10 steps to build your own conlang

Building a constructed language — a conlang — is part linguistics, part worldbuilding, part puzzle. Tolkien invented Sindarin and Quenya before he wrote a single page of The Lord of the Rings. Marc Okrand built Klingon for Star Trek III. David J. Peterson took George R. R. Martin’s ~30-word sketch and turned it into the full Dothraki language for Game of Thrones. You don’t need a Hollywood budget to do the same. What follows is a 10-step playbook for designing your own conlang from scratch — complete with examples from real conlangs you can study along the way. New to the idea? Start with our short primer: What is a conlang?

Step 1: Determine the Purpose and Scope

Every good conlang starts with a clear answer to why am I building this? A language built for a single sci-fi villain race needs to feel alien but only really needs a few hundred words. A language meant to be actually spoken by humans (an auxlang) needs to be learnable in months, not years.

Ask yourself:

• Is it for personal use, a fictional world, or for real people to communicate in?
• Will it be spoken, written, signed — or all three?
• Should it feel familiar (like Esperanto’s Romance roots) or alien (like Klingon’s ejectives)?
• How big is the vocabulary you actually need? 200 words for a short film? 5,000 for a novel?

Examples: Esperanto was designed by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887 as an international auxiliary language — deliberately simple. Toki Pona was built by Sonja Lang in 2001 as a thought experiment: can 120 words express modern life? Klingon was commissioned to sound like an alien warrior race would plausibly speak. Three completely different goals, three completely different design choices.

Step 2: Phonetics and Phonology

Decide what your language sounds like. The International Phonetic Alphabet gives you a menu of every sound humans can produce; pick the consonants and vowels that fit your aesthetic. Then write phonotactic rules: which sounds can sit next to each other, which can start a syllable, which can end one. Phonotactics are why “strengths” works in English but “ngmtps” doesn’t.

Examples: Toki Pona uses only 14 phonemes — all of them statistically common across world languages, so anyone can pronounce them. Klingon goes the opposite direction: uvular q, the affricate tlh, and a glottal stop give it that throat-clearing alien quality. Sindarin borrows the soft l, trilled r, and consonant mutations of Welsh, which is exactly why it sounds “Elvish” to English ears.

Step 3: Grammar

Now pick the engine. Languages fall on a spectrum of how they package meaning into words:

• Isolating — few or no affixes; meaning lives in word order and small particles. Mandarin Chinese is the classic example.
• Synthetic / fusional — one ending packs several meanings at once. Latin amabam = “I was loving” in a single word.
• Agglutinative — one affix, one meaning, stacked like Lego. Turkish ev-ler-im-de = “in my houses”.

Examples: Esperanto is mostly agglutinative and ruthlessly regular — every noun ends in -o, every adjective in -a, every present-tense verb in -as. Klingon is agglutinative with strict prefix-and-suffix slots. Lojban goes even further: its grammar is based on predicate logic, designed to remove ambiguity entirely. Pick the style that matches your purpose from Step 1.

Step 4: Vocabulary

Words come from one of two places. A posteriori conlangs borrow roots from existing languages (Esperanto’s vocabulary is recognisably European). A priori conlangs invent every root from scratch (Klingon, Quenya). Most builders mix the two. Don’t try to write a dictionary on day one — build the 200 most useful words first (Swadesh lists are a good shortcut), then expand.

A useful diagnostic: count how many words your conlang has for the things its speakers care about. English has ~10 useful words for “water”; an Inuit dialect has dozens for snow; Dothraki has 14 words for “horse” because the culture revolves around them. Your vocabulary is your worldbuilding.

Where to start? The Swadesh list is a 207-word inventory of basic concepts (“I”, “water”, “eat”, “big”, “mother”) that linguists use to compare languages. Translate it into your conlang and you have a rock-solid foundation. The 100-word version is a great weekend project; the full 207 will give you everything you need to construct simple sentences and start translating real texts.

Examples: Toki Pona’s 120 words force you to combine ideas creatively (tomo telo = “water-house” = bathroom). Esperanto built up from ~900 root morphemes that combine into tens of thousands of words via regular affixes. Klingon’s ~3,000 invented roots have no relation to any Earth language — on purpose.

Step 5: Syntax and Sentence Structure

Word order is one of the biggest tonal levers you have. The six possible orderings of subject (S), verb (V), and object (O) all exist in real languages, but they’re wildly uneven in frequency:

• SOV (Japanese, Latin, Turkish) — the most common order globally.
• SVO (English, Mandarin, Spanish) — second most common.
• VSO (Welsh, Classical Arabic, Irish) — sounds “poetic” to SVO ears.
• VOS, OVS, OSV — rare and unusual; great for an alien feel.

Examples: Klingon uses OVS, which is why translated Klingon dialogue reads as backwards. Yoda from Star Wars uses OSV (“Patience you must have”) for the same alien effect. Esperanto uses SVO but allows free order for emphasis, marked by case endings on objects (-n). Decide your default order and then decide what counts as “marked” deviation from it.

Step 6: Pragmatics and Discourse

Pragmatics is everything language does beyond the literal meaning of words: politeness, sarcasm, formality, in-group signalling. This is where languages reflect their cultures most clearly.

Examples: Japanese keigo and Korean honorifics encode hierarchy directly into verb endings — you literally cannot speak without declaring your social position. Esperanto deliberately flattened all of this: there is no T/V distinction, no honorifics, one word for “you” (vi) regardless of rank. Toki Pona has no formal register at all — the philosophy assumes honesty and simplicity make politeness redundant. What does your culture value enough to bake into the grammar?

Step 7: Writing System

You have four choices: an alphabet (one letter per sound, like Latin or Cyrillic), a syllabary (one symbol per syllable, like Japanese kana or Cherokee), a logography (one symbol per word or morpheme, like Chinese hanzi), or an abugida (consonant-base with vowel marks, like Devanagari). For a brand-new conlang, most builders default to the Latin alphabet for practicality — you can type it and your readers can read it.

Examples: Klingon has its own script (pIqaD) but is almost always written in Latin transliteration in practice. Tolkien designed Tengwar for his Elvish languages and made it beautiful enough that fans tattoo it. Toki Pona uses Latin script but has a charming optional logography called sitelen pona. If you want your conlang to actually be used, give people a Latin fallback.

Step 8: Build a Cultural Context

A language doesn’t exist in isolation — it reflects the people who speak it. Decide who your speakers are, what they value, and what their environment looks like. This shapes vocabulary (what gets named matters), idioms (what’s metaphorical), and registers (formal vs informal).

Examples: Klingon vocabulary heavily emphasises combat and honour — there is no neutral word for “hello”, only nuqneH (“what do you want?”). Toki Pona’s 120-word vocabulary reflects a minimalist philosophy that mirrors its speakers’ values. Sindarin draws on Welsh phonaesthetics for a specific Celtic-mythological aesthetic. Dothraki has dedicated horse vocabulary because Dothraki are their horses. Even Esperanto’s deliberately culture-neutral design is a cultural statement — it says “no nation owns this language”.

Practical tip: write a one-page culture brief before you write more vocabulary. Climate, kinship structure, taboos, what counts as a polite greeting, what gets cursed, what gets celebrated. Every word you add afterward should answer to that brief.

Step 9: Test and Refine

Use it. The fastest way to find broken grammar is to try to translate something into your conlang and discover you can’t. Translate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 1, the Lord’s Prayer, or the opening of Star Wars. Conlangers have used these as benchmark texts for decades.

Get feedback. Share with the conlanging community — the /r/conlangs subreddit and the Language Creation Society are both active and friendly. Outside ears spot inconsistencies you’ve learned to ignore.

Compare to natural languages. If a feature seems “weird”, check whether a real language already does it. Usually one does. If none do, ask why — that often points to a real cognitive constraint.

Iterate. Peterson has said Dothraki went through dozens of grammar revisions before filming started. Your version-1 grammar is a draft. Expect to throw out and rewrite parts.

Step 10: Spread the Word, Literally

A conlang only really comes alive when other people use it. The classic playbook:

• Build a reference site. A clean grammar reference, a searchable dictionary, and a few sample texts. This is the single highest-leverage thing you can do.
• Join the community. /r/conlangs, the Conlang mailing list, the Language Creation Society conferences (LCC). These are where the next Dothraki gets discovered.
• Make something in the language. Esperanto has a century of original poetry. Toki Pona has songs and YouTube channels. Even jokes count — humour is one of the strongest signs a language is genuinely alive.
• Be patient. Klingon took two decades to grow a serious speaker community.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

After watching hundreds of first-time conlangers, the same handful of mistakes come up over and over. Learn from them:

• Relexing English. A “relex” is when you swap English words for invented ones but keep English grammar, idioms, and word boundaries intact. The result feels less like a new language and more like English in a costume. Force yourself to translate something idiomatic (“it’s raining cats and dogs”) and watch what breaks.
• Designing the writing system before the phonology. If you invent letters first, your sound system gets warped to fit them. Always do sounds, then phonotactics, then script.
• Inconsistent rules. Real languages have exceptions, but your conlang shouldn’t start with them. Get a clean rule system working first; add irregularities later as “historical drift”.
• Building a 50,000-word dictionary before testing a sentence. Vocabulary without grammar is a glossary. Translate one paragraph end-to-end before you keep adding words.
• Never showing it to anyone. Conlangs that stay in a notebook die there. Even posting a single translated sentence on /r/conlangs will surface bugs faster than another month of solo work.

Have Fun

The best conlangs are built by people who enjoy building them. If a step feels like a chore, change it — nobody is grading your phonology. Build the language you want to exist.