Khemehekis Conlanger Taxonomy

The Khemehekis Conlanger Taxonomy is a categorization of conlanging styles developed by James Landau (Khemehekis) during the eleventies. Five new types were added in 2022, and seven more were added in 2024. Rather than the Gnoli Triangle, which deals with the type of conlangs someone creates, the Khemehekis Conlanger Taxonomy deals with the number, permanence, simultaneity, and relatedness of the conlangs someone creates.

Loyalists

Loyalists have one conlang, and probably have only ever made one conlang. They've worked on it for years on end, possibly 10 or 15 years. Maybe they started this language in their adolescence and are in their fifties now. The language becomes elaborate, with a large vocabulary and 100-page grammar, and is as finely polished as a crystal skull with the intricacies, quirks and exceptions to rules that have been given time to develop. As a result of sticking with this one conlang, they usually produce a masterpiece that wins the acclaim of other conlangers, and sometimes even non-conlangers.

Scrappers

Scrappers are the serial monogamists of the conlanging world. They'll get a seed of a conlang in their head, develop a preliminary phonology, toy with the aspects of grammar that interest them, create a few words, (possibly) dabble in giving it a conculture, decide they don't like it, scrap it, and start a new one. Lather, rinse, repeat. Scrappers want to stick with a conlang, they really do -- but they'll decide that their first conlang is a mere English cipher, their second unimaginatively knocks off Latin cases, their third is a kitchen sink conlang, that their conlang is too newbish, or simply unworkable, or that they just don't like the phonology, and they'll scrap it and try again. One of their conlangs may have only 33 words of vocabulary as of the time it gets dumped, and their vocabularies will certainly never reach the size of Itlani or Talossan. Often they do not have enough grammar to say "The girl ran smoothly past the gate", or possibly even to say "I love you" as of the time they are scrapped. Scrappers might create 50 or even 300 conlangs in their lifetimes, but as long as they're still scrappers, they'll never produce anything approaching what a loyalist would create in its scale and depth. Like the lady who dates twenty different guys before making one lucky man her husband, scrappers want to settle down one day with one or more great conlangs, and become loyalists or fillers or maybe even circumnavigators. But for now, it's just trial-and-error. They learn a little something from the experience of each conlang they create.

One subtype of scrapper, the flibbertigibbet, wants to create a conlang that satisfies her/his personal sense of aesthetics, but what that sense of aesthetics is keeps changing. One day, a flibbertigibbet will want conlangs that are full of bilabials like /p/ and /b/ and fill his language Bowambap up with them; then a few months later he'll decide guttural sounds are what he likes best, and scrap the way-too-bilabial Bowambap to create Khuhhaqixhigh, which better fits his tastes. Then when he decides the indigenous languages of Mexico have the best phonologies and orthographies, he'll say good-bye to Khuhhaqixhigh and replace it with a conlang called Chuhquiztec.

Fillers

Fillers take a project and fill it up with various languages. This can be a conworld (a country, a planet, a solar system or even a whole galaxy) with diverse peoples speaking many languages amongst them, or some other kind of suite of conlangs, perhaps for an alternative history like Ill Bethisad, or perhaps for working with an array of different real-life Terran cultures or even an array of Terran primate species! If scrappers are the serial monogamists and loyalists are the faithful lovers of conlanging, fillers are the polyamorists. They have many conlangs, often forming conlang phyla with the scale and scope of Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic or Austronesian, with diversity in phonology, syntax and morphology across the different branches and phyla. Since each language has a well-defined role within their broader project, fillers keep all their languages. Some can be more developed than others, even though a filler may create a Swadesh-type list for all of his or her languages, but even the less developed ones will never be deprecated. The final goal of fillers is to finish a suite of interconnected languages.

Perfectionists

Perfectionists have that conlang they've aimed for again and again. They are the gods who create the world, see the world is flawed, destroy it, and try again. A perfectionist's goal is to create the perfect language. Like a scrapper, a perfectionist keeps trying new things, but each sketch is very similar to the previous one, which in turn was similar to the one that came before that one. Each incarnation gets tried under a different (sometimes slightly different) name, but essentially there is one persistent vision in the conlanger's heart. [Thanks to Valosken for suggesting this one.]

Circumnavigators

Circumnavigators have eyes that survey the whole wide world of invented languages. They've created a wide variety of conlangs that they've kept, but not all for the same project. Circumnavigators have created fantasy conlangs, alien conlangs, conlangs for Bronze Age peoples, conlangs for futuristic humans, altlangs, micronational languages, personal languages, and jokelangs. They've likely experimented with engelangs (perhaps both a logical language and a philosophical one) and auxlangs (Euroclones and worldlangs) as well as artlangs. They've created at least one highly original experimental conlang. Circumnavigators have often authored visionary and inspiring material about the art of conlanging and the whole philosophy therebehind.

Freelancers

Freelancers will create conlangs for whoever needs them. They might create a conlang or two for an online collaborative world, then help some friends running an RPG campaign create another conlang, and might even be tapped by movie or TV producers to create a conlang for their fictional world. As they conlang for others, freelancers' conlangs are for different conworlds/projects, yet each have a well-defined purpose, and whether they get scrapped depends on what the people they help eventually choose to do with these conlangs. Freelancers typically have a wide array of glossopoetic tools under their belts, painting from catholic phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, and maybe even orthographic and pragmatic palettes.

Filmstabbers

Filmstabbers are the married lovers who unfaithfully go off and see a tempting mistress as the need arises. Like stabbing a few holes in the film over an entrée to let the heat escape while microwaving it, filmstabbers keep to their main conlang (or suite of related conlangs) while dabbling with other projects just to release the steam. Want to stick with Butzmazian but can't get that polysynthetic click sketch out of your head? Simple. Create a polysynthetic click language called !Xan/aaxhaapatetl, flesh it out over the next few days, scrap !Xan/aaxhaapatetl two weeks later, and keep Butzmazian all along instead of throwing it out with the bathwater.

Replacers

Replacers have a bit of filler in them, and a bit of scrapper. Some replacers are artlangers, each of whose languages has a well-defined role within a conworld, and their eyes are fixed to the same star all the while, but any one particular conlang within their project -- or many particular conlangs -- keeps getting replaced. Similar to TNT'ing an unsalvageable Wikipedia article, a replacer razes the language of the Empire of Samphoria and, after its destruction, erects an entirely new Samphorian language. Unlike with a perfectionist, only the name is the same. Other replacers are auxlangers or engelangers who intend each new language project to completely supersede the previous one.

Sandboxers

Unlike scrappers, sandboxers don't even plan on settling down with their conlanging. Like a kid playing in a sandbox, sandboxers will build castles, canals, and moats, only for them to be blown away or knocked over by the end of the session. They are, as gc12847 put it, "language nerds who make conlangs for fun and rarely develop them fully". Sandboxers conlang because it's fun, and, once they grow tired of a language, they'll scrap it for a new one. Sandboxers scrap not because their conlang is newbish, not because it's unworkable, not because it has a grating phonology or orthography, but because they've grown bored with it. Like scrappers, sandboxers seldom develop a language developed enough to translate 2,000-word texts or hold impromptu conversations in, and certainly they'll never build a lexicon the size of Kankonian's or write a grammar on their language as bulky as Siųa's, but then again, they don't really have any conlang that they put so much heart into as to develop it that far. As language nerds, they normally exhibit most of the traits associated with nerdiness, such as introversion; social anxiety; a taste for role-playing, video games, and comic books; trouble with making conversation about subjects outside their area of interest; the ability to get majorly into an interest; dressing for comfort instead of style; a liking for, and hardline adherence to, rules; and being emotionally reserved. When sandboxers die, they will have nothing to show for their life of conlanging when it comes time to write the obituary, and all their work will soon be forgotten. But that's OK with them, because they aren't doing it for the fame nor for the glory nor for having a project that will outlive them, nor for any serious social or philosophical purpose; they conlang only because they find it fun. Often a sandboxer's conlangs are, like the snowmen that Calvin in Calvin and Hobbes built only to have them melt, an invitation to "contemplate the evanescence of life".

Spawners

Spawners are like the fish and amphibians that spawn thousands of eggs, knowing at least a few of them will hatch, but also knowing that not all of them will grow into fertile adults. Their brains are fecund with ideas for many different conlang projects, and they start them all just to see which of them last. As Molly learns in the children's book Molly's Rosebush, not every bud on the rosebush opens into a rose, and not every egg in a robin's nest hatches into a robin. Some of their conlang ideas will eventually dry up, after which they may be rediscovered and played with anew . . . or rediscovered only to be faced with the realization that the life is no longer there. But others eventually grow into some of the most resplendent roses or mellifluous robins in the entire forest. Spawners innovate many interesting ideas, each of which often gets a separate language to test it as their biggest weakness is their inability to combine multiple ideas into one conlang. [Thanks to Mira for suggesting this one.]

Remappers

Remappers have a lot of filler in them, but they drop some of their conlangs -- not because the conlangs are too newbish or aesthetically unpleasing, nor because they get bored of them, but out of logistical necessity. As a remapper envisions and reënvisions his or her suite of conlangs, the languages he or she will have in that suite come and go. Maybe the dwarves who once populated her whole continent of Zastravia are now confined to the 2,000-square-mile nation of Larydon, so a whole bunch of dwarvish langs need to be scrapped. Or perhaps the remapper had a whole bunch of conlangs descended from Tenuma, but after he changed the whole history of immigration and conquests, he discovers he needs to replace the Tenumaic language family with a Qurqunic language family descended from the theretofore also-ran conlang Qurquni. Maybe it hits her that the nuclear war on the planet Ageplon would have indubitably wiped out the zhmoni, so she can't have zhmoni languages spreading throughout the galaxy after that atomic holocaust. Or perchance he is working with conlangs to experiment with language acquisition in different primate species, and during the development one of the species of primates goes extinct, while they discover that these two types of orangutans are in fact two different species. The best-laid plans of aliens and men go oft awry, and remappers soldier on and keep their options open accordingly.

Paralytics

Paralytics have a small number of conlangs that they've been working on for years; the longevity of a paralytic's conlang often rivals that of a loyalist's conlang. But over the decades, precious little work has been done on their conlang. They read thousands of articles on Wikipedia, articles in academic journals, books about linguistics, and grammars of obscure languages of Brazil and Vanuatu with sundry exotic features, and have thousands of ideas for things they could put into their own conlangs. To their credit, paralytics are careful to avoid creating kitchen sink conlangs, so they think cautiously about how to avoid putting too many features that won't work well together in the same conlang. With all these grammatical features, though, they'll spend decades daydreaming about the possibilities without ever putting anything on paper. As Thomas H. Chappell put it: "I get bored with being frustrated by my hampered progress. Like, for instance, do I mean a picnic-basket, or a laundry-basket, when I say 'hamper'? And is it related, at all, to 'hampster'? And why isn't the /p/ sound in 'hamster' written? And should my conworld even have such questions be relevant to it?" This analysis paralysis prevents them from ever having much to show, and long text translations are out of the question. But maybe, just maybe, after sixty or seventy years of conlanging, the Boltzmann brain may finally come together as all the myriad working pieces of the conlang's phonology, lexicon, and grammar work themselves out and produce something truly grand.

Misplacers

Misplacers want to keep their conlangs; they don't voluntarily scrap them. But they keep losing them anyway. They'll work out phonemic inventories and declension and conjugation paradigms on pieces of paper that they fold up and put in their pants pocket, but they'll forget to take the paper out of the pocket before they ask their mother to wash those pants. Then they'll move house and store the only information on their conlang they have on a floppy disk, only for their little brother to play with magnets around that floppy disk. Or they'll keep their entire body of conlanging work in a flash drive, only for their flash drive to be stolen when they take it to school one day. Misplacers are, without a doubt, the most tragic of the conlanger types, forever wondering what could have been.

Completers

Completers do not abandon conlangs; rather, they complete them. They'll get the seed of a conlang in their head, work out a lexicon of thousands of words, cover all the standard aspects of grammar (including completing all the declension and conjugation tables they'll need to), decide on a conculture, translate some texts, and put their conlang on a shelf as something beautiful to look at. Unlike scrappers or sandboxers, who scrap their conlangs and move on to the next one, completers declare that their conlang is finished . . . and then move on to create another one, which they will also declare complete one day.

Lifestagers

Lifestagers abandon old conlangs and start new ones, but at a much slower, more long-term pace than scrappers. Their conlangs will last for many years, and then be replaced as their life changes. While scrappers typically go through hundreds of conlangs in their lifetime, a lifestager usually goes through somewhere between five and ten conlangs over the course of her/his entire life. A lifestager might have a conlang called Kwalilla that she develops as a child for a race of magical, beautiful unicorns in their land of unicorn princesses, which fulfills her need for fantasy. Then, around the time she starts junior high, she'll leave Kwalilla behind and create Kalethron, a conlang from a land of 100% human princes and princesses, which she and her (straight female) friends will use to talk about cute boys. At 16, she'll start becoming angstier and will drift away from Kalethron, creating an anarchistic, dark conlang called Sakubo, influenced by anime, goth culture, punk culture, and the band Muse. When she moves in with her boyfriend in her late twenties, her conlang will be Béchassaise, a bohemian conlang which she speaks with her boyfriend and other twentysomething couples in her city. Béchassaise will be very reminiscent of avant-garde modern art in its aesthetic and ethic. When she and her boyfriend tie the knot and have children, she'll create Bafamapa, a conlang based on baby talk that she can speak with her whole family. In Bafamapa, the words for "pacifier", "sippy cup", "to change a diaper", "zwieback", "spaghetti", "snack time", and "stuffed animal" will not be missing. Bafamapa will continue to develop and expand its lexicon and grammar as her children grow . . . and then, when her last child has flown the nest, she'll stop speaking Bafamapa with her kids and work on Cebrisha, a very personal conlang with Láadanesquely handcrafted, personal vocabulary. In her eighties, she'll create a conlang called Tasako, with a wabi-sabi sort of aesthetic that reflects the beauty of nature and life, and Tasako will be her conlang until she passes away.

Sparklers

Sparklers are the conlangers who pour their heart and soul, every ounce of their energy into a single project. Every waking moment they can think of nothing else, to the detriment of their studies or career. It may be as narrow as a single personal language or as broad as a whole conworld teeming with history and culture. They're so obsessed that it invades their dreams. They're consumed by this monomania to the point that they accidentally call their dog by one of their character's names.

But just like the refulgent light of a sparkler, their passion burns bright but dies quickly. It may take weeks, it may take a year or two, but sooner or later they'll just wake up one day and be totally uninterested. And if that time has not yet come, they fear that it's almost here, that the project they swore they'd finally stick with just melts away into oblivion like raindrops falling in a river, that for all their time and energy they will have gained nothing. All that remains is a crumbling edifice made of ancient forum posts and files written in some weird program they no longer use, all abandoned and collecting dust, just like every other hobby they picked up, obsessed over, and abandoned. Years later they'll lie awake at three in the morning, staring at the popcorn ceiling of their bedroom and cringe a little at the childish make-believe world they made up in their late thirties as a coping mechanism for their stress. Sparklers often have ADHD, and as such this is a classically ADHD approach to hobbies in general. [Thanks to Lurker for suggesting and describing this one.]

Utilitarians

Much like loyalists, utilitarians have a small number of conlangs – probably only one conlang. However, their conlanging is very utilitarian. There are no quirky irregular verbs and nouns, no imaginative exotic features, no complex rules with plenty of exceptions and counterexceptions, no contronyms, no Grand Master Plan of diachronics. Unlike a loyalist's conlang, which is exotic, elaborate, and personal, a utilitarian's conlang is plain and simple. Rather than finesse and fine-tune the grammar of her/his conlang, a utilitarian will focus more on translating things into it and, well, using it. Since their conlangs are so vanilla and function-over-imagination, utilitarians' conlangs do not generate much acclaim the way loyalists' conlangs do. But a single utilitarian likely has a corpus of more words of translated texts in her/his conlang then ten scrappers, sandboxers, or paralytics put together! A utilitarian is likely, but not always, an auxlanger rather than an artlanger.

Homines fabri

Homines fabri are, first and foremost, the toolmakers of the conlanging community. They might develop word generators, or sound change appliers, or word lists (like the Landau Core Vocabulary), or even programs to help you keep track of your conlang and all the words in it, with its diachronics. With all the work they do developing these tools, however, Homines fabri find very little time to actually, well, conlang. Unlike a paralytic, whose productiveness in conlanging is stymied by having too many ideas they might want to put into one conlang, a Homo faber's productiveness in conlanging is impeded by the fact that she or he is putting all her/his conlanging time to use for this general purpose of conlanging software or documents rather than the purpose of one or multiple specific conlangs. [Thanks to Nel Fie for suggesting this one.]

Ex-cons

Ex-conlangers, or ex-cons for short, are former language inventors. They used to conlang, but now they have either consciously set aside or unconsciously lost interest in the art. Some ex-cons conlanged when they were young, but outgrew it. Perhaps they only had a "magical" language that they spoke with their siblings engaging in their paracosms when they were children. Other ex-cons don't stop conlanging until their fifties or sixties. Some are neurodivergent types whose niche interests change over time and at unpredictable intervals. They decide that they'd rather create Mixolydian music or participate in Renaissance fairs than conlang. Unlike scrappers or sandboxers, who replace the language they've scrapped with a new one, ex-cons stop creating languages altogether. [Thanks to Elemtilas for suggesting this one.]

Nonlangers

Nonlangers are, put quite simply, non-conlangers who hang out with conlangers. Perhaps they are fans of a big-name Internet-based conlang like Verdurian, Itlani, Ithkuil, Brithenig, Teonaht, Alurhsa, or Okuna and have joined the predominantly conlanger-filled Web communities surrounding those languages. Maybe they want to email or PM every conlanger on the Internet and ask them all the eleven basic color words in their respective conlangs. Or perchance they are just academics or graduate students doing research into the mindspace of conlangers, reaching out to conlangers to learn about what makes them tick for their studies. Since huge swaths of the human population find conlanging and conlangs uninteresting or even pathological, conlangers are usually delighted that these nonlangers are bridging over to them and interested in their work, and thus are nonlangers usually welcomed into the online conlanging community.

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