Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true.

~Tolkien^[1]

By the time Tolkien published The Lord of the Rings, he had been working on his invented languages for over 40 years. One of these languages was Quenya, a major elvish language in his mythology. Tolkien did not want his beautiful language to exist in a vacuum, so he set about making a world and mythology around the language to give it depth, meaning, and historical roots. Not only did this influence what Quenya eventually evolved into, it also prompted Tolkien to reverse-engineer Quenya to create its ancestor language, Proto-Quenya, and then use those two languages to invent Quenya’s sister elvish language, Sindarin. For each language he created multiple dialects representing how he felt the languages would have naturally evolved over thousands of years of use and interaction with other elements of his living world. And that doesn’t include other languages that were at least sketched, like Khudzul (dwarvish) and the Black Speech…

This is method 4. At this point you’ve long left behind being a writer first (or even a world-builder first): you are a conlanger, an inventor of constructed languages. You create languages, give them history and evolutions, craft cultures around them, because you love the languages. Perhaps you may even, like Tolkien, after decades of work, find your world saturated with enough richness and depth that you could write an epic story set in your language’s world, a story that captivates audiences but that, in your mind, primarily exists in the footnotes of what really matters—the language the elves are speaking to each other.

This stage of language invention far exceeds the purpose of this article. If you are interested in creating full language families and language histories, and if you create worlds and stories in service of your invented language rather than the other way around, hopefully you have already found your way into online conlang communities who can shepherd you into the “deep lore,” as it were. You may find it useful to purchase Mark Rosenfelder’s books, The Language Construction Toolkit and Advanced Language Construction. But don’t say I didn’t warn you: you aren’t an author anymore, at least not first and foremost. You, like Tolkien, are an inventor of constructed languages who also writes stories, regardless of how good those stories are.

Or, perhaps, who doesn’t write stories and now solely focuses on the language and its world for its own sake.

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[1] In the Land of Invented Languages [ItLoIL], page 283.

_{Copyright © 2023 by David Ludlow}