Conlanging is the art of creating fictional languages. Think about Tolkien’s Elvish languages or Klingon in Star Trek.

I’ve been creating fictional languages since early childhood. The first occurrence of a fictional language was about 2nd grade (1995) in a 20-page SF story about a girl who finds a robot hedgehog from outer space in the sandbox of a local playground and travels with him to save their planet from evil box-head robots. The girl had a cat companion which communicated in a „cat language” of random meows and purrs.

Long Wer

The idea of a cat language (and later, culture) persisted over the years with several versions appearing and getting abandoned. All later projects were centered about a story featuring an armadillo escaping from a European zoo and finding home among local feral cats (titled Hia and Mau). Language and culture was integral part of the story since about 4th or 5th grade, and first it was a pseudo-Ancient Egyptian as it was my culture of obsession of the time. I used all the AE material I could access (words and some constructs, mostly) and invented what I couldn’t. The language was quite functional surprisingly, I was able to write brief diary entries in cat hieroglyphs which are mostly still reconstructable. This language was named Long Wer („great language”). The armadillo story reached a long-term peak in its draft length with about 280 pages when I abandoned.

In my teens (2002-2008), the armadillo story and the concept of a cat language survived, but the idea of an Egyptianesque cat language became obsolete as cliché, also I wanted a language more grounded in history. My discovery of Tolkien had a great influence (it was quite underground in my country before the movies) on how systematically I could approach language creation, also this was the time I got regular Internet access and discovered conlanging communities. The local Tolkien community had a great role in sustaining my interests in language creation and the language was revered as an elaborate piece of art, some people greeting me in it or using names. This was the, let’s say „classical” phase of Longwer or Lyonnomaù (Language of cats). The language had retained some of the Egyptianesque roots (in terms of vocab), but was heavily influenced by Tolkien’s aesthetics. It had a big vocabulary of about 1000 words and an elaborate agglutination system with lots of cases and affixes and used a simple, phonemic writing system instead of hieroglyphs.
I put great effort in translating poems internal and external to the fictional world, though I had struggled with putting words into the novel itself. Besides the cat language, I created a rough etymology system centering on historical sound changes and a few draft sister languages of a common mammal language family mostly restricted to a phonetic draft.
The only usable language project besides Longwer was Meyadhew („Voice of Truth” in Longwer), which was the common mammal language of this fictional animal world, inspired by isiZulu. As I felt Longwer is too vanilla, I tried to make it very weird. I put all the consonants I could pronounce, so it had a big inventory of contrasts. It also had a huge noun class system and didn’t have verbs only nouns! Fun thing.

Syiao Méi

Website: https://syiao-mei.hu

I had a few hard years during the recession, and the fictional feline world was abandoned and I could not believe if it matters any more. After a moment of relief in 2014, I re-read my old notes and decided that it still something worth doing, albeit childish for the current taste, so I restarted once again to make it even more mature and realistic.

Biological considerations made it to the culture and language as well, as well as a conscious effort to create an oriental-flavored fictional „shadow culture” which existed besides, but with casual interaction with humankind (the Anthrope, as I chose to translate the cat term), with the contact historically being strongest with Middle and Far Eastern societies. The result was Syiao Méi („traditions of the Brothers and Sisters”, a more old-fashioned term is Syiào Qhānn, „Traditions of the Hunter”), which is a wild fusion of all the middle eastern and ancient languages I know, resembling Chinese, Persian and Arabic the most, with traces of Ancient Egyptian, Sumerian and Akkadian.

The phonology and sound resembles Chinese in that it is tonal and uses a lot of monosyllabic words ending in vowels and diphthongs. A peculiarity is that there are no stops in its phonetic inventory, only fricatives. The grammar is minimalist but complex, somewhere on the edge of flexional and isolating, with a few affixes and a lots of particles (most of them having a normal lexical meaning as well). Syntax is used heavily to differentiate meaning.

Has a multilevel etymology system with 90 old roots describing the whole paleo-cat universe back then when they acquired language skills, and then combining them with a set of affixes or with each other at different stages of the history of the language. Thus about most of the words there is a record the when it appeared in the language and what was its original form, and the changes being logical (mostly, as nothing is regular in nature).

Centra European cats have two writing systems both resembling cuneiform scripts (as cats obviously doesn’t have very good motor skills, so carving lines on plant surface or sand is the most they can deal with), one called the Older Script is a more elaborate mixed system of logophonetic-syllabic system, used by thousands of generations of scribes who maintained a scholarly tradition originating in ancient Middle East. This tradition was used for religious and scientific purposes and provided a certain privilege to the learned, though ironically they were often non-ferals but free-ranging domestic cats, who had more time without having to sustain themselves. The other writing system, the New Script is a recent invention, derived from the old one, and is a proper syllabary compatible with the current phonotactical state of the local dialect of Syiao Mei (for example, the old one did not have diphtongs, as the script was created for a very archaic stage of the language which wasn’t even the vernacular then, but was preserved in old poetry and ritual text). The New Script was created when a prophet seized power in the 1950s with the help of the scribes, and there was a sudden administrative need for an easier to learn script, then the Old Script was discouraged from everyday use and was only allowed to be taught to selected scholars to enable religious continuity. Think about something like Simplified Chinese and the cultural revolution.

There was no feline government in Europe before the urbanization in the 20th century, because communities were small and migration was easy, but the rise of population because of the emerging practice of feeding cats created considerable tension and violence, which, together with the trauma of the war, created a need for organized government and religion beyond earlier tribal structures.
I suspect there were such systems in Eastern cities, because historically urban cats have huge populations there, so similar ecological and political situations might have arised earlier.

As for the armadillo novel, I restarted it from scratch, wrote about 50k words between 2014 and 16, and restarted once again after a long pause in 2016-19 (partly for personal reasons, I and also I was stuck with the draft which wasn’t yet reaching to my ambitions, as I still had a limited toolbox as a writer and had to go deeper in general).

Secondary conlanging

Besides my own stuff, I was asked by the local Tolkien community to create a usable draft of the Valarin language for a summer camp in 2007, so I put together all my knowledge of Akkadian and Sumerian (I was studying Ancient Middle Eastern languages at the time), read everything on Ardalambion and made a solid basis enough for translating the Curse of Mandos. It was a quite philosophical language with very abstract root words and derivational processes.

In 2018, I created a second Tolkienesque language, the language of the Drúedain, the Tree People for a live RPG camp, and did most of the heavy lifting on culture construction and anthropologic detail of the culture as well, though it was a collaborative work between a handful of people interested.