:
- Alphabets - one symbol (roughly) per phoneme. Latin, Cyrillic, Greek.
- Syllabaries - one symbol per syllable. Japanese hiragana and katakana.
- Abjads - consonants only, vowels inferred. Arabic, Hebrew.
- Abugidas - consonants are base symbols, vowels are diacritics. Devanagari (Hindi), Ethiopic.
- Logographic - symbols represent words or morphemes. Chinese hanzi.
Your phonological system will partly guide this choice. A language with complex consonant clusters doesn't suit a syllabary well. A tonal language might need diacritics to mark tone.
Even if you don't design a full script, deciding on a romanization system - a consistent way to represent your sounds in Latin letters - is essential for writing and sharing the language.
Putting It All Together
Building a conlang is an iterative process. You'll make a phonology, start building vocabulary, and discover that certain sounds are awkward or that your morphology doesn't scale. That's normal - even Tolkien revised his languages continuously over decades.
The rough order recommended here - purpose, speakers, sounds, grammar, morphology, grammatical features, vocabulary, writing - reflects logical dependencies: you need a morphological system before you can build consistent paradigms, and you can't build vocabulary well without knowing how words are formed. But in practice you'll probably go back and forth, changing things here and there - especially in the beginning.
Also, the goal isn't necessarily perfection - real languages are grammatically inconsistent and break their own rules all the time, because it reflects the organic, messy process by which languages evolve and borrow from each other. There's countless examples of words originating in English, being imported into Arabic, morphing and changing, then being imported into English again.
Start somewhere. The rest will follow.