This lesson book is designed to introduce the linguistic concepts needed to design a constructed language (conlang) at a beginner level. The intended audiences for this work are twofold:  1. students in an introductory linguistic class designed around a conlang project and 2. anyone building a beginning conlang. Rather than presenting linguistic concepts in a linear model based on language structures, the book utilizes a spiral curriculum design in which concepts are introduced and reinforced at increasing levels of complexity as the course progresses. The book also rearranges the usual order of approaching language structures from smallest (sounds) to largest (syntax/semantics) to better support the information needed at each stage of conlanging while still providing enough time with foundational concepts that students can succeed in doing more complex language data analysis later in the course.

Originating Course—Nature of Language

This book was designed to be used with a specific course at Idaho State University (ISU): Nature of Language. Nature of Language is an introductory linguistics course that supports students in two programs: Anthropology & Languages and English. The course also supports learners in ISU’s College of Education’s English as a Second Language teacher preparation program. The course also supports one of ISU’s nine general education objectives: Critical Thinking. ISU has nine general education outcomes. General Education Outcome 7 focuses on Critical Thinking. The Nature of Language course is one of the courses used to support learner’s accomplishment of these critical thinking objectives:

Idaho State University General Education Objective 7: Critical Thinking Outcomes

1. i) Formulate/frame problems and analyze how others do so
2. ii) Recognize and apply appropriate practices for analyzing ambiguous problems
   iii) Identify and apply relevant information for problem-solving
   iv)   Create, analyze, and evaluate and/or interpret diverse perspectives and solutions
3. v) Articulate a reasoned framework for drawing conclusions and/or recommending solutions
   vi) Effectively articulate the results of a thinking process

Linguistics is a wonderful subject through to meet these outcomes, as linguistics engages learners in analysis of complex language data. Languages are fairly patterned in their structures and identifying these patterns entails logical deduction and problem solving. Real world language data is complex (read ‘messy’) and often ‘noisy’, meaning there may be information in the data that interferes with readily identifying patterns within the language. Language is also variable and illustrates the diversity of human culture through not only language structures, but also dialects, geographical differences in pronunciation and word/phrase choice, as well as language-related behaviors.

Conlanging (constructing a language) is also a wonderful way to fully engage in an introductory linguistics course. Constructing a language requires much more than just making up some words. Constructing even a beginner conlang requires understanding of how sounds are made by humans, how sounds interact, how writing and signs are related (or not so much) to sounds, how words and phrases are built, and how communities both govern how language gets used (who can saw what to whom and when), and how language reflects specific culture’s ways of engaging with the world.

This course’s specific outcomes are listed below:

ANTH/ENGL/LANG 1107: Nature of Language Course Outcomes

1. Explain the characteristics of global linguistic diversity, including language typologies, orthographies, and variations.
2. Apply key concepts and theories of language acquisition, language change over time, and historical and comparative linguistics to a language you construct.
3. Analyze the relationships between the underlying structures and surface forms of language elements, including sounds, words, phrases, and sentences in making meaning.
4. Construct arguments using linguistic evidence

In addition to being a required course for Anthropology majors and Linguistics minors at Idaho State University, this course fulfills the Idaho State University Gen Ed Objective 7: Critical Thinking and supports achievement of State Board of Education ESL Standard 4, required for Education’s English as a Second Language program students. The outcome alignment map shows the specific sub-outcomes aligned with the course outcomes and how they align with the General Education Objective 7 Outcomes.

ANTH/ENGL/LANG 1107 Course Alignment Map

About This Lesson Book’s (and course’s) Design

To construct a language, learners need to understand first how language and culture interrelate to design their languages. They also need to understand how phrases are built (syntax) before they can start to fully build words (morphology) and put a form to those words that reflects real-life interactions among sounds (phonology). In many ways, then, for conlangers, the usual order of topics of a linguistics course needs reversing. However, learners of linguistics also need to have enough time with introductory concepts to be successful with more complex concepts later in the course. So, for example, while the first consideration in constructing a language (conlanging) is world building, learners will also need to have enough time to study the International Phonetic Alphabet so that they can be prepared for phonological analysis when the time comes.

This lesson book, therefore, orders the content in order a learner would need just in time to build a conlang while still previewing and providing opportunity to learn foundational concepts along the way. Just enough, and not too much, information is provided just when learners need it. This model uses a spiral curriculum approach, approach to teaching, widely attributed to the American Psychologist and Cognitive Theorist Jerome Bruner – learning theory– refers to ”a course of study in which fundamental ideas are repeatedly presented throughout the curriculum, but with deepening levels of difficulty / increasing complexity in lessons and reinforcing previous learning (Main 2022).”

Given this design, the content and activities provide learners and conlangers the information they ‘need to know’ in the order and at the depth they need to build a beginner conlang. While there are many wonderful linguistics textbooks that cover linguistics in far more depth and detail than this work does, and many solid resources for conlangers out there, too, for many learners and conlangers, though, this information can be overwhelming, go into too much depth, and result in confusion rather than accomplishment. Linguistics is a broad, complex, and often challenging subject. Just read some Noam Chomsky if you double the veracity of that statement! This book provides just enough information in an order intuitive to conlanging.

Structure of Each Chapter

Each lesson module is organized as follows

• Text explanations
• Short videos
• Embedded lecture videos
• Self-check quizzes
• Learning Activities for in-class collaborative learning or home-works
• References and Resources for further reading

The learning activities in each chapter are designed to be used either as homework assignments or as in-class collaborative learning activities. Each learning activity includes the following sections:

In addition, building on the spiral curricular design model, the lessons also often preview a concept that will be investigated at much greater depth later in the semester. The lessons ‘tease’ the later content. For example, the lesson on Cherokee Classificatory Verbs focuses on how language structures can reflect worldviews or environmental schema but also previews both how to read an interlinear gloss and the concepts of noun classes (gender in Indo-European languages) and verb agreement, both covered later in the lesson on morphological noun and verb marking.  Similarly, the lesson on Indonesian Syllable Structures teases the concept of reduplication, which is covered in greater depth in a later lesson on morphological processes.

Table of Contents

1. About Conlangs!
   • o What are Conlangs?
   • o History of Conlangs
   • o How does a conlang project support your learning?
   • o Activity: Discussion of Harvard Learning Perception Study
2. What is Language?
   • o Features of Language
   • o Signs and the arbitrary nature of language
   • o Language in use
   • o Language structures
   • o Speaking before Writing
   • o Signing is speaking
   • o Activity: ‘a’ vs. ‘an’—What’s the rule?
3. Where Did Human Language Come from, Anyway?
   • o Features of language
   • o Debate about origins
   • o Non-human animal communication systems
   • o Rethinking the ‘Design Features’ of Language
   • o Activity: identifying language features in non-human language communication
4. What is Language’s Form?
   • o Sound vs. writing
   • o Writing systems, origins, types, and relationship to syllables
     • And material culture!
     • Activity: Tsalagi Transliteration (Cherokee)
   • o Diversity: Dialects and Varieties
5. How do we get started conlanging? World Building

• o Natural langs vs. conlangs
• o Language as reflection of culture, species, geography, and more
• o Activity: Identify your species, geography, and conflict

6. How is language biological?
   • o Sign language and vocal language
   • o Vocal apparatus and sound production
   • o Features of Sounds
   • o Consonants: voicing, place, manner
   • o Vowels and ‘semi-vowels’: manner and closeness (height), fronting, and rounding
   • o Introducing The International Phonetic Alphabet
   • o Activity: Describing & Explaining How to Make Close Sounds (ESL) (English)
   • o Activity: IPA Practice
7. How is language physical (meaning physics)?

• o Sounds and Physics
• o Suprasegmentals: Syllables and Stress (tease phonology)
• o Even stress, Pitch accent and. Tone
• o A ‘note’ on tone—tone types, where tone lives, and the origins of tone
• o Activity: Phonetics—Identifying, Describing, Transcribing, and Syllabifying
• o Activity: Indonesian Reduplication and Syllable Structure

        Conlanging: Project Stage 1

8. How are language and culture related?

• o What is culture?
• o Language and Culture (teasing semantics)
• o Sociolinguistics
• o Pragmatics
• o Deaf culture and sign
• o Activity: Cherokee Classificatory Verbs (introducing interlinear glosses!)

9. How does language vary within and among communities?

• o Language Diversity
• o Language Families
• o Language and Power
  • o Language shift
• o Activity: Mapping American Sign language dialects

10. How does language change over time?

• o Language Birth and Death
• o Nicaraguan language organic genesis
• o Historical Linguistics
• o History of English
• o Activity: “Because Internet” Late Modern English vs. Post Modern English

11. How do people acquire languages?

• o Language acquisition
• o Multilingualism and language ideologies
• o When things go wrong—“feral/abused children” and what we know about language
• o Language and Teaching (ESL)
• o Activity: Language and Power in the SL classroom (English and Spanish) (ESL)
• o Activity: Disney Dialects Analysis

12. Why is it not ‘just semantics’?
    • o Lemmas and Semantic Domains
    • o Metaphor and metonymy
    • o Focal Vocabulary
    • o Activity: Lemma vs. Semantic Domain
13. How do languages organize phrases and words?
    

• o Word Order (interlinear glosses)
• o Phrase construction and headedness (in brief)
• o Interlinear Glosses
• o Activity: Identify the Word Order and Headedness

Conlang Project Stage 2

14. How do we build words?
    
    • o Language Typology
    • o Types of Morphemes—bound vs. free
    • o Morphological Processes
    • o Derivation vs. Inflection
    • o Affixation, Compounding, Reduplication
    • o Activity: Morphology Basics
15. How do we build meaning in verbs and nouns?
    

• o Noun morphology
  • o Case, Number, Noun Class
• o Verb morphology
  • o Number and Class agreement
  • o Tense Aspect Mode
• o Activity: Choctaw Negation, Pronominals, Verb Tense & Aspect, and Case

Conlang Project Stage 3

16. How do we know which sounds are meaningful in a language? (Phonemes)
    • o Phonemes vs. Allophones
    • o Patterns in phonemic analysis
    • o Activity: Identifying patterns: Free Variation, Analogous Environments, or Complementary Distribution
17. How do sounds interact? (Phonology)

• o Phonological processes
  • o And stress!
• o Activity: Working a Data Set: Hindi <p>, <ph>, and <b>

18. How do does what we say differ from what we think we say? (Phonology)
    • o Allophony revisited
    • o Surface layer vs. phonemic layer revisited
    • o Activity: Working a Phonology Data Set: Lots of ‘L’s

Conlang Project Stage 4

18. How do parts of words and sounds interact? (Morphology)

• o Allomorphy
  • o Phonologically conditioned allomorphy
  • o Allomorphy ‘just because’
• o Activity: Identifying patterns in English suffixes

20. How do these interactions impact the surface of language?
    1. Morpho-phonology
    2. Interlinear glosses in depth!

Conlang Project Stage 5

21. Putting it all together: A conlang project for teaching beginning linguistics

On Diversity of Language Data Used

Charity Hudley (2020) call for decolonizing the field of linguistics, noting that linguistics as a discipline largely focuses on European, Australian Aboriginal, or Native American/First Nations language, largely overlooking the Indigenous languages of Africa, Asia, and Siberia. The language data provided in these lessons represent the diversity of languages around the globe, with data sets provided from all continents. Not every language family is represented, however, as that would be impractical. It still may be the case that North American languages are overrepresented in this book, as that is the geographic region of the author’s research. Additionally, Shoshone language data is also highlighted, as the Shoshone language is spoken by the people on whose lands Idaho State University is located. A decided effort, though, has been made to represent the world’s diversity of language structures and cultural language norms.

Data is provided for the following languages, grouped by continental region:

• o North America: Cherokee, Choctaw, Siouan, Navajo, Tohono O’odham, Yaqui, Shoshone, American Sign Language
• o Africa: Swahili, Xhosa, Bantu, Zande
• o Asia: Indonesian (Bahasa), Vietnamese, Mandarin, Arabic
• o Oceania: Guguu Yimithir, Maori, Warlpiri
• o Europe: English, German, French, Spanish, Hebrew
• o South America: Quechua, Guarani, Guarani

About the activities (Language Puzzles)

Davis (2017) notes that linguistic texts often present data in a decontextualized, “extracted” way that fails to acknowledge that these languages are spoken by (usually) living people in real-world communities. The language data provided in activities and in the lesson text are contextualized with information about the language name, family, geographic origins, community(ies) of speakers, approximate number of speakers and language status. Hill (2005) rightly argues that linguistics often use language in describing languages that focus on language shift and loss rather than resilience. Enumerating numbers of speakers can be framed in terms of endangerment or persistence in the face of colonizing forces. I choose to enumerate in contextualizing the language data and do highlight the language status of communities not to frame these communities and their language in terms of deficit, but to raise awareness of mostly English first language student to the impacts of colonization on the world’s language and to focus attention on linguistic diversity.

Each activity is designed to either be assigned as homework or used as an in-class collaborative activity. Each activity consists of the following elements:

• Learning outcomes
• Background for a specific language, including language family, geographical region the language is indigenous to and where it might currently be spoken, number of speakers, and health status of the language.
• Description of the primary linguistic concept the activity introduces or reinforces and any required secondary linguistic concepts.
• Data sets illustrating the linguistic concept.
• A set of questions guiding learners through working/analyzing the data set.
• A final ‘critical thinking’ question designed to facilitate learner metacognition or whole class discussion.

About the Project

Chapter 21—Putting it all together—provides an example semester-long project, divided into stages, that guides the beginning linguistics student or conlanger through the process of developing a skeletal structure of a conlang that can be developed later on their own time by adding vocabulary and additional grammatical structures. The project starts with world building and ends with a short dialog, poem, or story using just a few sentences in their language.  Through the stages of the project, they develop ways their language reflects their people’s culture, a phoneme inventory, syllable structure, rudimentary prosodics, basic vocabulary, primary sentence structure, a set of morphological processes, and a set of phonological processes that result in difference in underlying phonemic structure and surface phonetic realization.