Inventing Languages
A Practical Introduction

Provides an engaging, hands-on introduction to linguistics and language invention, making linguistic typology accessible to a wide audience.

Carolina González (Author)

9781108799416, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 4 December 2025

402 pages
24.4 x 17 x 2.1 cm, 0.64 kg

How are invented languages created? Artificially constructed languages ('conlangs') shed light on how we can apply the universal principles of language to produce whole new languages. Grounded on world building and linguistic typology, this engaging book provides a step-by-step guide to language invention, introducing the basic blocks of language building (such as sounds, morphemes and sentence structure) and demonstrating their use in both natural languages from English to Swahili, and invented languages from Esperanto to Klingon. An original conlang is developed throughout the book to bring the theory to life, accompanied with scaffolded, creative exercises that allow the reader to explore different linguistic options before incorporating them in their own conlang. Making conlanging accessible to readers with little or no background in linguistics, this guide is ideal for linguistics students, creative writers, and readers interested in language and language invention.

Abbreviations
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. What are constructed languages?
2. World building
3. Designing vowel inventories
4. Designing consonant inventories
5. From sounds to syllables
6. Stress and tone
7. The lexicon
8. The morphology of nouns
9. The morphology of verbs
10. Word order
11. Statements, questions and commands
12. Negation and evidentials
13. Complex sentences
14. Writing systems
15. Semantics and pragmatics
16. Variation in space and time
17. Language channels and modalities
18. Wrapping up and moving forward
Appendix A: natlangs mentioned
Appendix B: conlangs mentioned.

Subject Areas: Linguistics [CF]