You might've read the previous chapter to get you guys in the hang of things. If not, you're free to read/re-read it. Now, before we get to the conlanging, we need to decide the goals. I'm going for naturalism with this, with the speakers being human. Probably. Now, as for the geography, I'm going for a fictional island-continent taking place in our world. I don't know if I should make it similar to Biblaridion's tutorial and make the language isolated, or if I should allow there to be neighboring cultures to exist. Comment on this paragraph in case you'd have any ideas on what I should try out.
For the geography and environment, I'm going for the island-continent being smaller than Greenland, yet bigger than Hawai'i, the big island I mean. Adding the two sizes together, and dividing them by two, would give us an area of 420,164 square miles. I might give it a peninsula or two, and give it a small chain of islands that a number of people speaking the modern form of our sample language would migrate to. I think the four languages could be North [language name], South [language name], High [language name](like how there's High Valyrian), and Central [language name] if the island-continent was to lack peninsulas and islands. In other scenarios, North and South could instead be West and East, and High or Central could be replaced with Peninsular [language name] or Island [language name]. Whatever ideas you think could work best, tell me in the comments.
We should also consider the technology our speakers could be using. Should they be Stone Age like the Sentinelese? Should they be pre-Iron Age like the speakers of Biblaridion's tutorial language? Tell me what you think.
As for geography, it might have an impact on the language. Again, look at Artifexian's video about mountains altering speech for more information on that, and tell me what you think.
And don't forget about the culture as well.
While considering the development of the culture, we should also consider taxonomy. Like how, in the case of colors, the Russians think blue and cyan are as different from each other as red and pink, while there are English speakers who think cyan is a variant of blue and not actually its own color, and how Piraha doesn't use colors at all, only light and dark. More details on taxonomy are fleshed out in Lichen's video on it.
As for where our sample language is, let's go for the speakers inhabiting an island located at 49° 7' 59.16'' S, 132° 20' 40.6824'' W. The area is, again, 420,164 square miles, the island including two peninsulas(one resembling a mix between Italy and the Walvis Ridge, and the other one, adjacent to the first, resembling Cape Cod in Massachusettes. There is also a small chain of smaller islands that are close but distant.
As for the flora, there are palm trees, a few(but not all) types of orchids, lilies, ebony trees, and teak trees, with plant-based foods including coconuts, and other fruits I could add. We should also consider how far seeds can travel via wind from distant regions like the Polynesian islands and maybe coastal South America. So I could add in fruits like cherimoya. Plus, birds can also transfer plant seeds to distant regions. I might need to get rid of some of them to help with the taxonomy, especially how the speakers might interpret colors, and considering the regions in which these fruits are limited to. Comment what you think should go and what should stay. I'm cautiously taking requests.
As for the fauna, they, for the moment, include crocodiles, opossums, several other (but probably not all) clades that inhabit Chile, some native to Hawai'i, scorpions, amphibians like certain types of frogs, lizards, geckos, turtles, sea turtles, salamanders, lesser frigatebirds, brown noddies, black-winged petrels, Gould's petrels, Buller's shearwaters, pigeons, white terns, white-tailed tropicbird, many-colored fruit doves, and masked boobies.
Others could be included, as someone told me that "most mammals only really migrate that far over sea through mats of vegetation like seaweed". I don't want to add too many, just a small but doable amount. They also told me whether or not the trip can be made is based on the currents. The inhabitants could also be familiar with the many sea creatures of the Pacific Ocean, it depends on the migration patterns of such creatures. I could put river dolphins as well. Again, comment on what you think should go and what should stay, and what I should add to the mix. Like I said, I'm cautiously taking requests.
As for the language's word for "animal", compared to the groups that English includes, unlike Arabic(including the Moroccan dialect), I'm going for division among useless, dangerous, and neutral animals, with one of the language's words for each group, again, being its equivalent to the English word animal.
The speakers could be of Maori heritage, but considering their phonology, and other factors, I might rule them out. If you have good ideas, please tell me.
As for colors, they could, before the language forms, discover colors like red from seeing their own blood dripping out of cuts and whoever was just slaughtered by a predator, yellow from looking at a fire, which they would likely discover by themselves, green from the leaves, black in regards to darkness, white in regard to the sun and clouds, and blue for the sky and the ocean waters. The terms for those things could be the names of those colors as well. I'm thinking of those colors being root words in this conlang, with other color names being derived from them.
There are resources that could help you create the con-culture, but so far, none of them are helping me. I plan to create a backstory, yet, it's my first time actually coming up with a con-culture as well.
Let's say that the humans are hunter-gatherers, though they start to develop civilization in the long run as they expand over the island and colonize the smaller chain as well as the peninsulas. Perhaps they develop tools of varying varieties, like knives to slaughter animals, and carve glyphs into trees. They could create pictograms and ideographs to turn into logographs. They could develop weapons that were invented independently by hunter-gatherers the world over, like spears, or bows and arrows. Tell me in the comments what you think they should invent.
