"This book is an essential reference on creating words. It's packed with etymologies, ideas on derivation, places you can diverge from English, and fascinating things to think about. Plus it contains the real-world knowledge you need to name everything from colors to elements, from kinship systems to guilds" -- Back cover.

A guide to creating realistic languages for RPGs, fantasy and science fiction, movies or video games, or international communication... or just an unusual way to learn about how languages work.

The sequel to the Language Construction Kit: learn more about constructed languages and about linguistics: logic, pidgins and creoles, sign languages, the linguistic life cycle, and a meaty step-by-step survey of morphosyntax. Create detailed and plausible languages for RPGs, fantasy and science fiction, movies, or video games... or just learn more about how languages work with the same accurate yet fun approach as the original LCK.

Of the 6000 languages now spoken throughout the world around 3000 may become extinct during the next century. This guide gives linguists the tools to describe them, syntactically and grammatically, for future reference.

Jeffrey Henning's Langmaker was a key resource for conlangers in the early 2000s. This book, from Yonagu Books, contains most of his writing for the site: All the issues of his Model Languages newsletter which introduced conlanging and linguistics to newcomers. Reviews of major conlangs that influenced this generation of conlangers, from Tolkien to Edgar Rice Burroughs to Richard Adams. Descriptions of Jeffrey's own languages, including Fith, Dublex, Kali-sise, Tev'Meckian, and Ilish. The material includes an entirely new chapter on case and a new conlang, Denju.In addition, the Conlangs at a Glance section of Langmaker has been reproduced and corrected. This is the listing of 1100 conlangs that were described on the site as of 2005- a wide variety of historical auxlangs, professional languages, and those contributed by readers during the heyday of the site. Your name may be here! "The best thing about Langmaker was its universality. From the beginning, conlanging and the conlang community have been prone to factionalism (cf. the Conlang-Auxlang schism of 1996). Langmaker somehow transcended that. Every conlanger from every conlang community-or from no conlang community-was welcome there, and every conlanger found value in it. It was the Rick's of conlanging." -from the preface by David J. Peterson, creator of Dothraki and author of The Art of Language Invention This book is part of conlanging history. If you've read the Language Construction Kit, it takes a naturalistic approach to conlanging. Jeffrey casts a wider net, being interested in philosophical languages (like his Roxhai), logical languages (such as the fascinating stack-based Fith), and auxlangs (Kali-sisi, Simpenga). And don't miss his playful Tev'Meckian, the language of Galaxy Quest.Though you can seek out much of this material by judicious use of the Wayback Machine, all the material has been edited, errors corrected, phonemes converted to IPA, and extra material included, such as more on how Fith works, and the Tev'Meckian lexicon. The Conlangs at a Glance section was largely rewritten to give more and better information on the languages included.

An accessible but incisive introduction to modern syntax and generative grammar, for conlangers and anyone interested in languages or linguistics. Syntax can be frustrating, because there are multiple schools that seem to fight over inessential things. I hope I can show you that this is normal for a new field, and that it actually makes syntax fun. New discoveries are being made, and you can participate- something that's a lot harder to do in, say, quantum mechanics. The emphasis here is on doing syntax-- learning how to make and how to evaluate syntactic arguments.What's in it? An introduction to the Chomsky Hierarchy, a classification of grammars that's used both in linguistics and computer science, as well as a comparison to other generative techniques, such as Markov text generators. A tour of Chomsky's methods- production rules and transformations- with overnight stays in the Syntactic Structures, X-bar, and Minimalist stages in his thought. A leisurely stroll through interesting bits of syntax: the English verbal complex, pronouns and other anaphors, relative clauses, quantifiers and more. The emphasis is on doing syntax- not just learning rules and drawing trees, but learning how syntactic arguments are made. An overview of alternatives to Chomsky's approach: generative syntax, cognitive linguistics, relational grammars, word grammar, construction grammar, Jackendoff's Simpler Syntax, and Comrie's universals. A chapter on production which asks, how real are these grammars? Do we really have syntactic categories and transformations in the brain, or in the genome? A chapter on how you can apply all this to your conlangs. The Syntactic Bestiary- an annotated list of transformations and constraints, which you can think about for conlanging, or use to evaluate syntactic theories. Plus, unlike most syntax textbooks, this one comes with a set of web toys so you can see the rules in action and write your own. It makes the ideas come alive much more than mere diagrams can.

From language creator David J. Peterson comes a creative gui de to language constructio, offering an overview of language creation, covering its history from Tolkien's creations and Klingon to today's thriving global community of conlangers. He provides the essential tools necessary for inventing and evolving new languages, using examples from a variety of languages including his own creations.