Conlang Club at UW

Common meeting activities

Our meetings are mostly unstructured, but we have some activities we commonly do each meeting. Feel free to suggest activities for the next meeting, or volunteer to give a lightning talk!

Club conlangs

We often work on conlangs altogether as a whole club, usually centered around a central theme or set of goals. Look at some of our previous club conlangs and see the variety of conlangs we've made!

Lightning talks

Members present a short 10-minute lightning talk about their own conlangs, cool features of real languages, or anything else club-related.

Conlang potluck

We each make up a short sentence using a pre-generated phonology, with each word glossed/annotated with its morphology and meaning. Then, we present them and try to create one language that would make all of those sentences grammatical.

Lingustic puzzles

We work on linguistics puzzles as a club, usually Linguistics Olympiad problems from previous years.

IPA Scrabble

Scrabble played with letters from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) instead of the English alphabet. If you can convince everyone you pronounce a word a certain way, then the word is legal. Typically involves arguing about how each person pronounces words.

Officers

Past officers

David J. Peterson & Dr. Jessie Sams

Professional Conlangers for Game of Thrones and Motherland: Fort Salem and hosts of LangTime Studio, David J. Peterson and Dr. Jessie Sams, gave a Q&A during our club meeting on May 15, 2023!

Discussion topics included:

• The upcoming LangTime Engine, a tool for conlangers to keep track of their vocab and grammar
• Evolution and change in the Conlanging community
• Role of worldbuilding in conlanging
• Alternatives to onions in cooking

I'tslmaw (i:t͡sɬma)

The club conlang that started it all. A bizarre conlang with grammatical seasonality, a borderline unpronounceable phonology, and where the only verbs are "consume" and "produce," but noun cases are an open class. In addition to normal cases like Nominative and Accusative, it also features unusual ones like the Pursuit case which combine with the two verbs to form special meanings.

• See the reference grammar
• Read about it on the Conlang Wiki

Auxlang with CFG

An attempt at an auxlang where all sentences can be generated and parsed using a context-free grammar. Notably lacks any inflectional morphology, cases, gender, grammatical number, but has "delimiter" words that separate subordinate clauses and sentence arguments.

• See the reference grammar

Time: The Conlang

Time: The Conlang is spoken by people who are constantly transitioning between two different alternate timelines called North Time and South Time. Each timeline differs in various aspects (for example, North Time's food is gourmet while South Time's food is mostly vending-machine quality), with the world around you changing as you move forward in time.

Hero's Language

A conlang centered around the Hero's Journey, with a tense system that marks where in the Hero's Journey actions are taking place instead of the more familiar past/present/future system.

• See the reference grammar

The Forest

The Forest is a fantasy worldbuilding project centered around a forest with a giant, magical tree in the middle that is the basis for all life. We started with a proto-language spoken by sentient tree-like progenitors, and used it as the basis for a variety of daugher languages to create the Forest's language family. Each language is spoken by one of various fantasy peoples, like the Mercantiles, the Fungus people, the Vine people, and the Faeries.

• See the reference grammar for the proto-language (Proto-Plantlang)
• See the worldbuilding document

The Pidgin Game

A long-term collaborative conlang formed by having each player create their own minimal conlang then try to communicate by forming a common pidgin language. Languages created before the game starts are not allowed, such as natural languages. Each player also has a hidden goal to push the pidgin towards having a linguistic feature of their choice. Took place over Discord text chat, with the occasional hilarious voice chat.

Trilangle

An engineered artlang written using tessellating triangles of different colors. The placement of triangles along a 2D plane determines the syntax of each sentence, with "verbs" that can mutually take each other as subjects and objects. You can parse sentences starting at any word in the sentence and still get the same meaning. After working on it as a club conlang, Frederick is actively working on Trilangle on his own to further develop the syntax and semantics, including formal-language representations.

• See the current version of Trilangle
• See the initial brainstorming and grammar

The Pigin Game v2: Minecraft Edition (Miliwu, Sampinko)

A variation of our first Pidgin Game played in Minecraft. The whole club split into two nations, each with their own conlang. Then players across nations try to communicate with each other by forming a pidgin between the two national conlangs.

• Code for Enmerkar, the Bukkit plugin developed for the game

Lesson Lang

A conlang chock full of silly features we built up while giving our linguistics crash course to newcomers. Highlights include dishonorifics, a system of honorifics which are all derogatory, and a system of evidentiality that encodes whether the speaker's information was gained through logic/assumption, through experience/dreams, or is a lie/comes from click-bait.

Maolang

A "conlang" created by playing our own game inspired by the Mao card game. The rules are:

Start with an English reading passage. Each turn, one player secretly creates a linguistic rule. They then say the same passage using the new rule. The player who secretly introduced the rule corrects people who make mistake (without revealing the rule), and the person who made the mistake loses a point. The game ends when the club meeting ends, and whoever has the most points at the end wins.

• See Maolang as it progressed

Sepko-pelo

An a priori conlang that aims to be simple enough for club members to speak while having interesting features like phonesthemological roots and non-concatenative morphology. All word roots start with one of various phonesthemes (so if the phonestheme for food is /m/, the root m-ɲ-ç "eat" will start with /m/ because it's food related.) Non-concatenative morphology is used to derive new words, encode things like number with our multal/paucal system, or inflect verbs for tense and aspect.

• See the reference grammar

Potluck Conlangs

We each make up a short sentence using a pre-generated phonology, with each word glossed/annotated with its morphology and meaning. Then, we present them and try to create one language that would make all of those sentences grammatical.