Bonus 12: Creating languages for fun and learning (Patreon)

Imagine a language where you only had 2 vowels. Or a language where you used different verb tenses depending on your mood. Or a language with 28 different ways to say thank you. We're on our way to constructing a pretty unusual language. But that's part of the fun of constructing  a language; megalomaniacal control, and the ability to test the established limits of what human languages can do, or construct something that could easily sit alongside existing languages. 

In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren talk about the world of constructed languages, or conlangs. We discuss the variety of functions conlangs have, how the technical process has a lot in common with language documentation, and some of the ways conlangs are being used in linguistics teaching and research. Lauren also shares some exciting conlang news! 

Read the transcript here.

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Different types of conlangs 
• Conlanging documentary 
• In the Land of Invented Languages (Arika Okrent)
• Bad Conlanging Ideas Tumblr
• The Art of Language Invention (David J. Peterson)
• AwkWords 
• Vulgar language generator
• Toki Pona 
• The Language Construction Kit (Mark Rosenfelder)
• Describing Morphosyntax (Thomas Payne)
• Toolbox 
• Teaching Linguistics with Invented Languages panel at the LSA 2017 (PDF)
• David Adger's conlanging course for high schoolers 
• Christine Schreyer Na'vi research and conlangs course
• Simon Kirby language evolution research
• Joey Windsor's Klingon research (PDF) (Gretchen's live-tweeting)
• Gretchen's conlanging course part 1, part 2 
• Read the first chapter of P.M. Freestone's ShadowScent in the 2018 Undiscovered Voices anthology

Thanks to Rob, who suggested that we talk about conlangs!

You can listen to this episode on this page, via the Patreon RSS or download the mp3. A transcript is available for this episode as a Google Doc. Lingthusiasm is also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com or chat to us on the Patreon page.

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic. Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our producer is Claire Gawne and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.