Conversation with a Conlanger
Conlanging, also known as “language invention” — to use the words of David Peterson, the creator of Dothraki — is the art of creating or “constructing” a new language, usually out of thin air, but in many cases (as you will find below) from already existing languages or proto-languages. It is done for many purposes, though in recent times we have encountered it more in entertainment and literature. Those who work in this field are called “conlangers”, and their trade is called “conlanging”. A conlang is a constructed language. Like Esperanto. Like Dothraki and Valaryan. Like Klingon. Like Interslavic.
Interslavic was, like Esperanto, one other language that wasn’t made popular by television. According to Wikipedia, it was created “to facilitate communication between representatives of different Slavic nations, as well as to allow people who do not know any Slavic language to communicate with Slavs.” I had never heard of it until last November, in Olot, Spain, where I had gone to attend a language residency sponsored by Faber and Linguapax, and where I met Jan Van Steenbergen, the co-inventor of the language, and the vice president of the Language Creation Society. I found out that we shared a lot of common interests around language.
I have been fascinated by the idea of language construction for a long time, even if unconsciously so. As kids, we often created codes with which to communicate outside of the comprehension of adults, and sometimes thought of these as languages. But when the movie Avatar was released in 2009, I was blown away to see how Na’vi, a constructed language created by Paul Frommer, seemed as natural as any other language used by the actors in the film. Until then, it had not occurred to me (I had not seen Star Trek or paid much attention to other conlangs like Esperanto) that a constructed language can take on a life of its own either in a movie or outside of a limited space, as the language did much after, with a grammar of its own. Many more conlangs have become successful since then, particularly the afore-mentioned Dothraki from The Game of Thrones series. I had been familiar with conlangs as a student of linguistics, but it was my first time of encountering them in the wild, so to speak.
So, this drew me to Jan (official full name: Johannes Hendrik Van Steenbergen) throughout our stay in Spain. Over eleven days, we talked, shared, laughed, argued, and explored. I have always thought that much of our conversation on conlanging should be recorded. I wanted some part of it to be visible to the larger community of linguists and language enthusiasts, especially upcoming students to whom it might be of value or inspiration or even simply assurance that a career is possible in the most eccentric of linguistic pursuits. But our work and schedule didn’t allow for this to happen. So the following dialogue, which took place over several weeks after our residency, was the best we could do. I am glad to share it with you.
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To a layman, Jan, how would you define conlanging?
“Conlanging” is actually kind of a jargon term I’m not particularly fond of myself. It is short for “creating a constructed language”. In other words: creating the sound system, writing system, grammar and words of an imaginary language.
A while ago, I told a friend of mine, a language engineer, that I met a “conlanger” in Spain, and he had no idea what I was talking about. I realized later that the “con” in the name might have created a wrong impression.
Like I said, I don’t really like the jargon. But indeed, I have also heard people saying that they associate “con” with some kind of fraud!
Nigerian email scam! Lol
More like a “con artist”, I suppose. But then, I’m not a native speaker of English, so that kind of subtleties escape me sometimes…
But don’t worry: when I think of Nigeria, I rather think of you than of email scam!
Ah, thank you! You were telling us in Olot that you got interested in this field as a young child. How did that happen? I assume at this time you didn’t know the name for what you were doing. It was a type of fun exercise?
I remember myself wondering why certain words were X and not Y, because Y sounded better to my taste. Of course, that has little in common with language creation as such, but it is definitely the first time when I did not simply take language for granted as a means of communication, but as something that can be manipulated and even created instead.
You were a precocious child.
Shortly after I had learned how to read, I got fascinated by the “discovery” that other languages existed, and started reading about them. I enjoyed comparing languages! When I was 12 years old, I started learning French and Latin in school, which inspired me to write grammar tables of another Romance language. In a very simplistic manner: since the article is le in French, il in Italian and el in Spanish, my language should of course have al.
You created Arabic!
Hehe, yes, but I wasn’t aware of that at the time!
Anyway, a few years later, I fantasized about a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere West of Ireland, where a whole family of Indo-European languages was spoken. Still nothing elaborate by the way, just a few sketches. My first more developed languages came only when I was about 25 years old.
What was that first language?
At that time had several ideas for a story about a fictional (former) Soviet republic. Or actually two fictional Soviet republics. The stories never came about, but the languages did. One of them was Hattic, a fictional Indo-European language, another one was Vozgian, a fictional North Slavic language. And a few smaller, related languages as well. Looking back at it, it was still an amateurish and somewhat simplistic effort. But I guess every conlanger has to start with something simple.
This is interesting because we once talked about the role of language constructing in literature. In your case, at the time, the impetus for language creation came from the desire to use it in a story. Today, it is in the economic imperative for Hollywood, from Avatar to Game of Thrones. Is the impulse for language creation always related to creative writing/production?
Not at all! In fact, the most elementary impetus is language itself. I think every person has languages that he or she finds particularly pleasing to the ear or eye, and other languages that he or she finds particularly ugly. In other words, just like people can admire nature for its beauty, people can admire language for its beauty as well. And just like nature is an inspiration for artists, so is language.
Let me give you an example. Tolkien is primarily known for “The Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings”. Most people know that he also created languages for his fictional world, Middle Earth. What few people know, however, is that the opposite is true: he created his languages first, then created a fictional world to provide them with a background, and only after that wrote the stories. For Tolkien savoured languages like cookies, his main inspirations were Finnish and Welsh.
Yes, this is true. But what I’m curious about is whether every (or most) language creation efforts are also followed by a desire to create a natural speaking community, whether a fictional one or a real one?
Not necessarily. Languages have been created for a variety of different purposes: to serve as a universal or regional second language, to give more depth to a fictional culture in a book or a film, to serve as a secret or ritual language, to be used for psychological experiments… you name it. But the most common motivation is simply the fun of creating a language as an intellectual exercise or an aesthetic expression. And I am pretty sure that even in the case of many languages that have a fictional culture attached to them, that culture rather serves as a background for the language than vice versa.
How much work goes into constructing a language? In your experience, in any case. If you can tell me what the process is like, that would be great.
That depends very much on the kind of language you are creating, and of course, also on the person. Some people work on one language for their whole life, but there are others who have created dozens of sketches. Likewise, some people write entire grammars on one Monday afternoon, others think for hours about a single word.
My genre in language creation is definitely “a posteriori” languages, i.e. languages that are based on existing languages. In my case: Slavic languages, Romance languages, Indo-European. What that entails is that I never have to think long when coining a word, since there are always input languages where I can take material and manipulate it.
If you are creating an “a priori” language, a language created from scratch, every element is a product of your own imagination. It can be quite difficult to find the best word in such case, but on the other hand, it can go a lot faster as well, since it doesn’t require research. For example, coining a word in Interslavic means checking at least nine dictionaries and establishing the best solution, which can be quite time-consuming.
Tell me a bit about Interslavic and what got you involved in it.
Let me start with the second part of the question. In May 2006 I was contacted by Ondrej Rečnik, who invited me to participate in a project aimed at creating an auxiliary language for Slavs, called Slovianski. At the time, I was mostly interested in languages created for artistic purposes, and I didn’t care much for auxiliary languages at all: I found them neither interesting nor appealing for any other reason. However, I was very interested in Slavic languages, and my own work as a conlanger had always been connected somehow to Slavic, so I agreed anyway.
Initially, I merely thought I’d give some suggestions and then leave. However, it turned out differently. When I joined the Slovianski project, it wasn’t much more than a few sample sentences and a few basic ideas. So I proposed a basic grammar, a simplified version of all the ins and outs of the Slavic languages. Others tried different language types, but ultimately my naturalistic proposal gained the upper hand. In 2011 it was renamed Interslavic.
So what is Interslavic? Well, to put it in one sentence: Interslavic is a language based on material that the Slavic languages have in common, intended to be intelligible for anyone who knows a Slavic language without prior learning. In the beginning, it was mostly an experiment for me: would such a language be possible at all? To my own surprise, it worked better than I had expected, and the language has gained quite a following over the years.
I should perhaps add one thing: it is debatable whether Interslavic can really be considered a constructed language at all. It’s typically one of those things that belong to the grey area between natural and artificial languages.
Because languages eventually come down to the word level, lexicography, I was asking you a while ago about how you arrive at the right word to use in this constructed language, whether the language is intuitive enough such that when someone, completely independent of you, uses it in a different environment, you’d both arrive at the same place. What was your response?
First, I look for the words that are used in the Slavic languages, and also check in how far a speaker of a language that does not have them could understand them anyway. Based on those findings, I reconstruct a Proto-Slavic form and modernize it by applying the sound changes used in Interslavic. Sometimes, it happens that there is no word that is supported by a majority of the Slavic languages. In such case, we’ll just have to make a choice or add several solutions to the dictionary, and just accept that Interslavic may be intelligible for 90%, but not for the full 100%.
These mechanisms are pretty easy to apply, so indeed, others can do the same thing and come to the same results.
With speaking Interslavic, it is a bit different. Most speakers don’t speak Interslavic on a daily basis, and while speaking they don’t have the time to look things up in the dictionary. In spoken dialogues people will often mix Interslavic will elements from their own Slavic languages.
Does having an “artificial” language like this with a natural community of speakers, in essence, who can relate to it easily through their own local cognates helped its growth in the world? Also, do you think the existence of the language with this nature has any social implications for the speakers of Slavic languages in the world, for social cohesion, for instance? We’ve often heard that languages imbued with such noble ambitions.
You know, that’s a very difficult question. Interslavic is a young project: it was started in 2006, and the first years were only about its development and not about its promotion. Our present community of ca. 2000 people is big for a constructed language, but nothing compared to 300 million Slavs. Speaking about “social implications” and “growth in the world” would be presumptuous at this point. Anyway, it’s not our idea that every Slav is going to learn Interslavic as a second language, because that’s not going to happen. We have to be realistic about that. The ideal that world peace can be achieved by means of a language that everybody can speak and understand, was popular in the late 19th and early 20th century, but today we know that this was just a pipe dream. Our ambitions are much more modest, and if I may say so, modern.
To put it simply: our goal is a language that all Slavs can understand. Thing is, Slavs do not really have a common language of communication: most of them speak English poorly or not at all, not even to mention other languages. Which is cumbersome in this era of globalisation, with national borders losing their importance and huge numbers of people travelling the world. Interslavic is basically a toolbox that can be used to reach these people in a language that is definitely more understandable to them than English.
One of the first subjects we discussed, I think it was the first day we spent together at Faber, was Guosa, the proposed ‘interlanguage’ in Nigeria, created by Alex Igbineweka, to be derived from Hausa, Igbo, and Yorùbá. I remember dismissing the effort because of its nature, and because the first time I’d heard about it was in a Linguistics 101 class on how not to create a language. We seem to share the same thoughts on this.
To be honest, I don’t know precisely how Guosa has been created, what languages it is based on precisely, and how these languages are related to each other. I know that Yorùbá and Igbo are related, but I don’t know how mutually understandable they are, nor do I know in how well languages like Yorùbá or Hausa are known among speakers of other languages.
If there would be a constructed language in Nigeria, or in any multilingual environment in need of a ‘unifying’ language, how would you suggest one go about it?
That would depend very much on the kind of environment. In the case of the Slavic languages it’s easy, because they are similar in structure and share both a lot of international vocabulary and vocabulary inherited from Common Slavic. Mind, Interslavic is an example of a zonal auxiliary language, which means that it is intended for speakers of a family of closely related languages. A language for Nigeria, with all its languages from very different language families, would rather be a regional auxiliary language, i.e. based on geographic and not on linguistic proximity.
I don’t believe very much in the idea of a language that is a hybrid of totally unrelated languages. Just try to imagine a language that is a mix of German, Chinese and Swahili: such a language would not be intelligible to anyone who does not speak all three of them, and therefore be pretty useless.
I agree.
Still, that doesn’t really answer the question what idea of idea would be better in such case. The most realistic solution is probably the language of the old colonizer, but I think we agree that’s kind of sad. My take on this would be a language based on the largest languages that are related to each other, like Yorùbá, Igbo, Edo, etc. and try to build some kind of Inter-Niger-Congo. That would not be of much help to the Hausa and the Kanuri speakers, but at least it could be of help for the Southern half of the country, right? And if a language is good enough for one half of the country, it could perhaps become a lingua franca in the other half as well. A situation similar to the position of Hindi in India, I’d say.
How do you think the internet age has affected (positively or negatively) language invention?
Mostly positively, I’m sure. Just imagine: before, say, the year 2000 most conlangers weren’t even aware of the fact that there were others who had been bitten by the same bug. It was a passion that many of them would rather not talk about even to their best friends, as they were afraid people would find them weird. For that reason, languages created for purely aesthetic purposes were extremely rare, or rather, completely unknown. Because of the Internet, many conlangs became known to the world, the first conlang communities came into existence, and conlangers became increasingly less reluctant to talk about it with others, even with non-conlangers. A real coming-out, so to speak. The Internet has made it a lot easier for conlangers to present their work, to communicate with fans and learners, and even to work on a language together. Thus, many languages have their own small group of fans and/or learners.
In the meantime, constructed languages have become a more commonly known and accepted phenomenon, and what is also an important novelty is that they have pretty much become the norm in films; think of Klingon, Na’vi, Dothraki, etc. Today, we simply cannot imagine aliens speaking English anymore, and that is undoubtedly due to the Internet.
A negative aspect is that the conlang community is terribly fragmented nowadays. Only fifteen years ago, practically all conlangers knew each other’s names and were able to tell you a few details about their work. Today, there are more constructed languages and even conlang groups than anyone could count!
We also share a mutual fascination for David J. Peterson, creator of Dothraki who wrote about his work and process in The Art of Language Invention. One of my most memorable contact with his work, other that through his book, was at the Google office in London. I saw a colleague reading a book about Dothraki and I said — the only phrase from the tv series I remember — Valar Moghulis, which means “all men must die!” The response is usually Valar dohieres “all men must serve”, but my colleague responded with something else I’d never heard before, in Valyrian. When I asked her what it meant, she said “I said ‘but I’m not a man!’”. That creativity of the language, which I had then realized had transcended the fictional world of the tv screen, impressed me greatly. How did you meet him and what are the intersections in your work?
The first time I met David in person was during the Fourth Language Creation Conference in Groningen (the Netherlands), in 2011, but we already knew each other for years then. If I recall correctly, I joined the online conlang community somewhere at the beginning of 2002, and David was already there at the time, although I don’t think he had joined very long before me. And like I said, it was a small community were basically everybody knew each other.
Intersections… Hm, that’s a difficult question. I think David is more geared towards a priori conlanging, while for me, a posteriori conlanging is my natural habitat. Besides, because of Interslavic I have become more like an auxlanger, I guess, while David has always been an artlanger pur sang. But ultimately, we are both conlangers, of course, and we appreciate each other’s work.
If you mean “intersection” more literally, then I can tell you that we both participated in the competition organized by the Language Creation Society for creating the Dothraki language in 2009. David won, and actually I am glad he did. Because David is not only a better conlanger than I am, he is also an incredibly friendly, open and communicative person, and an excellent linguist to that. I feel proud to have him as a friend!
Tell me about your work as the VP of the Language Creation Society. What does the organisation do and what is your role in this mission?
The LCS was founded with the purpose of promoting the art and craft of language creation. For a long time, language construction has not been taken seriously as art form. If your 10 years old son came to you with a drawing or a poem, you’d probably be praising him, as any good parent would, but if he’d come to you with a sketch for a language instead, you’d rather think there’s something seriously wrong with him and take him to a psychologist! Our mission is to show the world that there is nothing weird about this expression of creativity, and that a beautifully crafted language is a work of art as good as a painting or a symphony. Thankfully, conlangers are increasingly aware of this, and do no longer feel the need to be secretive or even ashamed about it. The foundation of the LCS, you might say, is just one further step in the “reification” of language construction. There are several things we do to achieve that. We organise a Language Creation Conference every two years, we have a lending library for our members, we offer them free webspace, we publish a journal, we have a board where people who need a constructed language for a book, movie or game can advertise the job, and we sometimes provide legal advice as well. As you already know, the Dothraki language is one of the fruits of our jobs board, but there are many more examples.
My role as a VP is a rather modest one. Whenever our president is unavailable for some reason, I replace him. Sometimes I lead the meetings of our Board of Directors, and I’ve been handling our jobs board. The fact that I had the honour of representing the LCS in Catalonia was not explicitly related to my job as a VP.
Let me ask about our time in Catalonia, which I remember with such fondness. What would you say is the most memorable thing you took away from the residency?
Wow, Kólá, that’s a hard question! There are so many things that I remember with fondness, and I wouldn’t exaggerate if I told you that I enjoyed every single minute of it. But if you insist, then I’d say our dinners together in Olot.
Now I know that it’s me being interviewed here, but I wouldn’t mind you telling me what your most memorable thing is!
I loved the dinners! I found myself looking forward to it every day. I also remember, because I usually had to talk to my wife before bed, thinking to myself “today’s dinner has to be short because I have to retire early” and realizing many hours later when I got back upstairs that I had failed again. I think each dinner took between two and three hours. We had real substantive conversations about our work, got to know each other, shared ideas and hopes, make fun of each other, and enjoyed great food and great wine. It was always a good way to end the day. I also loved the presentations we did at the Faber office, which was a great way to bond over our different projects. We should certainly do those dinners again someday.
Absolutely! The dinners, the presentations… and let’s not forget Barcelona as well. November 21 was a day I won’t ever forget! I’ll let you in on a little secret: I am not a people’s person at all. Usually, I feel exhausted after talking with other people for an hour. But with you guys I didn’t have that problem at all! It’s remarkable how easily a common passion can make a meeting pleasant and comfortable. You were all great inspirations to me, and somehow managed to really make me feel that the world is makeable.
So, what else are you up to these days and what do you look forward to in this new year?
A lot, I’m afraid. There is, of course, my usual work as a translator and interpreter. Usually, interpreting is what I do during the day, and translating during the evening. For that reason, 80–90 working hours a week is nothing exceptional for me, and sadly, it doesn’t leave me much time for the things that really matter to me. In addition, a lot is going in the Netherlands when it comes to the translating/interpreting business, in short: public procurement and calls for tenders, which basically means that highly skilled professionals will become completely dependent on giant translation agencies whose only purpose is making profits. As a result, many of us won’t even be able to make a living anymore, which will then be compensated by lowering the standards, to that even B2 speakers can become certified translators. Really awful, all this!
I haven’t been able to work much on Interslavic during the last few months, but I hope to find the time to resume my work on that as well. For the rest, we will probably have another conference in the Czech Republic or thereabouts, there will be a Language Creation Conference in Cambridge this year, and who knows what else will come up?
Thank you for your time, Jan. I enjoyed this.
Thank you very much, Kólá, I enjoyed it, too. At some later point, we should talk a bit more about the Yorùbá alphabet, because I’ve been thinking a lot about that after we talked about it, and I have a few funny thoughts!
I’d love that.
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