you can call me Sombra (she/her) I'm in my late 20s, a trans woman and I'm a conlang obsessed nerd (conlang is short for constructed language).
Here is where I'll post about my languages, feel free to ask me anything! I'll tag posts based on which language it's about, may add more languages in the future, we'll see.
#Cwihlur
The language I'm making following Jessie Peterson's #Conlang year 2026 prompts, it's the language of a species of deep-water merfolk who are powerful and feared by humans, and they exist in a world inspired by JRPGS and The Legend of Zelda. Also tagged as #Proto-Abyssal when talking about the proto-language specifically.
#Kxënt'exo
My attempt at making an enchantment table language from Minecraft, I haven't been working on it as much recently but I want to keep adding to it every now and then (more info available here).
#Osrican
An a posteriori east germanic conlang written with the Greek alphabet, it's set in an alternative history setting, currently it's basically abandoned, though I may try to rebuild it almost from scratch at some point, loved the phonoaesthetics, the grammar wasn't great (more info available here).
#Conlang year 2025
A currently abandoned idea for a surrealist personal language spoken by beings in the dream world, I plan to go back to that language eventually but it probably won't be any time soon.
There's also #Conlang year for all conlang year posts regardless of year.
I have a personal website tekseni.bearblog.dev where you can find information regarding my conlangs (and a few other unrelated things).
I also have a website meant to help beginner conlangers learn how to make a language conlang-guide.bearblog.dev if you want to get into language creation but don't know where to start I hope that site is useful! it's kind of abandoned and doesn't have a ton of stuff in it but I wrote a couple of good things in there and I want to add even more stuff in the future.
As I think more about accessibility it's becoming more clear how inaccessible conlanging can be. I wonder what can be done to make things a bit better.
IPA is used everywhere in conlanging but there's no text to speech program that can read it, and there likely won't ever be. I suppose one way to improve this is to encourage people to record themselves pronouncing the conlang text they share online but of course there's some people (like me) who aren't as comfortable doing that. Plus this adds an extra challenge of only being able to make languages you can pronounce, which is not an issue with IPA. Still it's better than nothing though.
Another thing I think about is romanization, cause like, text to speech might not be able to differentiate between <cee> <see> <cea> and <sea> even though those all could represent different syllables. Plus diacritics also don't tend to be treated differently, so <še> and <se> could be read the same.
I imagine this is an issue that might show up in any multilingual content online, I'm sure some screen readers would be able to switch TTS voices between English text and Japanese text, because those are fairly well known languages and the distinction between them in text is incredibly obvious. But when dealing with less known languages I bet a similar issue would pop up with Text to Speech not being able to handle it properly.
And another thing I've been thinking about is image descriptions. I sometimes post IPA tables representing the phonetic inventories of my languages, and I am left wondering if me trying to type the whole table would be particularly useful given the fact TTS can't read IPA. You could describe every phoneme, for example: "The fricative row of the consonant table includes the voiceless and voiced labiodental fricatives, the voiceless and voiced alveolar fricatives..." etc. But then I'm not sure if that'd end up being entirely too long to be helpful or if it would be particularly useful.
In that last case I also feel like the solution would once again be audio explaining the phonology of the language and going over every sound. I think most of these things would be helped by having audio so I guess in this post I'm trying to encourage people to add more audio to their conlang posts. But also I'm wondering if any of you have any thoughts about this, ways to make things more accessible, things to avoid or anything like that.
Okay continuing from where we left off. Once I have the basic idea for my conlang I then define the phonology of the language, that is how it's pronounced, how it sounds.
Just a few quick notes before I show you the phonology I came up with.
1) Something that is done in art generally is borrowing things from real life in order to give a certain impression to the audience. When not done carefully this can be problematic as we can end up accidentally reinforcing stereotypes and caricatures.
So question what makes you think a language sounds "harsh" or "regal" or "delicate". It often comes down to cultural stereotyping and I think it's good to try to build the identity of your language yourself rather than relying on parodying natural languages.
2) Ultimately the sound of a language doesn't really reflect its speakers so it's more or less down to personal preference. Of course u can use symbolism so a character wearing blue can reflect them being sad, so when a language has longer words that can be symbolic in some way, just be thoughtful about it.
3) Delivery also affects how the language is perceived so you can play with that to make things sound a certain way. Try to read lines in a certain voice when showcasing your work. Any language can sound aggressive when growled for example.
In my case I won't think about the way it'd be spoken in terms of like how it's delivered as I never really post clips of me reading any of my conlangs anyway. I imagine there'd be a lot of variety in the speakers so despite being demons not all of them might be aggressive or scary necessarily.
So now for the actual phonology: of course it's subjective and there's different types of beauty but I want to go for something that sounds beautiful to me. I think something rhythmic and soft could work for what I have in mind specifically, something that feels like it flows smoothly.
So how do I approach that? Well I'm adding things like long vowels, geminates, and mora-timing to make it feel a bit more rhythmic. And I'm using lenition and palatalization to make it sound softer. Plus I'm picking sounds I find pleasant.
If you're new to IPA charts and you don't know what you're looking at in the image I have a post explaining how to learn IPA here: https://conlang-guide.bearblog.dev/deep-dives-ipa/ Plus a Wikipedia page with audio clips showcasing what each IPA symbol is meant to sound like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA
To elaborate on my choices: geminates are just long consonants, in some languages the length of time you pronounce a sound matters, like in Italian. Mora-timing is complicated to explain but think of the rhythm and flow Japanese has when spoken, yet another way to put emphasis on timing.
Lenition is when some sounds are pronounced in a "weaker" way in some contexts, think of the way Spanish "b" "d" and "g" are pronounced when they're between vowels. Palatalization shows up everywhere, think of the slender consonants in Irish, or the soft consonants in Slavic languages.
Figuring out the phonology doesn't just mean picking consonants and vowels but also the rules for putting them together. You can make two languages that have the same set of consonants and vowels sound completely different just based off what shapes syllables are allowed to take.
In this case since I have a lot of sounds I'm going for something simple: I'm aiming for a (C)V(C) syllable structure (C stands for consonant and V for vowel). The consonants are in parenthesis because they're optional. This means there won't be lots of consonant clusters.
I will decide the rules for it later but I'm thinking it'll have pitch accent, so the way syllables are emphasized is going to be more dependent on pitch rather than the volume or length of them. The system will be fairly simple as I don't feel like working on something more complex.
As I work on my phonology (and sometimes before I start) I tend to make a bunch of random words to get a feel for the sound I'd like the language to have. So here's some I came up with for this. The rough romanization is to give people who don't know IPA a vague idea of what these words sound like.
That romanization is temporary, I'll make a proper one later. I will say I'm not fully satisfied with this phonology. Often when making any kind of art it takes some fine tuning before I'm happy, so I might make adjustments later. But I wanted to share the authentic process and this is part of it.
And lastly I want to point out that the way I tend to make languages is that I evolve them from a more ancient form. I'll tackle that in the next thread I post but it's important to mention it because sometimes in the process of evolving the language I end up changing a bit of the phonology.
Evolving a language can be complicated and so sometimes to make things easier I end up removing some features or I unexpectedly add things because they seem like they fit. I treat this phonology as a first draft that can be refined later if necessary rather than something set in stone.
Unlike my other langs I'm going to share my whole process for making this one here, on bluesky and on my webbed site conlang-guide.bearblog.dev/guides-make-a-conlang-with-me so if you think that'd be interesting or fun feel free to follow. I'll try to make things beginner friendly.
On my site I'll also focus on explaining things a bit more so it's easier to follow along with me if you want to make your own lang. I will say if you've never made a conlang before following my method won't be super easy, but I figured I'd try to use this as an opportunity to teach ppl abt the hobby anyway.
So let's start with step 0: setting goals.
There's lots of different types of constructed languages, I'll make the most common one: a naturalistic conlang. That means one of the main goals is to emulate the features you see in natural languages such as irregularity, language change, and so on.
Side note: sometimes with naturalistic conlangs the naturalism is the main focus. For me it isn't always, a lot of the time I'm going after aesthetic appeal as well which can be quite subjective. I'm doing that for this one as well, so one of my goals is to make the language beautiful (to me).
Lore-wise this will be the language of demons, and to make things simpler I'm deciding they're quite reclusive, they don't exit from the underworld often.
This won't be set in the same worlds as my other languages. And I actually don't think I'll expand too much on it beyond the relevant areas.
The reason them being reclusive makes things simpler is I won't have to worry about how other languages influence this one, so I don't have to make other complementary langs to borrow vocabulary from. I might make other languages in the future but for now I won't worry about it.
As for the speakers I'm thinking of mostly regular style demons: they're humanoid but they got horns, tails, wings, and maybe some draconic or snake-like features would be cool, like scales in some areas and forked tongues. I should make a sketch or smth to solidify their appearance a bit more.
I'm thinking they'll live for a long time and will be able to use magic that they possess innately, perhaps some form of necromancy would be fitting. The ability to control something like fire also makes sense.
And finally their home. The underworld is in a separate plane from the human realm and while many souls can end up there they're kept secluded, so most demons don't really interact with humans.
The place is desolate, cold, I'm imagining like a massive cave with lots of dark rock, sand and ice.
So I guess I'm going for a slightly less conventional version of hell. There isn't quite a day-night cycle but they got some weather in the form of wind and fog. They have earthquakes and sinkholes.
And there wouldn't be a lot of plants and animals but I imagine you could find a few here and there.
Mostly little bugs I think, given it's not the most hospitable environment I should look into creatures that can survive harsher conditions.
But yeah that seems like a pretty good base to start working on the language proper soon!
I don't always want to share all the info on my conlangs cause most of them feel somewhat private, so I'm thinking of starting a new one with the purpose of it being something I share a lot more transparently on here. I could even walk u thru my process for how I make languages typically.
I'm not sure what kind of idea I want to go for worldbuilding-wise, do y'all have any ideas? I tend to give some sort of worldbuilding quirk to all my langs, like maybe they're spoken by merfolk or maybe it's used for magic, or it's a fanlang or something.
I've been working on my merfolk conlang Cwihlur and I decided to share a bit about it since it's still MerMay! Following the prompts for quothalinguist's ConlangYear (I am way behind) I'm figuring out how possession works in the language, so here it is below the cut
(Note: This is actually how it works in Proto-Abyssal, the ancestor language to Cwihlur, I'll figure out how it evolves later)
The language has two different types of possession: alienable and inalienable, so things get treated differently depending on how inherent your connection to them is.
Inalienable possession is (roughly) for body parts, kinship, things originating from the possessor, attributes, and mental stuff.
*k͡ʘəwix lu luxɑ
merfolk {poss} voice
(merfolk's voice)
*lu is a postposition originally denoting location, think of "the fin at the fish" eventually becoming "the fish's fin".
Alienable possession is for pretty much everything else, things that you can own but can be lost or removed without much difficulty.
*k͡ʘəwix seʀk͡ǁus seʀeq
merfolk harpoon {poss}
(merfolk's harpoon)
*seʀeq is a postposition coming from the word for "thing" so it's marking the harpoon as the object, the property.
The word for thing came from the word for "matter, situation" like in Germanic languages, which in turn came from the nominalized form of the verb "to request" because a request or a question can be a "matter" or a "situation" to be discussed.
I had the option of not marking inalienable possession at all and only using one postposition for alienable possession, but I thought it could be fun to mark both. Once I decided on that I learned that apparently some languages use a difference in word order to make the alienable-inalienable distinction, so I thought of how to incorporate that into my language.
So that's why inalienable possession is marked on the possessor while alienable possession is marked on the possessee. And of course I tried to make sure the word order and etymologies matched with the meanings so it's not arbitrary (plus I consulted the World Lexicon of Grammaticalization, love that book).
One more thing is I decided not to treat the following as possession (grammatically):
location, just because a thing is somewhere doesn't mean it's "of" that place, it's "in" it or "from" it
borrowing, the thing is not theirs, it's "with" them
stuff that hasn't been given, it's not theirs yet it's "for" them
A fun exception to the last one is prophecy, as this is seen as something predetermined, something we know is going to happen, so if someone is prophecized to acquire an item you can say the item is just theirs even if they haven't gotten it yet and no one would bat an eye.
As usual I'm not sure how naturalistic any of this is but it makes sense to me, doesn't seem too out there imo and I'm having fun so that's good enough for me lol
despite making slow progress with my main conlang I've also been wanting to start a new one lol
still unsure what I want it to be, might try another a posteriori one (thinking of maybe returning to my germanic one, not sure tho), maybe I'll try another very fantastical one (a magical language could be fun), maybe something very experimental (an alien language cld be cool, especially if I throw some realism out the window and just get funky with it), I got lots of ideas, we'll see!
with creative things I often find myself wishing I just had unlimited time to explore all my different ideas, there's so many things I wanna create!
oh also I do want to post that Obsidian template I posted about a while ago! I haven't gotten the chance to work on it a lot recently but hopefully it won't be too long until I got it ready
Recently a handful of people have told me that they really like the way I organize my conlang notes, I use Obsidian (a note-taking app) and I picked a theme to make it look like Wiktionary, so if there's any interest I'd like to make a blank template to share for other conlangers to use. (details below the cut!).
As you can see from the screenshots I have pages for words that include IPA, definitions, and even things like tags. These tags are useful for making automatically updating lists, so if I tag a word as "Verb" it will show up in the list of verbs without me having to manually add it.
And there's a "properties" section at the top, it is a bit tedious to fill out the same info that's already in the text into the properties but it allows you to see those properties on the automatically updating lists, as you can see on the third screenshot.
You can even have a list for transitive verbs specifically by either adding a "transitive" tag, or in my case adding a link to the transitive page (trans.) which also doubles as a glossary so I can click on it and it shows me what transitive means (This lends itself well to noun classes imo).
I use templates so if I want to add a new word I can just click on the template for "Proto-Abyssal Noun" or "Proto-Abyssal Verb" and it will give me a page ready for me to add all the info I need to. This feels like a pretty convenient way for me to keep track of things.
One of the main advantages imo is that if you have several languages in the same world you can easily link between them, for example you can add "this is a borrowing from X language's word: Y" and have actual links between the pages, works with Proto-languages as well.
And if you do have several languages it's useful to have a page for each definition, so you can see what a word is in several of your languages at once, like in the first screenshot if you click "sing" you'd see the word for sing in all of my languages (only 1 has a word for sing atm tho).
Now, of course, anyone can learn to set up their own Obsidian vault, it's not that difficult, but I've found a handful of plugins and things that are useful for beginners, so if you need to change the name of a tag or a language you don't have to manually edit hundreds of notes.
And honestly in my opinion the most tedious part is setting the whole thing up, organizing things into folders and making all of the automatically updating lists work properly, so I think it could be a good idea for me to make a blank template with all the folders and everything in place and share that, as well as writing a little guide on useful plugins for updating tags, properties, etc. as well as tips to avoid future headaches down the road, does this sound like something anyone wld be interested in? let me know!
I'm falling a bit behind on Conlang Year but I really wanted to have a name for my merfolk language already, so I spent a few hours thinking about it and experimenting with different forms until I came up with a name, it's Cwihlur [ˈk͡ǀʷi.ɬur] it just means merfolk voice/language so it doesn’t have a super interesting etymology but I like it, I feel like it fits.
So I suppose when I start posting more about conlang year I will tag my posts with the language name, might also tag posts as #Proto-Abyssal if I’m talking specifically about the proto-language.
I'm not going the hard-naturalism route so I just pretend their speech is identical to human speech, I imagine that realistically sound waves would travel differently underwater and they'd need some different anatomy since they'd be using water instead of air to produce sounds, but I didn't really wanna figure out how that'd actually work and I wanna be able to pronounce this language, so they just kinda speak like humans do lol I'm suspending my disbelief for convenience
I'm falling a bit behind on Conlang Year but I really wanted to have a name for my merfolk language already, so I spent a few hours thinking about it and experimenting with different forms until I came up with a name, it's Cwihlur [ˈk͡ǀʷi.ɬur] it just means merfolk voice/language so it doesn’t have a super interesting etymology but I like it, I feel like it fits.
So I suppose when I start posting more about conlang year I will tag my posts with the language name, might also tag posts as #Proto-Abyssal if I’m talking specifically about the proto-language.
I have a conlang question cause I’m having a bit of a hard time finding examples, in languages with animacy-based classes how do names tend to work? if you’re named after something inanimate like a flower do the noun class affixes get switched for animate ones? or just the agreement used with the name.
Cause I’m realizing I’m not sure how to come up with proper nouns for one of my conlangs, normally I’d just pick words or make compounds and whatnot but I feel like noun class might make proper nouns work a bit different than that maybe?
I'm dealing with a very similar problem in Viil. I'm not sure if my solution is realistic at all, but when I want to derive a word by changing the noun class, I usually just switch the noun class marker (diqqat = rice plant → diqqissi = rice (prepared)), except when the original class still plays a role in the derived word, in which case the class marker begins behaving sort of like another root in a compound (an example might be: sariqaq = living person, from sariq = root to do with living + aq = "person" noun class marker, VS sarimmaaq, a home person (whatever that means), from sariq = root to do with living + maa = place noun class marker + aq = person noun class marker).
Regarding given names, all (people's) names in Viil are in the aq class, and the same logic applies.
I have no idea how relevant this was to your question, and I also don't know if this is something natlangs do, but i did what i could :D
oh awesome! thank you, this helps! yeah I think that sounds like a good approach, it makes sense to leave the class markers there when they’re important for the meaning of the word you’re deriving, and in that case it also makes sense to have the person class marker in all names cause you can just add them to whatever word you have
I have a conlang question cause I’m having a bit of a hard time finding examples, in languages with animacy-based classes how do names tend to work? if you’re named after something inanimate like a flower do the noun class affixes get switched for animate ones? or just the agreement used with the name.
Cause I’m realizing I’m not sure how to come up with proper nouns for one of my conlangs, normally I’d just pick words or make compounds and whatnot but I feel like noun class might make proper nouns work a bit different than that maybe?
I might end up getting pretty busy this year as time goes on, so there's a chance I'll fall behind on conlang year, but at the end of the day I could follow all the prompts even if it takes me a bit longer than a year to go thru all of them, and I'm pretty excited about my merfolk language to just abandon it like that, so I wanted to mention it just in case I stop posting updates for a while, might be that I just got busy and I'll come back to the conlang eventually
Conlang Year Day 32 Prompt: Test your sound changes as a package.
Since I'm already very used to writing phonological evolution rules for my languages I did it in a couple of days, even though there were many prompts for exploring different types of sound changes. I wrote the sound changes in order and tested them as I made more, so I finished this prompt a few days ago hehe I got excited and I had enough free time this month so why not.
I don't usually count my sound changes, but I wrote a total of 57 (I wrote it in Lexurgy and some of the sound changes are more complex and go thru a few steps, so depending on how you count it could be a bit more) and while a lot of the words are still fairly similar to their proto-forms I think there's enough of a change for me to be satisfied, plus the final words sound aesthetically pleasing to me, which was one of my goals so I'm happy with this.
SIDE NOTE: this fictional world is inspired by JRPGs so I figured I would include slimes as part of the fauna in this world, I picture the aquatic slimes as being somewhat similar to sea cucumbers, but of course not identical.
I also made a romanization system as you can see in the screenshots, completely ASCII friendly, except you can mark irregular stress with acute accents if you want, but it's not obligatory.
Some changes to the phonology are the introduction of palatal consonants, so we now have [ɲ] ny, [ç] hy and [k͡ǂ] j. We also have dental fricatives [θ] th and [ð] dh, labialized consonants (though they are quite rare) such as [kʷ] kw and [k͡ǀʷ] cw just to give a couple of examples, and a four vowel system with length distinction, [o] is an allophone of /u/ but not a phoneme.
Conlang year update! I finished the initial word making prompts, I usually made more than 5 words per prompt so I ended up with 63 words, I definitely struggled with the weather themed ones considering the speakers of this proto-language live in the deep sea, making vocabulary for such a foreign world is certainly difficult, but other than that I haven't had that much difficulty. Excited to start on the sound changes next!
Conlang Year Day 19 Prompt: Create five proto-forms for body terms.
We're finally making the first few words! I'm very excited! This actually took a few hours to set up because I typically just write words in a spreadsheet but this time I'm using Obsidian to document my language, and I'm trying to make it look like Wiktionary so it's all fancy, the final result looks really good though so the time investment might be worth it.
EDIT: forgot I wanted to schedule this and posted it already, this is tomorrow's prompt, oh well haha what can I say, I got excited.
I actually ended up making 10 words, here they are:
səˈk͡ǃæn̪ - face
ˈʀɨ.pu - arm, hand
el - tentacle
wət̪ - back
ˈjɨ.qɑ - eye
k͡ǁup͡ɸ - head
xil - belly
læs - hair
t͡sem - fin
ˈje.ma - mouth
Of course keep in mind these are merfolk, hence the words like "tentacle" and "fin". Also I decided to name the proto-language "Proto-Abyssal" since these are deepwater merfolk, I think it works well.
In the Obsidian notes I left some bits empty like inflections because I don't know if there's going to be inflections yet, we'll figure it out as we get to that prompt.
Honestly this is very cool and I'm actually considering making an Obsidian vault for my Minecraft conlang, cause then I could upload it somewhere and people would have access to a Wiktionary style database of the language and see where all the loanwords come from and whatnot, but at the same time this takes a lot more work than making a simple spreadsheet like I typically do. For now I will continue documenting my language on Obsidian, I think it works and it's very cool, but I may eventually switch my notes over to a spreadsheet if I feel like it's not working for me, we'll see.
