Conlang terminology

Conlang stands for constructed language, in contrast to natlang for natural language. Other general terms in use for conlangs in the past, but less popular in recent years, include "artificial language" and "model language"; the latter term was popularized by Jeffrey Henning in the mid-1990s, but seems to have fallen out of general use.

Types of conlangs

There are various types of conlang:

• Engineered languages (engelangs /ˈendʒlæŋz/), further subdivided into philosophical languages, logical languages (loglangs) and experimental languages; devised for the purpose of experimentation in logic, philosophy or linguistics. The term was originated in February 2001 by John Cowan and And Rosta.[1]
• Auxiliary languages (auxlangs) — devised for international communication (also IALs, for International Auxiliary Language, or conIALs, constructed international auxiliary languages, by contrast with Latin or other natlangs which have been used as IALs)
• Artistic languages (artlangs) — devised to create aesthetic pleasure or humorous effect

This classification system grew out of discussions on the CONLANG mailing list in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Ray Brown explains it on his web site in terms of the "Gnoli triangle"; many conlangs are not at the vertices of the triangle (pure engelang, auxlang, or artlang) but somewhere along the lines or in the space in the middle.

An older, very basic classification system was applied originally to philosophical languages and auxlangs, but is meaningful for artlangs as well:

• a posteriori conlangs take their vocabulary from one or more natural languages (even if the grammar is very different from those natlangs)
• a priori conlangs have vocabulary whose phonological forms were invented from scratch (even if their grammar is strongly influenced by certain natlangs)

Occasionally one sees these terms used to refer to whether or not a conlang's grammar is based closely on one or more natlangs, but this is not the most standard use. Historically, with the philosophical languages and auxlangs of the late 18th to early 20th centuries, there was probably a close correlation between a prioriness in vocabulary and a prioriness in grammar and semantics; but with the wider variety of conlangs being developed in recent years, this correlation is not as strong.

Alternative classification methods

• Personal language, hermetic language, langue close or heartlang, a language someone creates for personal use; the latter two terms emphasize that they try to become fluent in their language to use it in expressing their private thoughts in a way that natlangs or other conlangs aren't suitable for. Javant Biarujia's Taneraic is probably the most famous such hermetic language; he coined the term langue close by analogy with French maison close. Paul Burgess's mna Vanantha, which he also calls "Hermetic", was recently discussed at length in Sarah L. Higley's Hildegard of Bingen's Unknown Language. The term "heartlang" was coined by Rick Harrison.
• Altlang, a general term for an alternate-history artlang, especially naturalistic diachronically derived artlangs such as:
  • Romlang, a naturalistic artlang derived from Vulgar Latin or Proto-Romance; usually set in an alternate history where the Roman Empire's linguistic influence was stronger in some area than it was in our own history. Andrew Smith's Brithenig is the granddaddy of romlangs.
• Lostlang, a fictional language that is assumed to exist (or once have existed) in a world otherwise the same as our world, being small enough not to make a difference. The term is derived from the League of Lost Languages, which provides a common framework for such languages.
• Fauxlang, a conlang with the design criteria of an auxlang but without the political goals of an auxlang ("the same thing we do every night, Pinky... try to take over the world!"). Some fauxlangs are also altlangs, auxlangs created by a fictional serious auxlanger in an alternate history; e.g. Rex May's Texperanto (created by a Zamenhof who immigrated to the Republic of Texas), and Ray Brown's Ελληνικό άνευ Κλίσι, a Greek-empire-timeline version of Peano's Latine Sine Fleksione.
• Taxonomic languages are usually engelangs, specifically philosophical languages, where the sequence of phonemes in a word specifies the position of the concept it represents in a taxonomic hierarchy; examples are Ro and John Wilkins' Real Character.
• Exolang, a language spoken by fictional nonhuman aliens, especially if it also violates human language universals. Quenya is spoken by fictional nonhumans, but probably wouldn't be called an exolang because it looks like a typical human language. Admired exolangs include Sylvia Sotomayor's Kēlēn and Jeffrey Henning's Fith. This term seems to be most used on the Conlang Relay list; elsewhere "alien language" might be more common.
• Euroclone, a term used primarily on the AUXLANG list but also elsewhere. It is used generally to refer to auxlangs that more or less resemble Western European models. Some use the term for a narrow set of auxlangs like Interlingua; some use it a bit more broadly to include more schematic European-based auxlangs like Esperanto and Ido. The term is pejorative as used by some speakers, particularly those who think an ideal auxlang should be based on worldwide rather than primarily or exclusively European sources.[2] An older usage applied the term to any conlang based on European sources, including e.g. romlangs as well as the aforementioned auxlangs.
• Worldlang, a term primarily used on the AUXLANG list; sometimes to mean an auxlang intended for global use in contrast to one intended for regional (e.g. Europe only) use, more recently used to refer to auxlangs that take their vocabulary from a variety of natlangs of different language families, not just Western European languages.[3] Some users of the term seem to emphasize globally accessible lowest-common denominator phonology and grammar, as well (e.g., CV syllables with a small phoneme inventory; few or no mandatory inflectional categories).
• Hagioglossa or ritlang, terms coined on the CONLANG list but rarely used as yet, a conlang devised for religious or ritual purposes (prayer, meditation, worship, etc.)[4]
• Planlang, occasionally proposed as a synonym of "engelang" but scarcely used in that sense, and also (slightly more often but not very often) used as an abbreviation of "planned language", a common term for auxlangs
• Lablang, occasionally proposed as a synonym of "engelang" but rarely used

Descriptive terms for conlangs

• Sketchlang, a conlang whose grammar or vocabulary or both is very incomplete; perhaps implying that the creator has no intention of fully developing it
• Relex, a term of criticism saying that someone has naively or unreflectively imitated their native language too closely in creating a conlang. Many conlangers' first attempts at conlanging are relexes of their native language on one level or another. Also occasionally called "codes", "cipherlangs" or "nooblangs".
• Kitchen sink conlang[5], a term of criticism saying that someone has thrown in too many features in their conlang without considering how they work together or what the overall ethos of the conlang should be. Sai Emrys doesn't use the term in his Conlang Evaluation essay, but he probably has this kind of thing in mind in saying "Somebody’s been learning new things in Linguistics class again..." Many conlangers' second attempts at conlanging are kitchen sink collections of all the neat features they've been reading about lately and the spiffy phonemes they've just learned to pronounce.
• Maggelity, a term used mostly on the CONLANG mailing list[6] to describe the quality of conlangs with extreme degrees of irregularity even beyond what's found in natlangs; from Christophe Grandsire's conlang Maggel and its baroque orthography and grammar[7]. Also adjective forms maggelic, maggelitous, maggelitinous.
• Etabnannery, adj. etabnanneric or etabnannimous: a quality of languages with extremely complex but regular orthography, usually due to retention of archaically phonemic spelling, or spelling that fails to reflect sandhi and other phonological processes.[8]
• ANADEW: Another Natlang Already Did it Even Worse, or Another Natlang Already Did it, Except Worse. The phenomenon of discovering that a weird, supposedly original feature in your conlang already exists in some natural language. Also, "anadewism".[9]

Conlang-exclusive terms

There are some grammatical or typological terms that are used only with respect to conlangs, or have a different sense with respect to conlangs although they originated in standard linguistics:

• Trigger languages have an unusual type of morphosyntactic alignment apparently found only in conlangs. The term, and the way the conlangs work, was apparently inspired by attempts to understand the applicativization systems of Austronesian languages like Tagalog.[10]
• Oligosynthetic languages, where all words are built from a fairly small set of root morphemes, apparently don't exist in the wild but there are a few conlangs of that nature; similarly oligoisolating languages with a restricted set of root words that don't compound but express more complex meanings through phrases, e.g. Toki Pona.
• Correlative is a catch-all term used in Esperanto grammar, and sometimes in describing conlangs whose design was influenced by Esperanto, to refer to demonstratives, interrogative and relative pronouns and adverbs, and (especially if they are morphologically related to the aforementioned particles in a given language, as they are in Esperanto) words such as "someone", "nowhere", "anyhow", etc.
• Self-segregating morphology is a quality some auxlangs and many engelangs have whereby one can always tell at a glance where one morpheme or word leaves off and another begins.
• Verb-drop, a term coined by analogy with "pro-drop", a term for conlangs where the verb can be omitted when it's obvious from the cases or adpositions applied to the nouns in a sentence.