How to Build Your Own Fictional Language

Most people start inventing a language by making up words. That's the wrong first step, and it's why most homemade languages fall apart after about fifty words. Professional conlangers like David J. Peterson start with sounds, then rules, and only then vocabulary.

This guide walks you through the same order the pros use. By the end, you'll have a small language that can grow without breaking.

The Counterintuitive Truth: Start With What Your Language Can't Do

Beginners try to make their language as flexible as possible. Experienced conlangers do the opposite: they start by removing options.

Klingon has no word for "hello" — the usual greeting, nuqneH, literally means "What do you want?" That single missing word tells you more about Klingon culture than a hundred added ones. Limits give a language personality. Every rule you add is a door you close, and closed doors are what make a language feel real.

Step 1: Decide Who Speaks It

Before any sounds, write three sentences about the speakers:

• Where do they live?
• What do they value most?
• What do they talk about all day?

The Dothraki are horse nomads, so Dothraki has many words for horses and riding. The standard greeting, "Hash yer dothrae chek?", literally asks "Do you ride well?" Culture comes first; vocabulary follows.

See how that works in practice with the Dothraki Translator.

Step 2: Choose Your Sounds (Phonology)

Pick an inventory of consonants and vowels. A typical human language has about 20–30 consonants and 5–10 vowels.

Your choices set the mood:

Tolkien modelled Quenya on Finnish and Sindarin on Welsh. Compare them yourself in the Quenya Translator and Sindarin Translator.

Pro tip: also decide which sound combinations are forbidden. If your language never allows two consonants at the start of a word, "stop" becomes impossible — and speakers would borrow it as "sitop" or "estop". That's how real languages behave.

Step 3: Build Syllables

Define what a syllable looks like. Use C for consonant and V for vowel:

Japanese-like:  CV        (ka, to, mi)
English-like:   CCCVCCC   (strengths)
Hawaiian-like:  (C)V      (a, lo, ha)

Simple syllables sound softer. Complex ones sound tougher. Pick one pattern and stick to it — consistency is what your audience will subconsciously notice.

Step 4: Pick a Word Order

Human languages mostly use one of six basic word orders. Roughly speaking, SOV (subject–object–verb, like Japanese) and SVO (like English) cover most languages. The others are much rarer.

• SOV: "I apple eat" (Japanese, Turkish, Latin often)
• SVO: "I eat apple" (English, Mandarin)
• VSO: "Eat I apple" (Welsh, Classical Arabic)
• OVS: "Apple eat I" (Klingon — very rare in real languages)

Choosing a rare order is an instant way to sound foreign. That's exactly why Marc Okrand gave Klingon OVS. Yoda's famous speech pattern leans on object-first sentences too — try it in the Yoda Translator.

Step 5: Make Grammar Do Cultural Work

Here's where your language becomes memorable. Grammar can encode what your speakers care about.

• Evidentiality: Na'vi can mark whether you saw something yourself. Great for a culture that values truth.
• Politeness levels: a caste society might have different verb forms for superiors.
• Grammatical gender: High Valyrian has four "genders" — lunar, solar, terrestrial, and aquatic — rather than masculine and feminine.

We call this grammar as lore: using rules, not words, to tell readers who the speakers are. It's the single biggest difference between amateur and professional conlangs.

Step 6: Create Words With Roots

Don't invent every word from scratch. Create roots and build from them.

Say your root vor means "fire":

• vora — flame
• voren — to burn
• vorath — dragon ("fire-thing")
• vorathi — dragon-rider

Now you have five words for the effort of one, and they all feel related. Tolkien worked this way, which is why Elvish vocabulary feels like it grew naturally over thousands of years.

Aim for about 300–500 core words before writing sentences. Peterson's Dothraki shipped to HBO with about 1,700 words in 2009 — but you don't need that many to start.

Step 7: Add History (Sound Changes)

This is the advanced step, and it's what separates good conlangs from great ones. Real languages change over time. Words erode, sounds merge, meanings drift.

Create an "old" version of your language, then apply a few rules:

1. Final vowels drop: vora → vor
2. th becomes s: vorath → voras
3. Stress moves to the first syllable

Now your "modern" language has irregular words that have a reason for being irregular. Peterson did this for High Valyrian and its descendant dialects in Slaver's Bay. You can see a related effect by comparing the Valyrian Translator with the Old English Translator, which shows real historical English before centuries of sound change.

We call this layered effect invented erosion — deliberately aging a language so its quirks feel earned.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Relexing English. Swapping each English word for a made-up one gives you an English code, not a language. (That's how word-substitution translators like Pirate Speak work — fun, but different.)
• Too many exceptions. Irregularity should come from history, not randomness.
• No writing system plan. Decide early whether your speakers write at all.

Tools and References

• Mark Rosenfelder's The Language Construction Kit is the classic beginner guide.
• David J. Peterson's The Art of Language Invention (2015) covers everything from sounds to scripts.
• The Language Creation Society runs conferences and publishes resources for hobbyists.

Where Hobby Conlanging Is Going

Conlanging used to be a lonely hobby. Now it's a career path: studios hire conlangers for films, games, and streaming series. We predict AI tools will soon handle the repetitive parts — generating word lists from roots, applying sound-change rules — while human creators focus on culture and meaning. The craft will become more accessible, but the decisions in Steps 1 and 5 will stay stubbornly human.

Try Them Yourself

Before you build your own, study how the pros did it:

• Klingon Translator
• Dothraki Translator
• Valyrian Translator
• Quenya Translator
• Sindarin Translator
• Na'vi Translator