Throughout the years that mainstream media existed, there have been expressions of other worlds, which include their own languages. There are Sindarin, Quenya, and the other languages from the Lord of the Rings franchise, Klingon from the Star Trek franchise, Atlantean from Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Na'vi from Avatar and its sequels, Dothraki, High Valyrian, Mag Nuk, and other languages from Game of Thrones, the Fremen and other languages from Dune, etc.
These languages exist as languages that can be spoken not only by those people but by us in this world as well. They aren't random sounds clustered to resemble languages, or ciphers to make existing ones seem foreign to the native speaker, they are fully functional languages with their own selection of sounds, their own system of grammar, their own lexicons, etc. They might seem like they were evolved by their abundant amount of speakers over centuries and millennia, though they were made to appear like that. The reality is that they were created over the course of a few or more months, or sometimes less, by one person, or two or more. Maybe even a committee. We know them as constructed languages, though the more general term is the portmanteau "conlangs", with the creators often dubbed "conlangers". And those conlangs make up a certain type, as multiple ones existed.
The considered first conlangs were philosophical languages created in the 12th and 17th Centuries. Then, auxiliary languages, or auxlangs came along, like Volapük by Johann Martin Schleyer, which lasted throughout the course of the 1880s, with Esperanto being created by Ludwig Lejzer Zamenoff. Auxlangs exist to ease communication between different peoples. Volapük was meant for unifying the world population. Esperanto, which is most commonly spoken today, was meant just for unifying the Polish, Hebrew, Russian, and German speakers in what is now Białystok during the 1880s. There are also zonal auxlangs like Interslavic, which exist to ease communication between different languages of the same peoples, like the Slavs.
In the 1950s, logic-based languages, or loglangs, started popping up. James Cook Brown created the first, the intention being to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, regarding the idea of language affecting thought. Loglan was the language, and got a community, with many loving the idea. His restrictions on lead to the creation of a more popular loglang, known as Lojban, which is still managed collectively today, yet maintains a reputation of being "spoken computer code".
The Elvish languages came to be from J.R.R. Tolkein's fascination with Welsh sounds and orthography as well as Finish syntax, leading to the Lord of the Rings books in the 1910s. Klingon came to be in the 1960s, with some words being created for it the following decade, until finally, in 1983/1984, Marc Okrand was approached by Paramount Pictures and the Next Generation production crew to develop it into a full-on language. In (I think) 2000, Disney approached Okrand and asked him to develop some kind of "tower of babel" language for Atlantis: The Lost Empire, and he did so.
In the mid-to-late 2000s, James Cameron met Paul Frommer and talked to him about his new project Avatar, and his desire for an alien language that's human learnable, leading to the creation of Na'vi. While Okrand was creating Atlantean, David J. Peterson created a conlang called Megdevi, which was his first and worst. He joined the Language Creation Society and won a contest when HBO, working on Game of Thrones, needed someone to develop the languages George R.R. Martin created for his books the series is based on. After creating languages for Game of Thrones, he would create some like Castithan for Defiance, some like Nelvayu for the MCU, and countless other shows, movies, and franchises. His most recent conlangs include the Fremen language for Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune.
He's still developing conlangs for franchises to this day and has been teaching the process to others via conferences and his book "The Art of Language Invention". There is also "The Language Construction Kit" by Mark Rossenfelder that exists for the same purpose. On YouTube, usernames like Artifexian(Edgar Grunewald), Biblaridion, Dracheneks, Kayinth(who used to go by Mondigu) have developed their own tutorials, though friends of theirs like Lichen, Agma Schwa, etc haven't done so, which isn't really a bad thing. Biblaridion plans on remaking his tutorial as there are elements he missed.
I thought it would be a good idea to try one out for myself, while basing a number of decisions on popularity. I'm better at coming up with phonological inventories than I am at coming up with grammar, so you're free to leave some suggestions for this tutorial conlang in the comments.
Before we decide the phonology, we should consider the geographic location, region, and biome our speakers might reside in.
We must also consider the fact that the culture of a language's speakers might have an impact on the language.
One aspect of culture is how they treat and/or interpret colors. (4:28-4:47 of next video)
Another aspect of culture is how they treat what's an animal and what isn't.
I have ideas for the phonological inventory including [m], [n], [p], [t], [k], [s], [l], [ɬ], [tɬ], [ħ], and [ʕ], with the first seven consonants as must haves, and the glottal stop being optional to make things symmetrical with the pharyngeals and/or a possible [h]. This is so the evolved form could possibly meet one of my goals for a conlang with lateral released consonants and pharyngealized consonants, the evolved form possibly including [ʎ]. If you have ideas for the phonological inventory, comment your ideas.
Other things I want to talk about include the natural rise of a number system, and other things that Biblaridion didn't have time to talk about in his tutorial, some of them like tone and grammatical gender having been covered by Kayinth in his tutorials. There are things I'd like to cover like tri-consonantal roots for syllable structures, syllable mora like what Hawaiian and Japanese have, etc.
I want to evolve the language further and create a language family(possibly no more than four descendants of the "modern" lang), going more in depth than the Milu Project did in his video about creating language families. And I have ideas where after I decide the phonology and phonotactics, I decide the aspects of the grammar before creating any words at all. I'm also thinking of letting the viewers comment below on which aspects of grammar I should include, and decide based on popularity. I'll need to set up requirements on that.
