Seattle Conlang Club

  • Saluton Esperanto
  •  Klingon
  •  MiniSign
  • vahli Sektale
  • Suil Sendok
  • Sùlsul Simlish
  • ᑯᐃᕑ Trilangle
  •  Quenya

Club projects

The Conlang Club has worked together on a large variety of conlangs, some silly, others serious, but mostly in between.

Current projects

The proposed cover of issue #1 of the SCC Zine

SCC Zine

Summer 2024 - Present

The Seattle Conlang Club Zine is a zine which features conlanging-related articles and art made by our club's very own members. All club members are encouraged to submit articles to the zine, no matter how big or small. We published Issue #1 on September 9th, 2024, which featured articles on our members' conlangs, Esperanto culture in Japan, Toki Pona, and even crosswords and conlang advertisements!

PidginCraft

Fall 2024 - Present

Periodically, players get together in a voice call and Minecraft server to play Minecraft. The catch is that no one is allowed to speak the same language at the start. The goal of this is to create a new, shared pidgin language that we can all understand. PidginCraft regularly documents its grammar at the end of every play session to make it easier for new and returning players.

Past projects

I'tslmaw (i:t͡sɬma)

Fall 2019
I'tslmaw phonology brainstorming

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.

Example sentence in I'tslmaw
Aw pfy-ihnn skuv'-nn tlih
I farm-LOC foot-INST consume
"I go to the farm"

Auxlang with CFG

Spring - Fall 2020

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.

Time: The Conlang

Spring 2020
A timeline in the world of 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

Fall 2020

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.

The Forest

Fall 2020 - Winter 2021

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.

The Pidgin Game

Summer 2021
A Conlang Club Pidgin teaching aid

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

Summer 2021 (Continuation by Frederick: Fall 2021 - Present)

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.

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

Fall 2021

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.

Lesson Lang

Fall 2021 - Winter 2022

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

Winter 2022

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.

Sepko-pelo

Winter - Spring 2022

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.

Example sentences in Sepko-pelo
Pilo temco-milan hjepco-megmo mé-f<ol>ukle
I bean-spice freeze-pudding HAB-<AUG>like
"I most like vanilla ice-cream"
To mé-hkuhkenjo
3SG INCH-scissors/V.TENT
"It might have started to be a (pair of) scissors"

Potluck Conlangs

Fall 2022

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.

Pidgin Island Quest

Summer 2024 - Fall 2024

A band of transient, feral mountainfolk have been kidnapped in their sleep to a big tropical island for some unknown purpose! Each player, starting with a list of 15 words from a random world language, must work and communicate together to survive and elevate their new shared culture.

The game is played similarly to a tabletop role-playing game, with the game master rotating between each of the players each week to keep things fresh. Synchronous session run every weekend, but can be played asynchronously through the text channel in the club Discord.