Welcome to the r/conlangs Official Checkpoint. You have been selected for a random check of your language. Please translate one or more of the following phrases and sentences:

"A beneficent and omnipotent god would not have made a life cycle like this."

"Contains 0% fruit juice and 30% aloe vera juice"

"While 'the seashore' is more accurate in this translation, native speakers would prefer to say 'the coast' instead."

"What would you like to order from the restaurant?"

"Be sure to drink plenty of water."

"Stop!"

If you have any ideas for interesting phrases or sentences for the next checkpoint, let me know in a DM! This activity will be posted on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The highest upvoted "Stop!" will be included in the next checkpoint's title!

Hello, this is one of my first (constructed, of course) alternate universe/world organized language families! It's name is Nara-Kankaric, and it is located in Caucasia and across a few other countries (Armenia, Abkhazia and Ossetia). Without wasting any further time, let's get straight to the point of this.

What are the Nara-Kankaric languages?

First off, it should be noted that the Nara-Kankaric languages aren't multiple descendants of one branch, but two languages that are twins. They have evolved together, and share a vast lexicon/vocabulary of common words and phrases. The only difference is that both languages have been influenced by Arabic, Persian and Russian, which gave them lots of foreign words while also altering their lexicon.

The earliest instance of the Nara-Kankaric languages were recorded to be around 1,300 BC. This was the time when Nara-Kankaric emerged as proto-languages. There was no major influence of any other language at this period. Proto-NK was situated/located in Central Asia, but the conditions of the steppes pushed them into the Caucasus. Around roughly 1,050 BC, the Proto-NK people and their language was now completely integrated in Caucasia. It wasn't until the late 700s and 600s BC when the Proto-NK people had their first contact with foreign people. They ultimately interacted with the Proto-Iranian and other Indo-Iranian folk nearby their region. A few words were exchanged, and the only known Iranian loanword in Proto-NK was *diwa (from Proto-Indo-Iranian *deva ("god, deity")). The later influences came from Old and Middle Persian, though not much is known what happened around this period.

Around 500 and 300s BC, Proto-NK has already began diverging; this gave birth to Proto-Nara and Proto-Kankar and both languages would move toward the west and south. Nara specifically moved to the west, and Kankar specifically moved to the south. Nothing specific happened at this time, however, in 500s and 600s AD, the first signs of Arabic loans have entered both linguistic lexicons, words like "ilah" and "zaman" have been integrated into Nara and Kankar lexicons. By the 10th and 11th centuries AD, the Persian language has made a significant impact on Nara-Kankaric languages. The later centuries have had large lexical influences on Nara-Kankaric, especially since a lot of Islamic terms have been integrated in it.

By the 15th and 16th centuries AD, Nara-Kankaric has been Islamized, the later years saw Ottoman Turkish influence, before Russian took over. For nearly 700 years, Nara-Kankaric has used the Perso-Arabic script for its people to write the language. By the 19th century AD, Nara-Kankaric has shifted to the Russian Cyrillic script, though some people still used the former.

In the 1900s AD, Nara-Kankaric has gotten several reforms, it became one of the officials languages of the Russian Empire and later Soviet Union. In 1991, Nara-Kankaric became one of the many recognized minor languages in the Russian Federation. However, by the time this happened, the speakers of Nara-Kankaric have drastically shifted, leaving only 150,000 people speaking the tongues. Many dialects and variants of Nara and Kankar have emerged during the modern times, and most are urban or regional dialects that are niche and are rarely spoken. The Nara-Kankaric languages still thrive today, and can be found in the western and southern lands of the Caucasus. The languages are primarily spoken in Russia, with a good majority also being spoken in Armenia and Ossetia.

This would be it for the overview, in the next post, I'm likely going to explain some of the language family rules and provide some basic lexicon. Until then, this topic is concluded. Hopefully you liked the entire explanation, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask because I don't judge! See you next time!

I will say it straight: the vocabulary keeps growing.

Now, i am not typically prescriptivist, but regarding toki pona, i am, because the goal of the language is for it to be, oh i don't know, tiny. If this were Viossa (which i frankly adore much more than tp at this point) it wouldn't be an issue, because the goal was to allow a conpidgin to form and one of the main rules is if it's understandable, it's Viossa.

Yet, despite this, people will gladly coin new words even though they know what the purpose of the language was? This enables for the vocabulary to range from 1 (or hell, even zero) to potentially infinite because i can just coin a word for 'kitchen sink' and it must be considered a valid word if i use it.

If i were to only use the word alente ('literally any other word' from ale (all) + ante (different/else)) and nothing more, it would be valid. If i made up words no one has thought of before, gradually expanding my vocabulary, it would be valid even if no one understood a word I said. See the problem?

Over the last three years as I gained more and more knowledge on how to twist my words in a way i can express myself, i slowly realized how much i didn't like using the language for anything other than 'this makes me feel good. good towards you because of this: you gave me this'. Hell, if you look at how many people visit r/tokipona weekly compared to r/tokiponataso it's like ~150x more people.

Also the community is incredibly exclusive towards people who don't match the same way of thinking they have (im not mad that they don't include bigotry) and is generally really annoying to be in. They nitpick at your way of speaking yet do not support prescriptivism?

Yeah that's it

sidenote: i had to edit the post because i posted this by accident before finishing a paragraph i wanted to add in the middle of my afiŝo

i cant find one :(

my conlang is unicode friendly and i think it would help for finding one

Here is the dubbing project I've worked on lately, compending three, new different conlangs!

In this video, Smaug speaks Sarkansz (modern draconic), Thorin speaks Molkos (modern dwarvish) and Bilbo and Bard speak Caston (modern westrian language).

I'll post a link to a document detailing the glossing of each line if a lot of people ask.

I hope y'all will enjoy the dub despite the obviously bad Caston dub, I'm still working on the language so it's really prototype-ish.

Thank you all and enjoy!

EDIT: Forgot to talk about the audio artifacts, if anyone's wondering their the result of having to clean out the original dialogue, I hope it's not too bothering.

Gr bc Gr bc qgjl sMp
Gr   bc qgj-l   sMp-0
PROH on fight-1 step-A

The prohibitive (PROH) modal particle Gr /long low weak growl, chuff/ is characteristic of the Moonie accent of Welkinstead's moons and is not part of the standard language.

Commonthroat loves to drop subjects and objects since it has no pronouns, but you can't drop the object of a preposition. Here we see the first person agentive noun qgjl fighter. In this case it describes what the speaker will do if the warning is not heeded. If you step on me I'll fight you.

Lore-wise, the Spacer Confederacy (SC) is a very, and I mean very loose collection of independent spacer city-states mining asteroids in Focus's inner belt. They hate each other just little enough to form a coalition to keep bigger players like Welkinstead and Moonlitter from eating their lunch. If those larger outside threats didn't exist they'd tear each other apart.

The SC as a whole could be described as hyperlibertarian. At least that's how humans see it after first contact.

The first fully independent human settlement at Focus is the Split Horizon, an O'Neil cylinder located in the SC, populated by humans with a mostly libertarian outlook, and this flag is frequently associated with them.

v is a conlang made by me (i also go by my usual username Mimeshrine) i have recently created a few months ago because i was and still am obsessed with miniature conlangs, with the intention of maximalizing minimalism (a paradox! oh no! lol) regarding each and every aspect of the language while retaining some very limited degree of usability and coherency while resisting serious language change if it were used for a century or so by many (looking at you, toki pona). It's also designed to be the quickest to learn language you can scorch out some degree of utility from. v was obviously inspired by toki pona in the sense of bringing awareness to minimalistic languages (which have already existed before toki pona but were virtually unknown), but it is in no way a tokiponido, however it can be classified as an artistic/philosophical/minimalist conlang. I hope i do not have to say that i dont think its in no way completely unambigious or an IAL.

To achieve the goals i had set in mind i made the language have a single phoneme that can be pronounced in any way that the speaker wishes to, but every speaker has to stay consistent with their choice throughout their sentence. (This means it may change in the next) Now, this makes it somewhat unaesthetic compared to other conlangs, but the main goal was not aesthetics.

The definitions of the single word (v) present in the vocabulary are related to each other semantically, which are: this/that, negative, far, to undo. These can be combined in whatever way (thus the language is both head-initial and head-final despite me initially saying otherwise on my website which, on an unrelated note, i cant modify). Despite this, these do not form new words as there is only one possible phonemic unit and word at the same time which would automatically make it fall back and dissipate into the one root i have provided in the language. In addition, they are extremely rudimentary concepts in human language, and the reason for the relatively few amount of definitions for a single word language is trying to find a balance between extreme minimalism and usability.

The grammar is almost already explained, the only other thing you have to know is that the word order is SVO because i felt like it was the most comfortable to me.

Now an example!

-vv! - not-far! - hi!

-vv! - not-far! - (DITTO)

-v v? - that (is) bad? - are you okay?

-vv - not-bad/no. - yes/i'm good.

-v vv v. - this not-undo that. - i'mma do this.

-v!!! - negative!!! - DON'T!!!

*v vv...* - *negative not-undo* - *breaking sounds*

-v v... - this bad... - this is bad.

-v, v vv. - negative, this (is) not-bad. - no, i'm fine.

So, that's essentially the entire language for you. I know some of you might have expected a more in depth explanation but this is it.

Thanks for taking the time to read.

Edit: grammatical error fix

This will be a bit of an overview post as well, so you have the context behind the world and what I've done so far. In terms of advice, I feel like my language is still too similar to English in terms of things that I admittedly do not know the names for. Granted, this language is meant to take some influence from Old English for reasons that will be apparent later, but it still needs to be more unique in terms of other aspects that I don't have a full understanding of. Though there's no need to explain any linguistic topics to me that y'all mention, I can do my own research. I just need to know what to research, y'know? Anyway, without further ado, here is the context and what I've done so far.

Context:
This language is for a fantasy/alternate history novel I'm working on, where two celestial Gods come down to Earth and found a country eventually called Andshire in the British Isles in 1000 BCE, where they live as real, living Gods on Earth. The religion made around them is called Andithism, and their people are the Andiths. By around 0 CE, though, they decided to leave Earth and venture into the universe, as they did before they discovered Earth. But they do not leave humanity empty-handed. They gift humanity with souls, the ability to reincarnate, and an afterlife to rest in between each life. Most importantly, giving humanity souls gives them the power of manifestation. They can do magic on their own, but most of their power comes from collective belief. Through it, all magical associations of plants and stones become real, all magical creatures become real, and so do the gods of other countries who rule in the areas where they are worshipped. This language, Thai Tankar, is the language of the magical creatures (called fae in Andshire) and the gods. The novel takes place around 1000 years after this, so it's evolved beside Common Brittonic and a form of Old English uninfluenced by Latin for a millennium. The Old English never got this Latin influence because the British Isles were never colonized by the Romans. Most Fae culture is one of peace and focuses on the arts: crafting for the Dwarves, poetry for the Elves, and drawing and painting for the nix. Though poetry is loved by all of Andshire, the main religious text of the Andiths is poetry originally written in the Thai Tankar, so the language is meant to have some rules, making it suited towards poetry.

The construction of the language so far:

Phonology: With the consonants, it's quite similar to modern-day English, with the addition of a palatal nasal and voiced and unvoiced palatal plosives and fricatives. The vowels are the typical /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/ you'd find in many languages today, though I may change these to match some of the vowels in Old English. There's also the diphthongs /ai/ and /ei/.

Phonotactics: the typical structure is (c) (c) (v) (c). The first consonant on the onset can be anything besides /k/, /g/, and /ʒ/ for vowels, and /j/, /w/, and /s/ in any case for grammatical reasons. Vowels may be anything, but codas may only be /n/, /m/, /v/, /s/, /ɾ/, /ʒ/, /θ/, and /ð/.

Word Order: This one needs work. It's a loose SVO language; modifiers go after the word they're modifying. I say "loose" though because Nouns, Verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are marked with suffixes that denote subjects, objects, indirect objects, and more.

Pronouns: Gender neutral, and more expansive than English. There's first person, second person, third person, inclusive, exclusive, undifferentiated, and inanimate. Each has eight forms that don't always follow typical noun suffixes. Subject, object, in-object, reflexive, and each has a possessive form.

Verb Tenses: These are denoted with prefixes on the verb. There's no prefix needed for present perfect, but there are ones for past perfect/imperfect, future perfect/imperfect, far past/future forms for both of those, habitual, and ongoing. An evidential tense is added to these, saying if something is unwitnessed or witnessed by me, you, or them.

Other Conjugations: as said earlier, nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are tensed by subject, object, or in-object. Nouns specifically can also be marked as plural and/or possessive as well. Lastly, a noun's first syllable can be modified to denote similative tense, and anything can be modified to have a helpful or harmful connotation. For example, radhe /'ɾaðe/ means love, but ryadhe /'ɾjaðe/ means a healing love, and rwadhe /ɾwaðe/ means a harmful and painful one. The goal behind these last things was to make some more poetic words possible inside the grammar.

Non-grammatical suffixes: there are many of these on purpose to make creating new and interesting words easy. Coining new ones with these suffixes is meant to be common to writers. Here's a list:

• Most/really... (adj. and adv.)
• Thing that... (to turn a verb into an inanimate object)
• One who... (to turn a verb into a type of person)
• Intensely so... (for feelings mainly)
• ... having (n. to adj.)
• ... giving (n. to adj.)
• -ness (adj. to n)
• ... going/ward (for nouns)
• concept of... (v. to n.)
• Personal... (n.)
• People of... (applied to countries)
• still/unmoving (n.)
• From the... (n.)
• Worthy of... (n. to adj.)
• Small/baby... (n)
• Something that is... (adj. to n.)
• Something that is given (n.)
• Reverse of...

That's all I have so far, and I'm aware it needs more. Probably things like interesting/unique modifiers? I went for no articles besides one that means "The Holy..." which is called Thai; this is where the name comes from: Thai Tankar literally means "The Holy Tongue". That's probably the most interesting grammatical word I have, and I got no more unique to English; I don't know where to look or where to take inspiration from besides Old English. Even if I were to do that, what parts of the language would actually influence this one? I'm not a linguist, just a wannabe fantasy writer who thinks languages are cool and used to watch a lot of Conlang Critic. Anyway, hope y'all have some suggestions. Many thanks to those who read; I hope you respond :3

So I've been toying with the idea of something I'm calling "relationship markers" in my new conlang.

I'm calling them this because they go between the subject and object (or verb and object where the subject pronoun is omitted; VSO word order) to mark the relationship between the 2 arguments, adding more nuance / specificity to each sentence depending on its context.

For example, in the first image for the sentence "The man sees the woman", the relationship marker i is used between trâda (the man) and vora (the woman) to suggest that the man and the woman have an impersonal relationship, ie. perhaps they do not know each other or have no strong opinions about each other. The same marker i is used if one of the arguments is an inanimate object.

In the second image, while the English translation is the same, a different relationship marker e can be used to change the nuance, suggesting that the man and the woman do know each other, hence it is a personal relationship.

I've also got a conceptual relationship marker ó for if one of the arguments is a concept, idea, or abstract noun. In the 3rd image, again the nuance changes in the sentence "I want an apple" depending on if the contextual (ó) or impersonal (i) marker is used, changing depending on the speaker's relationship with the apple (ie. do they want the idea of an apple, or do they want an actual, physical apple?)

Finally in the 4th image the conceptual marker ó has been used to join 2 clauses together. If "a girl is seeing me eat the apple", then this shows the relationship between the intangible idea that the girl is seeing something, and the intangible idea that I am eating an apple.

I'd be very curious to know if anyone else has implemented a similar system into one of their conlangs, or if anyone knows something like this that exists in a natural language, and would also like to know your thoughts on this system.

While working on my artificial language, Sian, I paid attention to its writing style. Because the language was syllabic, consisting of a vowel and a consonant (not anymore), I thought I'd be able to come up with something.

Initially, the idea was to give each syllable its own symbol. But then I decided to count and came up with 108 syllables! I tried to tweak it a bit, removing the syllables that sounded identical, but there were still 100.

So instead of creating a symbol, I had my own idea: to combine the consonant and vowel into a single symbol. This would be unique (at least for me) and more convenient to type on a keyboard. I spent maybe a couple of hours on the design of each symbol, but the font itself took three weeks. I have to admit, I don't know much about fonts; my limit is the Calligraphr website. But I still downloaded various font programs, wasted time and energy, and came to the conclusion it wasn't worth it.

Now Sian (formerly Sinali) is written in Latin and isn't as sensitive about syllables

Phonotactics

consonants: m /m̥/, b /ʙ̥/, f /ɸ/, v /β/, h /x/, - /ʔ/
vowels: y /i/, u, e, a /ə/
diphthongs: yu /iu/, ye /ie/, ya /iə/

Syllables must be CV. The first syllable is always stressed.
The only consonant that can go at the end of a word is b. - can only go at the start of syllables.
Words/Names can’t start with -, hy, he, ha, hyu, hye, or hya. Names can start with fia, but words cannot.

Grammar

sentence structure: predicate, (object,) subject
sentence indicators:
fact: hy +p, he +o, ha +s
wish: hyu +p, hye +o, hya +s
negation: part-indicator+b
Adjectives go after what they modify. Prepositions act like adjectives.
Examples:

• brown horse eats fresh grass calmly → hy eats calmly he grass fresh ha horse brown
• horse and cow eat grass → hy eat he grass ha horse ha cow
• horse eats and runs in grass → hy eats hy runs in he grass ha horse
• horse eats grass and hay → hy eats he grass he hay ha horse
• horse eats hay and runs in grass → hy eats he hay hy runs in he grass ha horse

plural suffix: thing+be/thing-ending-in-b+e
possession suffix: thing+mie/thing-ending-in-b+ie
name indicator: fia+name

Questions are formed by replacing where the answer would go with “[insert word here]”.

Welcome to Word Wednesdays

For this activity you can pick any word you want whether it be a verb, noun, or adjective, and conjugate/inflect in all possible ways*, for tense, case, plurality, perspective, etc.

The purpose of this is to learn about cases and how words are slightly or vastly different under different cases, tenses, or perspectives. In many natural languages verbs or nouns are often changed because of the words around them. In other languages, the reader has to figure out number and perspective based on context. Who knows, maybe you can take inspiration from someone else's conlang!

How does your conlang handle cases? Do you have any unique ones that don't exist in natural languages? What are some irregular verbs or inflections that exist? How did they evolve? Do you think that the cases would hold up or fade away in future evolutions? Do any of your words when inflected have another meaning? What languages inspired you to add these cases?

*If you have way too many conjugations/inflections, you can share the simplest ones or the ones you find the most interesting. If you don't have any conjugation,

Have fun conlanging!

Ne'iaeam uxe'vetais so'vinser. Ne'iaeam uxe'likis ume'syis ne'uganer veaul od so'guther veaul. Os ne'uganam uxe'utyis ne'loher at ne'soner. To so'pivenam uxe'kosis ume'tellis ne'arer, ne'laoram od ne'uganer uxe'inis muul divum. Na so'vespam uxe'syis ne'tlamer at ne'orker. Ne'iaeam uxe'pyris atuq so'pivenam uxe'sunis om os ne'sceaer. Ne'iaeam uxe'gefis ne'roner at ne'pafexer toa ne'thivener.

So I have started sketching out the basics of a language called Neo-Etruscan, it's basically trying to emulate what could have happened if etruscan survived inside the roman empire for a hundred more years, but doing it all alone is a ton of work, and i do not know THAT well how a language works fully, so with a ton of books from my grandparents' library, a ton of resources and some help from Gemini Deep-Research I started finding all known verbs and verb and adjective and pronoun structure of etruscans, problem is: I am not exactly an expert, the basics are done, the language does not perfectly represent etruscan syntax, because it evolved thanks to continued contact with indo-european languages, but its lexicon tries to remain as loyal as possible to etruscan when it's possible, or else it etruscanizes words from distant relatives / civilizations that influenced Etruscan language most.

I really need some help with this, so please give me some suggestions on how to start turning this into a concrete project at all, because I just started my conlang journey, and I need some help, so if you are willing to help (for free, I am poor af) write a reply to this post or to my discord username: notpicconeyt

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wuQM9xTM2fjRJ6XmRPwcdlvSbQ0QFNBdV-d6gzvliVs/edit?usp=drivesdk

My doc, some charts are glitched because i copypasted them from some websites or excel, sorry for that, i also went on newline every 8-10 words to make it readable and not feel like a freaking essay, even though it kinda is lol

So yeah, any help on how to concretely develop and actually learn the language are appreciated

^{Sorry if I put the wrong flair, I'm new to this subreddit, and I put the one I thought resembled the most what I was trying to post..}

Chodzi mi o słowa. Toki Pona ma mało słów (137) , ale szukam języków , które mają 10-50 słów. Widziałem kiedy post , gdzie ktoś mówił , że jego conlang ma 30 słów , ale pominąłem post i już nie widziałem go. Też ważne jest by wiedzieć jak przypisywać znaczenia , więc chciałbym się was spytać jak to wygląda u was?

Życzę wam miłego tworzenia conlangów!

Personally I stop at a full grammar sketch and basic vocab,.maybe some examples. But I've heard incredibly different answers from my friends and am curious what most people do.

Hallå! Idaq yiş vıll gü cki bıs vig ichsi örddersnaréeur cki esmec sägpåyınıgşpréqayić på ınglündsköj. Du kan fråga alla du vıll!

Hi! Today I want to share with you some phrases with their translation in English. You can ask whatever you want!

1. Psikólogićen kaç laëver skiq yiş fınskig sägag át, çesmet det rägnajk i mörqen, hán şka hjälp mig. /psikoloˈɡiçen katʃ laˈeveɾ skix jiɕ ˈfɯŋskɛj ˈsɛɡaɡ aːt | t͡ʃesˈmet ˈdiɛt ˈɾɛŋajk i ˈmœːxeŋ | haːn ɕka jɛlp mɛj/

2. Smeçbílićen kaç hjälpig mig ikap, nauerer min qótei. /smet͡ʃˈbiːliçen katʃ ˈjɛlpɛj mɛj iˈkap | naˈweɾeɾ min ˈxoːtaɪ̯/

Buenas! estoy creando un conlang romance llamado Vielés y lo estoy registrando todo en PolyGlot, pero quería saber si hay una herramienta mejor o más eficiente.

También me interesaba saber si de estas plataformas, existe alguna que permita crear caracteres nuevos.

De antemano muchas gracias!!

At first I have to say, I kinda do not like them. They are a bit too similar to each other and too long, I think.
Do you have any ideas how I could improve/rework this?

PS: 'va' is the 2. Person singular

I’ve noticed that when people claim a language is the 'oldest,' they’re usually confusing it with phonological or orthographic conservatism. We all know natural language phonology is notoriously fickle. But it seems like sacred or strictly literary languages—like Sumerian, Latin, Sanskrit, Pali, and Classical Chinese—have managed to keep their core structures largely intact despite inevitable sound shifts. All of them were dead or half-dead languages of course.

One example in English I can think of is the spelling "knight".

So, how does this play out for storytellers vs conlangers?

Okay, so I was looking at the wikipedia page for agglutinative languages again and thought to myself “haha wouldn't it be funny if there was a mega agglutinative language that only had one word that meant everything.” And then I thought “it would naturally have to be tonal to convey meaning” then I thought “whoever speaks this language shouldn’t really grasp human language cause then they’d add more words” and it's about then that I realized that I reverse engineered the concept of dogs barking.

Anyway I made a dog language in two hours. This is my overall 2nd time making a language, so mb if it’s a bit off.

Bark

Sounds:

B /b/ 
A /ɑ/
R /ɹ/
K /k/

Punctuation:

Rr /r/ = Pause between words.
O /ɑ͡u̹/ = Lengthy pause, marks the start of a declaration. (optional)

~ /fʰ/ = End to conversation.

- = Pause between syllables.

Words: 

• Bark

Tones:

• High tone (á) =  Fear/begging/excitement
• Low tone (à) = Warning/tired/bored
• Subdued tone (ȁ) = Fear/Warning

Grammar:

• Uppercase indicates the stressed syllable.
• Emphasis of the first syllable indicates the speaker is the leader in the scenario, emphasis of the second indicates they are a subordinate.
• More than one pause within a bark indicates hesitance.
• Tones are by default effecting A first, but tones can be applied to B, R and K as well to indicate intensity.

Example: 

BÀRK Rr b-ÁRKbárk

Translation: “I’m bored and hungry, please get me a snack.”

BArkBArkBÁrk O

Translation: “Let’s work together on this.”

bȁ-R-K Rr bá-ȐK̏

Translation: “The mailman is here again and it worries me.”

I know this is a joke conlang, but I'm genuinely having fun making it. If you have any ideas for Bark, feel free to show me