Conlang/Appendix/Glossary

Entries should be succinct, lucid, and preferably provide big-picture insights.

Generally, outgoing links from this book should appear only at the ends of glossary entries (mediated by /Glossary/note); the rest of the book should link to glossary entries via /ref.

Terms
Here are some basic conlanging and linguistics terms.

It's valuable to note when a term is used in different senses that could cause confusion. This glossary seeks to give fair warning of discrepancies between mutually incompatible dialects of technical jargon, rather than setting down a single self-consistent dialect that would then be inconsistent with various usages encountered in the field (which happens a lot in any technical subject that's been around for a while).

Terminology often works best within a limited framework; succinctly explaining when it doesn't work so well is big-picture insight that may be difficult to obtain from enthusiastic, or simplified, explanations within its favored framework.

If a term could be listed either in adjective or noun form (as inflectional or inflection), prefer whichever feels more natural and provides smoothest coverage. An adjectival entry should list definitions for the various kinds of nouns it can modify; but if the adjectival form has a generic sense and then specifics to be mentioned for some nouns and not others, it may work better to list the noun form and then list specific adjective-noun combinations.
 * Examples:
 * fusion wouldn't cover fusional language, but  covers language and implies the sense of fusion.
 * there would be nothing to say about derivational affix beyond "an affix that's derivational", but there is more to say about derivational morpheme, and the sense of derivational follows from the process, so it's easier to list and  than to try to fit everything under adjective derivational.

If a term doesn't list any sections of the book where it is discussed, although it could be something that doesn't need coverage in the book proper, or something that is covered but not yet linked from here, it could also signal a topic waiting for coverage.

Named theories and models are also listed here; both those traditionally treated as proper nouns, such as, and those not, such as or.


 * A whose symbols represent  sounds.  Vowels may be omitted altogether, but often are optionally representable by  on the consonant symbols, and provision may be made for representing vowels in exceptional cases where the vowel does not accompany a consonant.  In most such systems, the vowel follows the consonant.  Contrast,.


 * A sometimes indicating removal from the marked noun, in which case it is a variety of .  In English, likely introduced by preposition from.  Usage varies greatly between languages.  The term ablative comes from a Latin verb meaning take away.


 * Change of a by altering a  (or vowels).  The more usual form of, also called vowel mutation; contrast.


 * 1. Of a noun,.
 * 2. Of a language,.


 * 1. A indicating the patient of a transitive verb or subject of an intransitive verb in an  alignment pattern.
 * 2. A case indicating the subject of an intransitive verb in a alignment pattern.


 * A whose symbols represent  sounds with default associated, and  to change these vowel defaults.  Contrast ,.


 * 1. Of a noun,.
 * 2. Of a language,.


 * A indicating the patient of a transitive verb in a  or  alignment pattern.


 * A word that modifies a noun.


 * A, , or (more rarely).


 * A word that modifies any part of language except a noun &mdash; verbs, adjectives, other adverbs, clauses, sentences.


 * A that qualifies anything except a noun.  Contrast.


 * A word-part that attaches to words and modifies their meaning. More narrowly concerned with form, and thus carries less conceptual baggage, than related term.


 * a that starts  and releases, usually with the same.


 * A : The participant of a situation that carries out an action.


 * Of a language, combining into words without changing their forms.  May or may not imply, depending on who you ask.  Contrasts with , but  doesn't have to be either agglutination or fusion.  The concept of morpheme works more smoothly in agglutinative than in fusional languages.


 * Any of the representing a  in a given language.


 * A whose symbols represent, including .  If only  are represents, that's either an  or an.


 * alphasyllabary
 * Another name for an.


 * Alternative history language. An artlang meant to be what some historical natlang would have evolved into in some alternative history.


 * Of a, having by constricting airflow between the  and the tongue.  May be  or.


 * The ridge at the top of the mouth just behind the teeth and before the.


 * The phenomenon of discovering that a weird, supposedly original feature in your conlang already exists in some natural language. Coined in recognition that natural languages regularly turn out to be even more bizarre than what conlangers can devise.  Acronym for (sic) another natlang already dunnit except worse.


 * Of a language, not words for their grammatical relationships.  Says nothing necessary about /word ratio, nor about other kinds of inflections; cf.,.


 * 1. The act of referring with an expression to some referent that depends on context. The referring expression is the anaphor.  See.
 * 2. More noarrowly, when the reference depends on a preceding expression. The preceding expression is the antecedent.  Contrast, postcedent.


 * Of a, having using the tip of the tongue (the apex).  See.


 * Change of a by altering a  (or phonemes).  Most often a change of vowel, called  or vowel mutation; changing a consonant is .  More often, sometimes.


 * Of a feature, borrowed from natural languages rather than invented. Of a, mostly composed of a posteriori features.


 * Of a feature, invented rather than borrowed from natural languages. Of a, mostly composed of a priori features.


 * Of a, having of  by constricting airflow (so it's not a ) but not enough, or in such a way as, to cause turbulence (so it's not a ).  All approximants are either  or ; they're  just below the vowels in the.


 * The notion in that signs have no direct connection to the concepts they represent.  Principle heavily relied upon to justify clean separation between different levels of language description, by  and since; even, while mostly avoiding semiotics, has invoked arbitrariness.  The notion of  violates arbitrariness of the sign.


 * Of a, an organ used to constrict the airflow at a . Active if it moves, passive if it doesn't; the tongue is especially commonly used as an active articulator.


 * Artistic language. A  created as art.


 * Structure of the action of a verb with respect to time.
 * 1. The unmodified term usually refers to grammatical aspect, which is arrangement of the action indicated by of the verb.
 * 2. Lexical aspect is a property of the verb independent of inflection, necessarily involving a smaller set of possibilities since it excludes details of a particular instance of the verb.


 * A in which a  becomes .  Cf..


 * In, change of a to sound more like another nearby phone.  May be either  or ;  or .  See.


 * An system with many  that do not reduce the verb's valency, allowing most any noun argument to be promoted to become the subject.  See also.


 * Auxiliary language. A  meant as a common second language for people with different native languages.


 * Of a or, having the highest part of the tongue toward the back of the mouth.


 * Of a, how far back in the mouth the highest part of tongue is positioned when pronouncing it.


 * A that cannot occur in a word without other morphemes; such as English plural morpheme -s.  Similar term  is more narrowly concerned with form, thus carries less conceptual baggage.  Cf. /.  Contrast.


 * Of writing, alternating between lines left-to-right and right-to-left. The word is borrowed from Ancient Greek, meaning ox-turn-fashion (turning in the manner of an ox when plowing a field).  In some boustrophedon writing, the glyphs are reflected right-to-left on lines going opposite directions; in  the glyphs are rotated 180 degrees between lines, a variant sometimes called reverse boustrophedon that, as far as we've heard, occurs in no other natural script.


 * The art of visually beautiful writing. The roots of the word mean beautiful writing.


 * Of a noun, its grammatical function in the sentence. Nouns are often  for case.  Case distinctions vary by language.  Case categorization is typically similar to semantic  but coarser-grained.


 * when the reference depends on a following expression. The following expression is the postcedent.


 * 1. Of a or, having  intermediate between  and.
 * 2. Of a, not.
 * When a sound is described as a semivowel, central refers to backness; whereas when the same sound is descried as an approximant, central means not lateral.


 * Any language in which the  of  merged with the plain .  Contrast ; the two types are named after the words for hundred in respectively  and, which illustrate the contrasting phonetic evolution patterns.


 * A pair of words that mark the beginning and end of a modifying phrase.


 * A grammatical structure expressing a single complete proposition &mdash; a verb and its noun arguments, with modifiers but not including any related proposition. Compare.


 * A .  Typically quite loud, though softer in a few of the natlangs that have them.  Found in some natlangs in southern Africa and a few in eastern Africa, and in.


 * 1. Of a, having more than one . See ,.
 * 2.


 * The part of a after the, if any..


 * 1. of a.
 * 2. A for a.


 * Constructed language. A language deliberately invented by someone.


 * 1. A with constricted air flow through the .  Distinguished by  and by how and where the air flow is restricted &mdash;  and  of articulation.  Contrast with, which have higher.
 * 2. A written to represent a consonant sound.


 * between non-adjacent . Much less common than .  A relatively common form is coronal harmony, whereby   (such as // and //) assimilate to the same.


 * Change of a by altering a  (or consonants).  May indicate grammatical information or reflect grammatical context.  Form of apophony less common than.


 * Of a, having using the front of the tongue.  Contrast.


 * Study of language by statistical analysis of large bodies (corpora) of text, generally without making any prior structural assumptions (cf. ). For a sense of relative scale, the Brown Corpus from 1961 is about a million words in 500 texts.


 * A that has no meaning of its own but distinguishes words; such as then cran- in English cranberry.  Also called fossilized morpheme.


 * with the sides of the &mdash;the arytenoid cartilages&mdash; pulled closer together, reducing airflow and loosening the .  Also called by a variety of other names, in various contexts, such as vocal fry.


 * Of a, using symbols meant to be easy to write rapidly by hand. The term is also used for modern cursive handwriting in which consecutive letters within a word usually flow one into another.


 * A indicating a recipient or beneficiary.  Typically the ; in English, often introduced by preposition to or for.  The term dative comes from a Latin verb meaning give.


 * A form of in which a 's  changes, typically moving back toward the .  Latin root buuca means mouth; thus, removal from the mouth (i.e., removal to the glottis).


 * 1. of a.
 * 2. A for a.


 * An element of a compound grammatical structure that is not the . See also.


 * A qualifying another element of the sentence, rather than being a sentence in itself.  May or may not be the same as.


 * Changing the form of a word to create another word &mdash; altering its meaning or grammatical class. Cf. .  Contrast.


 * A that changes the core meaning or class of the word.  Contrast.


 * 1. Of language change, taking place over time.
 * 2. Of linguistic study, concerned with language change over time.
 * 3. Of a, having its own internal fictional history.
 * Contrast.


 * A whose function is to modify another glyph.  Cf.,.


 * A situation where two dialects of a language are used by a single population. In the usual case, one dialect is vernacular and the other formal.  The formal dialect is often an earlier form of the language, is used in writing, and is not natively spoken.


 * A combination of two forming the  of a syllable.  One of the two is always weaker, and may even be treated as an ; if the first is weaker, it may be called an on-glide, and the diphthong is rising; if the second is weaker, an off-glide, and falling.  See also.


 * An directly affected by the verb.  Contrast.


 * Instances of language falling outside the traditional structured sentence; variously longer than a single sentence, involving multiple conversants, and/or in actual speech rather than polished prose.


 * An that removes part of the  it's applied to.  May be described, with additional conceptual baggage, as a subtractive  (at some stretch to the notion of morpheme, since a subtractive morpheme is not only  but has no form of its own).


 * 1. Of a, relating three noun arguments to a verb. The arguments are typically called the , , and.
 * 2. Of a verb, mediating a ditransitive clause.
 * Cf.,.


 * Of a, pronounced with the tongue bunched up.


 * Of a, having using the back of the tongue .  Contrast.


 * Of a, characterized by two airflow restrictions of the same , which are therefore both considered . A special case of.


 * , when viewed as an.


 * Of a, produced with an outward airflow though the mouth and/or nose. The outward airflow may be produced either by the lungs , by the  , or by the tongue ; most human speech sounds are pulmonic egressive.  Contrast.


 * Of a consonant, produced by an airstream from the closed and moving rapidly upward.


 * A sequence of characters depicting a facial expression, used to express emotion. Most often punctuation characters.  Modern use of emoticons in electronic discussion is generally traced to a proposal in 1982.


 * of a compound grammatical structure, having a . Contrast.


 * Engineered language. A  designed to meet objective criteria.


 * Of a, having in the lower , by constricting airflow via the aryepiglottal folds at the top of the larynx against the .  May be classed as  or.


 * A flap in the lower protecting the, so food doesn't go down the wrong way when swallowed.   for.


 * 1. Of a noun,.
 * 2. Of a language,.


 * Of a language, following an pattern that treats the patient of a transitive verb like the subject of an intransitive verb, while distinguishing them from the agent of a transitive verb .  The second most common alignment pattern amongst natural languages; much less common than.


 * A indicating the agent of a transitive verb in an  or  alignment pattern.


 * An auxlang whose vocabulary is entirely Indo-European, often entirely Romance.


 * Of a verb, how the speaker knows the action happened.


 * of a compound grammatical structure, not having a . Some linguistic theories require every compound structure to have a head.  Contrast.


 * Fictional auxlang. A supposed auxlang created by a character in a fictional setting.


 * A verb form that inflects for and, and can serve as the verb in an .  From the Latin finitus, meaning in this context definite, because it inflects for person.


 * A whose  of  momentarily blocks airflow by throwing the  against the passive articulator.  Differs from a  because the block is instantaneous so there's no pressure build-up; differs from a single-contact  because the articular is moved by muscular contraction, rather than by vibration due to the airflow.  Commonly synonymous with ; if not, the difference may be that the articulators in a flap strike tangentially whereas in a tap they strike directly.


 * A that can occur alone as a word; contrast.


 * 1. Of a, having of  by forcing airflow through a narrow enough opening to produce turbulence.  A  fricative may instead be called a glottal transition, avoiding awkward questions about whether the sound is a consonant or a  and whether the vocal cords themselves are technically part of the .  The word fricative is from a Latin verb meaning rub.
 * 2. Of a vowel, varying usage refers to some part of a blending between a fricative consonant and an immediately following vowel; typically, between a and a  vowel.  The term "fricative vowel" is sometimes used for the consonant colored by its anticipation of the vowel, sometimes for the vowel ostensibly colored by residual turbulence from the consonant, and sometimes for the different phenomenon of a  fricative consonant.


 * Of a or, having the highest part of the tongue toward the front of the mouth.


 * Of a language, having the property that a single may indicate multiple / changes; e.g. a Latin noun suffix which may indicate at once   and .  Fusional may or may not imply, depending on who you ask.  Contrasts with , but affixation doesn't have to be agglutination or fusion.  The concept of  is more awkward in fusional languages than agglutinative ones.


 * futhark
 * See.


 * The lengthening of a.


 * A way of classifying nouns into groups. May be completely unrelated to sexual gender.


 * A typically indicating the marked noun owns another noun, or that the other noun is attributed to the marked noun.  Similar to the possessive case in English.  The term genitive comes from a Latin word meaning origin/birth.


 * 1. An that differs from a  only by being slightly more closed.  Linguists may differ on whether some approximants correspond to a vowel, hence whether they should count as glides.  It's generally agreed that  approximants are not glides.
 * 2. An approximant that occurs in the transition to or from the of a.
 * 3. A vowel treated as a consonant, i.e., not the nucleus of a syllable. See.


 * Of a, having at the .  The terminology here is debated, in that the  is ostensibly what the sound passes through after being generated at the glottis, thus does not include the glottis, making the glottis ineligible as a place of articulation; but natlangs often, not always, treat these  as consonants rather than .  See ,.


 * Of a, produced with airflow initiated by the . Contrast , .  The term glottal is also occasionally used for , generally not for.


 * Of a, having its basic identity colored by a partial or total closure of the . A .  See.


 * The opening of the ; in practice, the vocal cords themselves. See,.


 * An elemental symbol used in writing.


 * The study of the rules governing the use of a given language.


 * Of a, pronounced with the sides of the tongue raised so that airflow is a narrow stream directed at the teeth. See.


 * The front of the roof of the mouth. Lined with bone (technically, the bone itself is the hard palate), whereas the back of the roof of the mouth is soft tissue, the.


 * In linguistics, between non-adjacent sounds.  The term is not usually used without specifying the type(s) of sound(s) involved.  Most common is ; see also,.


 * The element of a compound grammatical structure that primarily defines the nature of the structure. Most often the structure is a phrase, in which case the head is a word (such as the preposition in a prepositional phrase); but also, if a word is viewed as a collection of, the head of the word would be a morpheme.  Other elements of the structure are called .  Especially associated with , but the term head can be used descriptively without that conceptual framework.  See.


 * Of an grammatical structure, having its head at the end.  Sometimes called left-.  Contrast.


 * Of an grammatical structure, having its head at the start.  Sometimes called right-.  Contrast.


 * headless
 * See.


 * Of a, how open the mouth is when pronouncing it. Termed high or low for how far the jaw drops, thus low for more open, high for less.


 * Any of certain particularly ancient whose symbols appear to be .  Generally the term has become attached to a script before it was deciphered.  The term hieroglyphic comes from roots meaning sacred writing.  The classic example is ; others include, , and.


 * International Auxillary Language. An auxlang intended for use on an international scale.  Auxlangs are almost always IALs, to the point where the two terms are often treated as synonyms.


 * A written symbol representing an idea/concept. A  made up of logograms is am ideographic system.  An ideogram provides no information about the sounds used to express its meaning.  In this inclusive sense, most  are ideograms.  The term ideogram is sometimes used in a more exclusive sense to mean a symbol representing an idea independent of language (potentially raising questions about the nature of ).


 * Formation of a specialized verb by means of a compound joining the verb with an  or with its .  Often associated with.


 * An indirectly affected by the verb.  Contrast.


 * A family of related languages historically spoken in India, Europe, and points between. Reconstructed common ancestor.


 * A indicating location within the marked noun.


 * An that attaches to the middle of a word.  Contrast,.


 * Changing the form of a word to indicate a grammatical category such as or, without altering the word's core meaning or grammatical class.  Cf. .  Contrast.


 * A that does not alter the core meaning or class of the word.  Contrast.


 * infraglottic cavity
 * See .


 * Of a, produced with an inward airflow though the mouth and/or nose. The inward airflow may be produced either by the lungs , by the  , or by the tongue .  Contrast.


 * A indicating the marked noun is the means by which the action is accomplished.


 * Of a, occurring between two .  often occurs intervocallically.


 * 1. Of a, relating a single noun argument to a verb. The argument is called the.
 * 2. Of a verb, mediating an intransitive clause.
 * Cf.,.


 * 1. A that isn't known to be related to any other natlang on Earth.
 * 2. The only living member of a large family of related languages.


 * Of a language, having no and very low /word ratio.  Must be, cannot be.


 * Of a, having many exotic features with no apparent reason or overall scheme.


 * Of a, produced with the lips puckered, creating an additional resonance cavity between the lips and teeth and thereby altering the sound. The same effect for a  is called .  Occurs in most languages but might not be.


 * Of a, having using the blade (top surface of the front, just behind the tip) of the tongue.  See.


 * A language is a learned system for using sequences of for general sapient communication.  Description of a language is usually analyzed into  and .  Scientists struggle over just what language is, but it appears to be strictly a behavior of sapient beings; thus far no non-human animal has been shown to use a language with the complexities of human communication, and most non-human communications (such as those of birds, a much-studied case) clearly aren't even remotely comparable.  It's difficult to determine whether even some human communication systems qualify, such as .  See also.


 * 1. Of a, having in the neighborhood of the .  Certainly includes ; may or may not include.
 * 2. One of a hypothesized series of consonants in, based on indirect evidence of effect on in daughter languages.  Though called "laryngeals" by early proponents who thought their place of articulation might be , , or , current speculation also includes  and .  See.


 * The interior space of the . Divided by the  into the vestibule above, connecting to the, and infraglottic cavity below, connecting to the trachea (windpipe).


 * 1..
 * 2..


 * The voice box, from which project into the ; connects from the windpipe (and thence the lungs) to the lower .  See,.


 * Of a, produced with airflow along the sides of the tongue while airflow is blocked along the center of the mouth. Produces an L-like sound.  The usual English sound // is an  lateral ; there are others, even lateral.


 * A indicating some sort of motion to the marked noun.  In English, likely introduced by preposition to or into.  Cf..


 * A in which a  becomes more, or disappears altogether.  The term lenition originally means weakening.  Lenition tends to happen to a consonant in an  position.


 * The identity of a word that does not change under but does change under .  Encompasses core meaning and grammatical class, but not grammatical categories such as, , etc.


 * An approach to in which a stem is altered by a (/) process to produce a .  Contrast,.


 * Of a, produced with airflow initiated by the tongue. This involves a double closure , one at the back of the mouth (either  or ) and one farther forward; usually the sound is described by its forward articulation.  Lingual  are called ; lingual  don't usually occur in natlangs, an exception being .  Contrast ,.


 * A pattern that usually holds for natlangs. Idea pioneered by .  Compare.


 * Of a, being either  or . A hybrid classification; lateral approximants and rhotics feel similar, subjectively, placed at the same level on the  and often having similar  in natlangs.  The choice of term recalls a similar term hygrós (ancient Greek meaning moist) used by  over two thousand years ago (though he also included ).


 * A indicating the marked noun specifies a location.  The term is sometimes used to designate a specific case in a language, sometimes to describe a general property of a case with a more specific name.  Estonian and  each have a half dozen or more locative cases.  The term locative comes from a Latin word meaning place.


 * Logical language. A  based on formal logic.


 * A written symbol representing a whole or phrase.  A  made up of logograms is a logographic system. Logographic systems are generally very large and impure, with some symbols representing  or individual.


 * Of a, how the air flow is disrupted. Compare.


 * Of a verb, the possibility and necessity of the verb &mdash; whether it happens, might happen, can happen, is commanded to happen, etc.


 * Classically, a word-part that has a meaning of its own. Cf. /.  Words are more easily analyzed into morphemes in  than in  languages.  Alternatively, some linguists view a morpheme as a process; see.


 * An approach to in which  are combined to produce a .  Contrast,.


 * The study of the internal structure of words.


 * A coherent part of the form of a word, without necessarily any meaning attached to it. Term coined for use in, where parts of a word form don't have meanings.


 * The grammatical relationship between the way a verb relates to its noun arguments, and the way an  verb relates to its noun argument.


 * mutation
 * See.


 * 1. Of a, produced with air flow through the nose rather than through the mouth. Contrast with .  Compare .  See.
 * 2. Of a,.


 * Of a, produced with some air flow through the nose in addition to air flow through the mouth. Both  and  can be nasalized.  Not to be confused with .  See.


 * Natural language. A human language that occurred naturally, as opposed to a.


 * A proposed framework in which the semantics of all human languages would be built up from a common set of semantic primes. The primes, language-independent irreducible meanings, would be combined into semantic molecules.  The theory was proposed by linguist Anna Wierzbicka in the early 1970s.


 * 1. Of a noun,.
 * 2. Of a language,.


 * Of a language, following an pattern that treats the agent of a transitive verb like the subject of an intransitive verb, while distinguishing them from the patient of a transitive verb .  The most common alignment pattern amongst natural languages; contrast.


 * A indicating the agent of a transitive verb and the subject of an intransitive verb in a  alignment pattern.


 * Of a language, not using word order for organizing the elements of a sentence, so that word order is available for use for other purposes (such as structure).  This term comes from the  tradition of linguistics.


 * A word that denotes a thing (concrete or abstract).


 * 1. The core in a ; the peak, most, usually a.
 * 2. Synonym for.


 * Of a noun, how many of the noun there are.


 * A part of a sentence that specifies a thing secondarily involved in the action of the verb. One of the three main parts of a sentence.   verbs take no object; the terminology becomes somewhat tangled for  verbs, which take two objects.  See also.


 * A with an obstructed airflow; anything from  on down on the .  Contrast.


 * occlusive
 * See.


 * Of a language, having few with an  structure (very low morpheme/word ratio).  No found in nature; conlang  is oligoisolating.  Prefix oligo- means few.  Contrast.


 * Of a language, having few with a high morpheme/word ratio .  Arguably not possible in nature; conlang  is claimed as an example.  Prefix oligo- means few.  Contrast.


 * The part of a before the, if any..


 * A model of language in which the surface forms of language are generated from underlying representations by optimizing between competing constraints; OT for short. Constraints are not involable rules, rather may be overriden by higher-priority constraints.  Most of the specifics are supposed to be, languages differing only by relative priorities of the constraints.  Controversial; notably, critics suggest OT cannot account for successively applied rules.  Usually applied to , but sometimes also to higher-level concerns such as .  Proposed in 1991.


 * Not : of a, produced with air flow through the mouth; of a , produced without air flow through the nose.


 * The correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language.


 * Rare language type in which the neutral ordering of the three main sentence elements is object-subject-verb. Most  put the subject before the object.  OSV natlangs are mostly native to the Amazon basin.


 * Rare language type in which the neutral ordering of the three main sentence elements is object-verb-subject. Most  put the subject before the object.  Some native languages of the Americas are OVS.


 * Of a, having by constricting airflow between the  and back of the tongue .  Compare.


 * 1. Of a, having its basic identity colored by narrowing of airflow between the tongue and the .  A ; as if the consonant were closely followed by a.
 * 2. Of a, having undergone a either causing or caused by either a palatal consonant, palatalized consonant, or  .  Often ends in.


 * A complete pattern of all the ways a word can vary by . Cf.,.


 * A indicating the marked noun is partial in nature, ; covers a variety of situations.  Notably, Estonian, and  have such a case.


 * A : The participant of a situation upon whom an action is carried out.


 * peak
 * See.


 * Of a noun, how it relates to the speaker and the audience.


 * 1. Of a, having in the upper , by constricting airflow in the pharynx (the throat) using the root of the tongue.
 * 2. Of a consonant, either having primary articulation either in the pharynx or.
 * See.


 * Of a, having its basic identity colored by constriction of the or .  A.


 * The upper part of the throat; roughly, the part of the throat that is also part of the . Has three parts, the nasopharynx at the back of the, oropharynx behind the , and laryngopharynx connecting to the  and esophagus.  See ,.


 * A pattern of form in words that naturally pairs with meaning, in violation of 's principle of . Phonaesthemes are not limited to a single language, and do not compose to fully define a word form; contrast .  Spontaneous word coinages are statistically likely to involve phonaesthemes.  Common examples are "gl-" for words related to light and vision, "sn-" for words related to the mouth or nose.


 * 1. The qualitative sound of a language, including its beautiful (euphonic) and harsh (cacophonic) aspects. Term in this sense attributed to ; cf..
 * 2. The relationship between form and meaning of words; cf..


 * A language sound made using the . See.


 * A minimal sound element of language that can distinguish words from each other. See.


 * Of a feature of in a language, capable of changing the meaning of a word.  For example, in English,  is phonemic while  is not.  Compare.


 * The study of the sounds of human speech. There is no concept of  in phonetics.


 * The study of the sound system of a specific language. May deal with both and.


 * Of a language, the rules of how can be combined.


 * An that uses a picture to suggest its meaning.


 * Of a, where along the the air flow is disrupted.  Compare .  See.


 * Of a, having of  where airflow is blocked.


 * agreement of a verb with several of its arguments. In natlangs, may occur with, may occur with .   has polypersonal agreement.


 * Of a language, having a very large number of per word.  Term coined circa 1819 by linguist Peter Stephen du Ponceau to describe American natlangs.  Raises questions of what a  is.  Some linguists have proposed more restrictive definitions to clearly exclude phenomena such as .  Polysynthetic languages often use  and.


 * Of a, having by constricting airflow between the inner side of the  and the tongue.


 * postcedent
 * See.


 * A word that marks the end of a modifying phrase. Cf.,.


 * The study of the ability of natural language speakers to communicate more than what is explicitly stated.


 * 1. In traditional grammar, one of the two parts of a sentence, saying something about the.
 * 2. In some formal treatments of grammar, a boolean-valued function asserting a property of a single element or a relation between multiple elements. Sometimes predicator to distinguish from the traditional sense of predicate.


 * An that attaches to the beginning of a word.


 * A word that marks the start of a modifying phrase. Cf.,.


 * An introduced by a.


 * Of a, the constriction of airflow that gives the consonant its character. If the consonant is , distinguished from the , which only colors the consonant without changing its identity.  See.


 * in which a later sound is influenced by an earlier one.


 * An whose referent is a.


 * Of a, produced with airflow in/out of the lungs (controlled by the muscles of the diaphragm). Human speech sounds are most commonly pulmonic .  Contrast ,.


 * A vowel with the quality of a .  Technically, a vowel whose third  is shifted downward in frequency.  The concept may be partly or entirely dispensed with; some rhotic syllable  may be interpreted as rhotic approximants, while others may be treated as  of an uncolored vowel with an R-colored neutral vowel.  If R-colored vowels aren't really vowels, then rhotic approximants aren't.


 * Of a, having in the .  May mean specifically articulation in the upper pharynx by airflow constriction using the root of the tongue (the word radical comes from Latin radix meaning root); but in some usage, radical also includes.


 * A : participant of a change of ownership that acquires ownership, as the student in "The librarian gave the book to the student."


 * The property of a language that a sentence can contain a sentence within it as a subpart, allowing unlimited depth of nesting ("I know that they know that I know that they know that...").  has claimed recursion is  to human language, a claim recently challenged by  citing  as a counterexample.  Considerable controversy has ensued.


 * Change of a by repeating part of it.  Prominently used in Austronesian natlangs; scattered uses elsewhere, e.g. in English.


 * in which an earlier sound is influenced by a later one.


 * A that qualifies a noun.  Contrast.


 * A that too closely imitates a pre-existing language.  Shortened, and generalized, from linguistic term.


 * A process of language change in which most or all of the lexicon of the language is replaced by vocabulary from another language (the lexifier). Origin of the generalized conlanging term.


 * Of a, having between the  curled back to some degree or other, and a place on the roof of the mouth at or behind the .  With a fully curled-back tongue, the  surface is ; sometimes retroflex is used to include  and  sounds, in which case the subapicals may be called true retroflex; but generally not other tongue positions such as .  May be , , or.


 * Of a, being qualitatively R-like. It's generally agreed which consonants are rhotic, but there has been some difficulty identifying a technical criterion to explain it; consider how little the   and alveolar  have in common, as sounds.  Rhotics behave similarly in human languages; their resemblance is  rather than .  Some linguists consider approximant rhotics to be .  See.


 * The combination of and, if present,  of a ; all of the syllable except the  if any.


 * Of a, produced with the lips puckered, creating an additional resonance cavity between the lips and teeth and thereby altering the sound. The same effect for a  is called .  Occurs in most languages but might not be.


 * Of a, either the property of being , or the binary property of whether or not the vowel is rounded.


 * glyphs of a certain style using straight lines that make them easy to inscribe on stone. Specifically, runes refer to certain alphabets used for Germanic languages: in particular, several futhark (fuþark) for Scandinavian languages, and the  (fuþorc) for Old English.  See also.


 * The hypothesis that a person's language affects how they think.


 * Any language in which the  of  merged with the plain  while the  didn't.  Contrast ; the two types are named after the words for hundred in respectively  and, which illustrate the contrasting phonetic evolution patterns.


 * 1. A writing system, used to represent language. This is the sense in this wikibook; we use it interchangeably with writing system.  Scripts do not necessarily correspond one-to-one with languages; a language may be written using multiple scripts, and a script might be used to write multiple languages.  Usually if a language is exclusively written, one would describe it as a language rather than as a script.
 * 2., especially handwriting.


 * 1. Of a, a constriction of airflow that only colors the consonant, without determining its character. Whatever the  of the , secondary articulations are .  See.
 * 2. Also sometimes used of a, indicating a secondary constriction that colors the vowel without changing its identity.


 * semantic molecule
 * See.


 * semantic prime
 * See.


 * Aspects of meaning, as expressed in language or other systems of signs.


 * semiconsonant
 * See.


 * The theory of how signs are used to communicate meaning; encompasses both linguistic and non-linguistic sign systems. Founded by, who called his work semiology.


 * semivowel
 * See.


 * Of a or, a hissing quality; secondary feature caused by airflow between tongue and sharp edge of teeth which raises the frequency.  Occurs in English  and  fricatives/affricates.


 * , when viewed as an.


 * soft palate
 * See .


 * A with unobstructed airflow; anything strictly above the  on the .  Sonorants are usually .  Contrast.


 * An ordering of according to how free the air flow is.   are more sonorous than,  than .  Linguists disagree on some details of the ordering.


 * Alteration of a, either depending on context, or ; may be  or not.


 * Common language type in which the neutral ordering of the three main sentence elements is subject-object-verb. About 40% of  are of this type.  SOV languages include Latin, Sanskrit, and Japanese.


 * speech sound
 * See.


 * spirant
 * . From a Latin verb meaning breathe, blow.


 * A form of in which a  or  changes to a  (spirant).


 * stop
 * See.


 * 1. Of a, belonging to a conventional set of loud sounds. Always includes the ; sometimes only the siblants, sometimes also some lower-frequency /.
 * 2. Of a, highly combined with an  .  Commonly used in discussing  languages.
 * 3. Of a vowel,.


 * Of a, having using the underside of the tongue tip.  See ,.


 * 1. In traditional grammar, one of the two parts of a sentence, specifying the noun that performs the action; see.
 * 2. As a, the only participant of an clause.
 * 3..


 * Of a, having using the bottom side of the front of the tongue; suggests a part of the tongue further back than.


 * 1. A ; that is, a clause qualifying any other element in the sentence.
 * 2. An ; that is, a clause that doesn't qualify a noun.


 * subtractive morpheme
 * See.


 * An that attaches to the end of a word.


 * The occurrence, in different inflections of a single word, of multiple, etymologically separate forms. English examples are went as a form of go, or good better best.


 * Common language type in which the neutral ordering of the three main sentence elements is subject-verb-object. About 40% of  are of this type.  VOS languages include English, French, Mandarin, and Russian.


 * A whose symbols represent .  Compare.


 * A consonant serving as the of a.


 * Basic unit of sound, of which words are made; a cluster of with a sonorous .  Use of written symbols to represent syllables is older than use of written symbols to represent individual .  Some linguists view some languages as not having syllables.


 * A form of in which all sounds in a  take on the same .  Noted of the Proto-Slavic language.


 * A written symbol representing a . See ).


 * 1. Of changes in a language, taking place due to some factor other than time (such as adjacency in an utterance).
 * 2. Of linguistic study, concerned only with language as it exists at a given time, disregarding changes over time.
 * 3. Of a, not having an internal fictional history.
 * Contrast.


 * The study of how words are arranged into sentences.


 * Of a language, having high /word ratio. Cf..


 * A whose  of  momentarily blocks airflow by throwing the  against the passive articulator.  Differs from a  because the block is instantaneous so there's no pressure build-up; differs from a single-contact  because the articular is moved by muscular contraction, rather than by vibration due to the airflow.  Commonly synonymous with ; if not, the difference may be that the articulators in a tap strike directly whereas in a flap they strike tangentially.


 * Of an activity, the property of achieving some sort of completion. In English this may be captured by the distinction between doing something in an hour (telic) versus doing something for an hour (atelic).  May interact in various ways with  and  in various ways in different languages.  See.


 * Of a verb, when the action happens &mdash; past, present, future, etc.


 * Of a noun, its semantic function in the sentence. A categorization of nouns typically similar to grammatical  but finer-grained.  Also called thematic role, especially when used with a more grammatical emphasis.


 * A : participant of a situation that does not change state, as the book in "The librarian gave the book to the student."


 * , in the approach to syntax.


 * In linguistics, an approach to grammar as a formal process of generating sequences of words based on phrase structure rules. Associated with .  The form of the rules is generally presumed .  The transformational grammar approach may present conlanging hazards (see related caveat on theory and practice).


 * 1. Of a, relating two noun arguments to a verb. The arguments are called the  and.
 * 2. Of a verb, mediating a transitive clause.
 * Cf.,.


 * An system in which any  in a sentence can be the focus/trigger of the sentence, marked only as the trigger rather than for  while the verb is marked to indicate the trigger's role.  Conlang device inspired by ; however, incompatible with more recent theory on how Austronesian alignment works.


 * A whose  of  is airflow causing vibration of the  so that the articulators make intermittent contact, typically two or three times though more contacts, or just one, are possible.  See also.


 * Of a language, following an pattern that distinguishes the agent of a transitive verb, patient of a transitive verb , and subject of an intransitive verb .  Less common than either  or.


 * Academically-controversial hypothesis that although a given language's grammar is learned, the template that allows this learning (the UG) arises inevitably from unidentified, presumed genetic structures in the human brain. Associated with  and other s and rarely has practical implications for language creation.


 * unvoiced
 * See .


 * A fleshy projection hanging down from the middle of the back edge of the roof of the mouth. It closes off the nose when swallowing (as the  closes off the ).  Quite visible if you can get a good look, in a mirror, down your throat past your tongue. See.


 * Of a, having at the , by constricting airflow between the uvula and back of the tongue.


 * Of a, having at the , by constricting airflow between the velum and back of the tongue.


 * Of a, having its basic identity colored by narrowing of airflow between the tongue and the .  A.


 * The back of the roof of the mouth. Also called the soft palate; soft tissue, whereas the front of the roof of the mouth is lined with bone, the .  The  hangs down from the velum.  The velum, together with the uvula, can partly or entirely block airflow to the  and .  See.


 * 1. A word that denotes action performed by or on a thing (sometimes, the trivial action of being).
 * 2. The part of a sentence that specifies the central action of the sentence. One of the three main parts of a sentence.


 * vestibule
 * See .


 * Two folds of tissue stretching across the, capable of vibrating to produce . Also called vocal folds.


 * The anatomical cavity through which sounds pass after being generated. For human beings, this consists of the  and  cavities,, and.


 * vocalic R
 * See.


 * Of a, either the property of being , or the binary property of whether or not the sound is voiced.


 * 1. Of a, which participant in the action is the subject &mdash; whether the subject does the action, has the action done to it, or does it to itself.
 * 2. Of a,.


 * Of a, produced with the vibrating.


 * Rare language type in which the neutral ordering of the three main sentence elements is verb-object-subject. Most  put the subject before the object.  Some Austronesian and Mayan languages are VOS.


 * 1. A with unconstricted air flow through the .  Distinguished by, , and subtler features such as .  Contrast with , which have lower.
 * 2. A written to represent a vowel sound.


 * between non-adjacent sounds involving both and .  Much less common than .  Noted in some native languages in British Columbia, Canada; see also.


 * between non-adjacent . Common in  languages.  The most common form of.


 * Language type in which the neutral ordering of the three main sentence elements is verb-subject-object. About 15% of  are of this type.  VSO languages include Welsh and classical Arabic.


 * A standalone unit of language. May be used in either a concrete or abstract sense; generally clear from context, but, for precision, prefer  or.


 * word-and-paradigm morphology
 * See.


 * An approach to in which a word follows a  to produce .  Also called word-and-paradigm morphology; sometimes abbreviated WP. Contrast,.


 * An form of a.


 * WP
 * See.


 * writing system
 * See.


 * Language in written form; however, this could mean either a written encoding of spoken language, or a language whose form is written. When there is an associated spoken language, the written form may use a different, and may also contain some purely written elements, e.g. .  Some conlangs are purely written with no spoken form, such as.

People and things
List conlang-related people, organizations, discussion fora, and books (or other works) here. Languages belong in a separate section, below. Most people of interest are likely to be conlangers of note; presumably if a conlang is suitable to list below, so is its creator here. Books about conlanging are especially likely to be relevant; we probably don't want to try to list every work that uses a conlang, as the list could get unmanageably long. If you think you or your work/forum/whatever should be listed, it's probably best to ask on the |talk page for someone else to make that call and, if yes, write the entry.


 * A 2004 book on by .   Purists wishing to distinguish Salo's extrapolations from Tolkien's notes may refer to the language described in Salo's book as Neo-Sindarin.


 * An essay by, first delivered as a talk around 1931 and later revised and redelivered, presenting what is now called . A major milestone in the history of conlanging.  Tolkien "outs" himself as an artlanger, distinguishes between  and artlangs, discusses the relation of mythology to language, and discusses.


 * Author of a book about conlangs, , 2009. PhD in psycholinguistics (psychology of linguistics) at the University of Chicago in 2004.  While researching the book, attended a.


 * A mailing list created in 1997, split off from.


 * A common exercise in conlang application, translation of the story of the Tower of Babel, Genesis 11:1–9. Proposed as a standard exercise by, who hosted some four or five hundred such translations on the  website.


 * A part of the human brain related to producing speech. Located toward the front of the dominant hemisphere (which is usually the left hemisphere since most people are right-handed).  See.


 * This phrase has been cited as an exemplar of a euphonious (beautiful-sounding) English phrase., describing his attitude toward Welsh in 1955, wrote, "in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent".


 * Conlanger who created conlang, and subsequently proposed what is now called the.


 * Conlangflag.svg symbol of the online conlanging community, designed by an organic democratic process on mailing list.  Depicts a sunrise, symbolizing conlanging coming out into the open; behind the Tower of Babel, referring to the  and symbolizing the many-layered development of a conlang.


 * A mailing list created in 1991, that drew together language creators into a community. The term  is derived from the name of the mailing list.  In early 1997, auxlang advocacy was banished to a separate list  as CONLANG-L moved to a server at Brown University.


 * Linguist who has studied the since the late 1970s.  Early in his career he followed 's methodologies, but has since come to the position that Pirahã is a counterexample to some of Chomsky's theories of, especially universality of , resulting in heated controversy; Chomsky has called Everett a "charlatão puro" (pure charlatan).


 * Conlanger who created artlang, spending over four decades on it. 1942–2007.


 * Co-founder of the, and its president for several years. Has created a number of conlangs for television and movies, including  for Game of Thrones.


 * Linguist. Author of , 2004; provided translations for the  movies, 2001–2003.  At the time of the LOTR movies, was in graduate school.


 * Grammarian, circa 170–90 BCE, attributed creator of the oldest surviving language grammar, highly influential on grammars since.


 * Creator of auxlang . Reverend, from Ohio, 1853–1937.


 * Linguist and, considered amongst the founders of the twentieth-century forms of both subjects. 1857–1913.


 * Creator of altlang . Suggested bogolang for an altlang in which the historical sound changes of one natlang are applied to another natlang (as with Breathanach, arguably, etc.).


 * Pen name of journalist and author Eric A. Blair, who described fictional language.


 * Italian mathematician and linguist, creator of, 1858–1932.


 * A triangle showing the mixture of practical, technical, and artistic motivations for a conlang. The pure motivations are at the corners: auxlang, engelang, and artlang. Proposed by conlanger  in the late 1990s.


 * German polymath, one of the inventors of differential calculus. 1646–1716.  Attempted to create .  1614–1672.


 * Twelfth century German Benedictine abbess, who created . Noted for contributions to natural science; long considered a saint in various branches of Roman Catholicism; named a Doctor of the Church in 2012 by Pope Benedict XVI.  Since a 2010 proposal by the Conlanging Librarian at the, her feast day of September 17 has gained some traction in the internet conlanging community as a conlanging holiday, when conlangers wish each other a happy Saint Hildegard's day.


 * An alternate history project started in 1997 around . At last check, more than 75 contributors, more than 30 conlangs including Brithenig and.


 * A 2009 book about conlangs by psycholinguist.


 * Creator of . 1921–2000.  Sociologist, science fiction author.


 * Dutch linguist and conlanger. Coauthor of auxlang  and author of altlang.


 * Conlanger who authored the in 1995–6 and later hosted the  website until circa 2009.  See.


 * Creator of auxlang . German Catholic priest, 1831–1912.  Claimed the idea for Volapük came to him after a parishioner couldn't send mail to their son in America because US postal workers couldn't read their handwriting.


 * Creator of logical philosophical language . California-based, bachelor's degree in linguistics.  Sometime speaker at.


 * Creator in the seventeenth century of an influential . 1614–1672.  Anglican Clergyman.


 * US linguist who investigated . 1915–2001.


 * Creator of and .  1892–1973.  Philologist, professor, and lifelong .  A major influence on conlanging as a whole; see ', ', .


 * A major conlanging website maintained until about 2009 by . Resources hosted included (amongst others) descriptions of roughly two thousand conlangs; four or five hundred ; and the  archive.


 * A widely recognized introduction to conlanging by conlanger, first on his website and more recently also in dead-tree form.


 * A university-hosted conference on conlanging. Recently, a two-day conference held in odd-numbered years at a university, except the first one-day in 2006.  So far, hosted by universities in North America and Europe.


 * A non-profit corporation dedicated to promoting conlanging, founded in 2007. Runs the.


 * A non-profit organization formed in 1987 to develop.


 * Creator of . 1859–1917.  Medical doctor, born of Polish-Lithuanian Jewish parents in an area of partitioned Poland with many ethnic groups at odds with each other; believed a common language could promote peace.  His idealism earned him the Esperanto nickname Doktoro Esperanto, meaning Doctor Hopeful, from which the language got its name.


 * Creator of the language in the 1980s for the Star Trek franchise, and later the Atlantean language for 2001 Disney movie Atlantis: The Lost Empire.  US linguist; has studied native American languages.


 * Prominent conlanger, a.k.a. Zompist. Maintains the zompist.com website, including the  and ; creator of conlang .  Author of several books, including the dead-tree edition of the Language Cconstruction Kit.


 * A series of articles about conlanging written in 1995–6 by . A prominent on-line conlanging resource, hosted on the  website until its demise.


 * US linguist centrally associated with the hypothesis and.


 * An online encyclopedia of writing systems and languages, set up by Simon Ager. Started in 1998 and evolved into an encyclopedia due to Ager's interests.  Emphasis on writing systems.  Includes some conlangs, numerous constructed scripts.


 * Creator of auxlang . Danish linguist, 1869–1943.  Significant contributions to theory of structural linguistics.


 * Creator of the language for 2009 film Avatar.  US communications professor with a PhD in linguistics.


 * Creator of conlang . US cartoonist.


 * US-based conlanger active in the internet conlanging community mainly during the 1990s. Creator of conlangs  and.


 * A stone monument discovered in the Nile Delta in 1799, repeating a decree in three different, which famously provided the key to deciphering . The decree was issued in 196 BCE.  Weight a little over half a ton, inscribed surface around a square yard (or, square metre).  Ancient Greek, , and hieroglyphic; actually deciphering the latter took about another 20 years.


 * Pen name of Sarah Higley; conlanger, science fiction writer, and professor of English at the University of Rochester in upstate New York. Creator of artlang .  In science fiction, noted for creating character Reginald Barclay of the Star Trek franchise.  Author of 2007 book Hildegard of Bingen's Unknown Language, about 's conlang.


 * Well-known computer program for automatically applying sound changes to words, written by . The original program was written in the C programming language in 2000 CE.  He wrote up upgraded version in javascript, running on a web brower and supporting unicode, in 2012.


 * Secret Vice
 * See .


 * A non-profit corporation that promotes study and documentation of languages around the world, especially endangered ones; literacy; and translation of the Christian Bible into those languages. Extensive linguistic research and resources are provided by SIL.  The United Nations formally recognizes SIL in a consulting role.


 * An annual award by to a noteworthy conlang, given since 2006.


 * Creator of philosophical language . Toronto-based linguist.  Formerly Sonja Elen Kisa.


 * A parody science journal on linguistics. Scholarly tone; archives suggest it's existed in one form or another since the late 1980s.


 * A 2015 book on conlanging by . About the creative process; doesn't contain exercises.  He also posted a same-named series of videos on YouTube, starting at about the same time.


 * A fantasy novel for children by, published in 1937; now considered classic children's literature. Contains an undercurrent of linguistic appreciation and insight, and some quotable quotes sometimes used in a linguistic or conlinguistic context.


 * An epic fantasy novel by, first published in 1954–1955; one of the best-selling novels of all time (as of this writing, only surpassed by Don Quixote and A Tale of Two Cities). Provides a significant slice of Tolkien's legendarium and conlangs of Middle Earth, which he'd been developing since World War I.  In the successful movie adaptation from 2001–2003, translations into Tolkien's languages were handled by conlanger.


 * Creator of the language in the 1970s for TV show Land of the Lost franchise, and later created a Vampire language for the 1998 movie Blade (but for the sequel Blade II, after her death, her notes on the language could not be found and another linguist was hired).  1923–2000.  UCLA professor of linguistics.


 * Creator of philosophical language . 1913–1981.  Born in Vienna.  In childhood, had vision of beings from space and was told by a psychiatrist to describe visions to other people as dreams or poems; studied linguistics, earned a doctorate in psychology, and created aUI, "the language of space".  His 1968 book on aUI starts with a poem about a visitor from space.


 * A part of the human brain related to understanding language. Located (usually?) toward the back of the dominant hemisphere (which is usually the left hemisphere since most people are right-handed).  See.


 * Character in the Star Wars movie franchise, noted linguistically (though Star Wars has been notoriously thin on linguistic interest) for peculiar word ordering in English that seems to suggest his native language may be.


 * A popular on-line conlanging discussion form maintained by.

Languages and scripts
Most of these are conlangs. Only list natlangs when of particular interest to conlangers (or we'd drown in a sea of them!). Constructed will usually, though not always, be subsumed by their associated languages; see also the remarks on written language in the FAQ, at What's a "Language"?.

List conlangs only when they have gotten some attention in the conlanging community; don't list your own conlangs here (unless they've gained some fame/notoriety in the community). Any conlang that has a or an ISO language code presumably qualifies. Likewise any script with an ISO script code. As a rule, provide ISO codes for constructed languages/scripts, omit for natural ones.

This list is an opportunity to explain how each language fits into the big-picture perspective of conlanging; this high-level view is often difficult to deduce by studying detailed resources about each language (to which this list will usually provide an outgoing link).


 * An artlang created over many years by conlanger . An  language, likely started the trend of ergative conlangs.  Set in a corner of 's fictional world.  Winner of the 2010.


 * A used in Asia Minor (Anatolia) on Crete from roughly 1300–700 BCE.  Historically sometimes called Hittite or Luwian hieroglyphs.  Deciphered.  Displaced by alphabetic script.


 * A philosophical language first published in the 1960s by philologist and psychoanalyst, in which words are built up as sequences of a small set of semantic primes &mdash; 31 single-phoneme morphemes. Billed as "the language of space", the idea being that human corruption is encoded in the vast vocabularies of human languages.  ("aUI" = space mind/spirit sound; space language.)


 * A conlang created by conlanger Carsten Becker starting in 2003, exploring the concept of . Its creator has since written extensively on how Ayeri differs from.


 * A natlang commonly studied by conlangers as a particularly pure example of . Language  spoken in the Basque Country of Spain and France.  ; most verbs only occur in  form with auxiliary verbs showing.


 * An altlang created by conlanger in 1998.  Supposes Latin supplanted the native Celtic language of Ireland; thus Q-Celtic to 's P-Celtic.  Part of.


 * An altlang created by conlanger Andrew Smith in 1996. Considered the classic example of its type, supposes that Latin displaced the native Celtic language of Great Britain, and applies to it the same language transformations that turned Old English into Modern English.  Winner of the 2013 .  ISO language code  .  See also.


 * An developed in southeast Asia circa 1000 CE, still in use for Burmese and several other languages in and near Burma (Myanmar).  About forty glyphs, including .   form began to shun straight lines from around 1600 CE due to use of a writing surface likey to be punctured by a stylus when writing straight lines (palm leaves).


 * A logical language proposed, but never constructed, by, as a formal basis for an imagined calculus of logic. Inspired by.


 * A writing system created by . Within Tolkien's fictional universe, a system of symbols invented by the Sindar (aka gray elves) for their language, .  .  Suitable for carving in hard serives where curves are difficult; Tolkien drew inspiration from  natural scripts.  ISO script code.


 * A used on Crete from roughly 2100–1700 BCE.  Not generally agreed to have been deciphered.  About 700 glyphs.  No ISO script code (at this writing).


 * A developed in the Sumerian civilization circa 3000 BCE, which evolved and continued in use for about three millennia.  One of the oldest scripts.  Number of glyphs varied over time from roughly 1000 to 600.  Specifically developed for use on clay tablets using a blunt wedge; the word cuneiform means wedge-shaped.


 * A logical language constructed for knowledge representation in a long-term research project attempting to produce AI through accumulation of knowledge.


 * A ceremonial language, no longer extant, believed to have been constructed, of some natives of the Gulf of Carpentaria (the big rectangular notch on the north side of the coast of Australia). Notable for some very unusual linguistic features;, otherwise not found outside Africa; only two pronouns, first-person and not-first-person; very small vocabulary of root words; regular adjective-reversing prefix.


 * An artlang created for the 2011 HBO television series Game of Thrones by . See also.


 * A script used in Egypt from roughly 650 BCE to 450 CE.  Derived from .  The term demotic can also refer to the modern Greek language, and to a  Vietnamese script.


 * A used in Egypt (Anatolia) on Crete from roughly 3200 BCE to 400 CE.  One of the oldest scripts; ancestor of most alpahbets now in use.  Started with fewer than a thousand glyphs, eventually grew to about five thousand;, , and  letters.  Modern decipherment due to the.


 * The oldest script, used for Germanic languages at least from the second century CE.  Twenty four runes.


 * A significant genre of fictional conlangs are languages for elves. 's most extensive  family of languages were elvish, especially  and .  The adjectival form elvish, rather than elfin, was an  preference of Tolkien's.


 * An auxlang first created in the late 1800s by ; first published in 1887. The most widely spoken conlang; spoken by possibly as many as two million people, spoken natively by about 1000–2000 people.  Intended to promote peace through communication.  Indo-European; Slavic phonemes, largely Slavic semantics, Roman alphabet, primarily Romance vocabulary.  ISO language code ,.


 * An auxlang created by . The name means Esperanto without inflection, though more precisely it has fewer inflections.  Inspired by .  Harrison called it a dialect of Esperanto, to emphasize it wasn't meant to be a reform of Esperanto such as.


 * A natlang of northern Europe. Related to Estonian, unrelated to the Scandinavian language family.  Heavily influenced 's artlang .  ; ; a fairly large repertory of, notably including a  and an elaborate system of.


 * A script used for Old English and Old Frisian from roughly the fourth century CE.  Evolved from the, also influenced by .  Around forty letters; named fuþorc after the sounds of the first six.


 * An auxlang developed by Ronald Clark and Wendy Ashby, circa 1972–1992, building on . Purely .  Claims to be modeled on Italian with similarities to German.  Has been criticized, though, as a relex of English.


 * A script used in Egypt from roughly 3200 BCE to 650 BCE after which it was supplanted by .  Primarily ink on papyrus.


 * A natlang spoken in Mesopotamia between three and four thousand years ago. The earliest attested Indo-European language.  Deciphered around World War I, providing evidence for the previously abstract hypothesis of  in  (PIE); though some linguists have suggested the ancestor of Hittite may be a sister rather than daughter of PIE.


 * An auxlang created in 1907 as an attempted reform of Esperanto, taking a minority of the Esperanto community with it, in an event known as the schism, or even the Great Schism, from which there are still resentments more than a century later. Ido vocabulary is more Romance.  The Ido community further split over additional reforms.  Ido is estimated to have about 100–200 speakers.  ISO language code ,.


 * An auxiliary language by conlanger Larry Sulky.


 * An auxlang developed by Lancelot Hogben, first published in 1943. Purely .  ISO language code  .  See.


 * An auxlang coauthored by, for communication between, and with, speakers of Slavic languages; circa 2006. Largely based on Old Church Slavonic.


 * A logical philosophical language designed by to express thoughts precisely and very densely.  Winner of the 2008.


 * A group of African languages that, alone amongst extant, use . Grouping originally proposed by . Not related to other languages, not all related to each other either; two of them are.


 * An artlang created in the 1980s for the Star Trek franchise by . Possibly a few dozen fluent speakers; reportedly a couple once taught their son to speak it natively. , , sound inventory very guttural-heavy, deliberately skewed toward a war-like mentality.  No verb to be, a contrarian choice that later presented a challenge when translating "To be or not to be".


 * An engelang created by linguist and science fiction author Suzette Haden Elgin, meant to embody the perceptions of women. Supposes a strong form of the, and that Western languages favor the perceptions of men.


 * A natlang spoken originally by the ancient Romans. Served, in various forms, as a European auxiliary language for about two millennia, through Vulgar Latin, Church Latin, and Neo-Latin.  Ancestor of several major western European languages &mdash; the Romance languages &mdash; through Vulgar Latin.  Heavily inflected.


 * An auxlang created by mathematician, published in the early twentieth century. Simplification of , citing inspiration from remarks of .  The name, Latino sine flexione, means Latin without inflections.


 * Perhaps the earliest known full-blown conlang, created in the twelfth century by . Subject of a 2007 book by.


 * An engelang created by, starting around 1995. As often happens, there was some artistry mixed in, and a few years later Gnoli proposed what's now called the.


 * A logical language developed from the 1950s onward by sociologist Dr. as a tool suitable to test the .  Brown asserted copyright control over aspects of the language, which caused a fork of the project,.


 * A logical language started in 1987 as a fork of by members of Loglan's language community, in reaction to copyright claims on Loglan by its creator.  Initially a  of Loglan.  At this writing, development of Lojban is ongoing.  ISO language code.


 * A pictographic used by the Mayan civilizaiton of Mesoamerica roughly from the third century BCE to the sixteenth century CE.  The only native Mesoamerican script deciphered (as of this writing).  Mixture of  and ; the syllable notation focuses on vowels.  Numerals using base twenty, with a zero symbol, and 1–19 using a secondary base of five.


 * An artlang created for the 2009 movie Avatar by ., providing an exotic sound manageable by the movie actors.   by ;.


 * A fictional planned language described by in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.  In-story, the language is designed by a totalitarian state to prevent dissident thoughts by making them impossible to express; see.


 * An auxlang created by linguist, first published in 1928. Jespersen split off from the  movement.  German and Romance roots.  ISO language code.


 * A -like script used for early Irish languages starting from perhaps the fourth century CE, or earlier. Originally twenty letters in four groups of five; later another set of five were added.  Characters are attached to a continuous line, allowing rather arbitrary writing directions.  It's been suggested ogham may have been an encoding of another alpahbet, though which other alphabet is no agreed upon.  Used in neo-paganism mainly for divination.


 * An artlang created in the 1970s for children's TV show Land of the Lost by . About three hundred words; spoken within the story world by a race of primitive humanoids.  Meant to be potentially educational, simple enough for kids to learn.


 * A natlang spoken by the Pirahã tribe (estimated 250–400 speakers) in the Amazon rain forest, studied since the late 1970s by linguist, with notoriously peculiar features. According to Everett, the associated culture has no art or storytelling, and the language no vocabulary for number or time, and no verb tense, very few  and can also be whistled.  The pronoun system seems to be borrowed from an unrelated language.  Everett, who started the study under the auspices of  using  methodology, after studying the Pirahã became an atheist and opponent of the  hypothesis.


 * Created by as a common ancestor for his elvish languages.  See ;,.


 * Reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Easily the most intensively researched proto-language, using the  notably based on classical Greek,, and.


 * An artlang created by . One of the most developed of Tolkien's elvish languages.  Strongly influenced by .  ISO language code  .  Cf..


 * An artlang created by conlanger Henrik Theiling. ; ;.


 * A classification language created in 1904 by . Alternating consonants and vowels progressively narrow meaning.  Supporters included Melvil Dewey, creator of the Dewey Decimal System.


 * A system of written symbols used on Easter Island (aka Rapa Nui; the southeast corner of the Polynesian Triangle, about 2000 miles/3500 kilometres west of South America). In the mid-nineteenth century, diseases and slave raids eliminated almost all the island's population, apparently including the last people who knew how to read rongorongo.  Linguists now disagree on whether or not it is actually  as such.


 * A natlang spoken originally about 1500 BCE in south Asia. Earliest form is called Vedic Sanskrit.  Later form served as a lingua franca in India through to after 1000 CE.  Now used in various liturgical and philosophical tranditions.  See.


 * An auxlang created by conlanger Dana Nutter in 2003. Designed for simplicity with power.


 * An artlang created by . One of the most developed of Tolkien's elvish languages.  Strongly influenced by Welsh.  ISO language code  .  Cf. ;.


 * An auxlang created by François Sudre, from 1827 through a posthumous book in 1866. Words are built from seven phonemes, represented especially by the seven notes of the western musical scale (do through si), with alternate representations including the seven colors of the rainbow.


 * Aka Dutton Speedwords. An auxlang created by Reginald J. G. Dutton, developed over much of the early-to-mid twentieth century with the latest revision published in 1951.  Has been assessed by conlangers as a  of English.


 * An artlang created by Dutch conlanger Rolandt Tweehuysen, starting in the early 1960s. Uses word order to indicate verb tense; resultative case indicates that the referent ceases to exist.  Very large vocabulary, around 25,000 words.


 * το άνευ κλίσι Ελληνικό, Greek without inflections. A conlang created by conlanger Ray Brown around 2010.  Analogous to Giuseppe Peano's .  The idea of a Greek variant on Peano's idea was discussed on the CONLANG mailing list from 2006; Brown's 2010/11 effort used Classical and Koine Greek, avoiding Modern Greek.  Mailing list discussion suggested a fictional background in which Alexander the Great survived to turn west and conquer the Mediterranean, which would make the language a fauxlang; Brown found the historical background constraining, and by late 2010 disavowed it, billing the project an intellectual exercise, thus an engelang.


 * A micronational language created by Robert Ben Madison in 1980 for his micronation Talossa, which he founded in 1979 at the age of 14. Has a mythical history in which it dates back to the Roman Empire.  ISO language code.


 * A logical language inspired by, that took a turn toward the naturalistic. Created by .  Letter "q" in its orthography represents sound // ("ng" in usual English spelling), "tc" represents //, so "Tceqli" is pronounced roughly as "Cheng-Lee" (the basis for a pun on the language's web page).


 * A writing system created by . Within Tolkien's fictional universe, a system of symbols invented by the elf F&euml;anor, designed to be painted with a brush, with the form of each symbol describing features of the represented speech sound.  Can be used to write any spoken language, by choosing a mapping of sound features onto form features (a mode of the tengwar).  ISO script code  .  (An earlier writing system within Tolkien's legendarium, by a different elf, R&uacute;mil, is also sometimes called tengwar.)


 * An artlang created over decades by conlanger, science fiction writer, and professor of English . Well-reputed in the internet conlanging community.  OSV.  A distinctive feature is its Law of Detachability.  Winner of the 2007.


 * A fauxlang created by conlanger Rex May, set in an alternative history where emigrated to the Republic of Texas.


 * An artlang created by conlanger Jim Henry in the 1990s. Spoken by non-humanoid.  Inflections largely carried by articles rather than nouns or verbs.


 * A twenty-first century conlang facilitating Taoist thinking, created by linguist in 2001.  Few words, no inflections at all, uncomplicated meanings, simple grammar.


 * A family of artlangs created for the 2011 HBO television series Game of Thrones by .  Parent language High Valyrian, descendants Astapori Valyrian and Meereenese Valyrian.  See also.


 * A fictional language created by conlanger for a Dungeons & Dragons world, circa 1995.  Borrows from, without resembling, various European natlangs.


 * A conlang created by conlanger, first published in 1991; underwent major changes later. Original billed as an , but continued after its author announced he was no longer developing an IAL.


 * An auxlang created in the later 1800s by German Roman Catholic priest . Most successful auxlang before, which was first published about ten years later.  Vocabulary derived from German roots.  ISO language code  ,.


 * An altlang created by conlanger . Well reputed altlang in the internet conlanging community; blends Vulgar Latin and Slavic features supposing the Romans conquered Poland, as part of.


 * A seventeenth century classification language created by . Planted the idea of this type of philosophical language, later considered amongst others by  and Peter Roget (of Roget's Thesaurus).


 * A purely pictographic conlang created by . A.


 * A twenty-first century philosophical language created by Andrew Nowicki. Two-letter morphemes used in compounds; consecutive vowels mark word boundaries.