Conlangs are a fun, interesting art-form…

Language. So complex yet so under-appreciated. What better way to appreciate this topic than to create a language yourself! That’s what, for the last 150 years or so, many so called ‘conlangers’ have been doing. Conlanging has its roots, many say, in the international auxiliary language movement in the late 1800s. Esperanto, created by L.L. Zamenhof, under the pseudonym of Doktoro Esperanto, in 1887 now has possibly over 1,000 native speakers, and maybe even 2,000,000 second language speakers. While this depth of reception is an exception to the general rule, conlanging is truly an art-form, with enthusiasts and contributors worldwide. One of my personal favorite conlangs was created by “Sonja Lang” in 2001. It is called Toki Pona, the “language of good” (as it is translated). It is what would be called an oligoisolating language, a (theoretical type of) language in which a small number of morphemes form potentially long, modifier-heavy sentences using an isolating structure. The beauty of Toki Pona comes in the form of its minimalist nature, only having about 123 words in the whole language. If you try to speak it, it forces you to whittle your ideas down to their bare essentials, and get rid of unnecessary fluff in your speech. But Toki Pona is just one (albeit awesome) example of a conlang. There are tons! So go out there, whenever you can, and create a language! Or learn a conlang, that’s fine too! But whatever you do, remember that language is an art!