Method 3 is a continuation of Method 2. After creating a naming language, you now have a framework for making individual words in your language, and you can build on that to produce simple sentences, complex sentences, and other linguistic structures. For the most part, you are now in open sky and can choose to fly wherever you want.

Setting Expectations for this Section

I first want to state that there’s no real order of operations for developing your language; after all, there are thousands of natural languages on earth spoken today (not counting dead languages), and that means there are thousands of ways to handle verbs, adjectives, adverbs, complex sentences, commands, questions, borrowings from other languages, and more, ranging from variations on what you might be familiar with to the exceptionally unique. That’s not even considering the fact that advice on the best order to work in varies by the tastes of whoever is instructing you; my linguistics professor once said he preferred to come up with ideas for complex sentences, then reduce those rules to make simple sentences, then reduce those rules to make phrases, words, syllables, and finally coming up with sounds last, while many of the books I’ve read suggest working in the exact opposite order. In short, there’s no right way to make your language, and only you can determine what parts of your language even need developing, but I hope these tips will help you get started.

Quick Advice

You don’t need to be a linguistic or grammar expert to develop your language beyond single words and short phrases, especially if you just want to make simple sentences and leave it at that. However, studying on grammatical and linguistic rules (especially for foreign languages) can be a great way to both generate ideas for features for your language and help you free your mind from the limits of your native language to see all the other things it is possible to do with a language.

Also note that the more you develop grammatical or linguistic structures for your language, the more you’re working for your own passion and enjoyment. Most readers will not dive deeply into a constructed language (most won’t even do that with real-world languages they don’t already know) and will skip over descriptions of grammatical rules in your prose. That’s okay as long as your expectation is that you are doing this for yourself, and perhaps for the niche, hardcore, nerdy audience you may hope to eventually cultivate.

What is a Sentence? and How to Turn That into Simple Sentence Structures

To be a bit reductive, simple sentences have up to four parts: a verb, a subject, an object, and an indirect object. A verb is what is being done, a subject is who (or what) is doing it, and an object is who (or what) it is being done to; indirect objects, when present, represent a who or what being indirectly affected by the verb. Subjects and verbs show up in every sentence, but objects and indirect objects don’t—and indirect objects don’t show up without an object also being present, in most languages.

You can begin your language’s basic grammar by deciding what order these grammatical elements appear. English, for example, has the SVO word order (subject, verb, object): she threw the bone. Japanese, on the other hand, has the SOV (subject, object, verb) word order: she the bone threw.

No one would blame you if you stop there, because things just get more complicated from here on out, even in simple sentences.

Verbs are Awful—I Mean, Critical

Frequently, but not exclusively, one of the hardest parts of a language to learn (as well as develop!) is verb conjugation—or, how a verb changes form to reflect what you are trying to say. Depending on your decisions about how your verbs conjugate, your simple sentences could be so easy to construct a caveman could do it or so frustratingly nuanced that you’ll want to spend your life savings on a hired linguist.

What do I mean by that? Well, English speakers get off relatively easily, depending on who you ask. We have past tense (“I spoke”) and we have present tense (“I speak”). Want to say you spoke, but in future tense? You can’t. It doesn’t exist. You can say “I will speak,” but you didn’t actually conjugate the verb “speak”; instead, you added another word to the sentence, which is another bag of snakes entirely that I won’t get into here.

Anyway, other languages don’t function this way. In Spanish, “will speak” could be translated “hablaré.” The same concept is handled in a single word by conjugating the verb. And if you’ve ever looked at a Spanish conjugation chart, you know there’s significantly more to memorize than just simple past, present, and future if you want to be even merely proficient with the language…

Verbs and verb conjugation also serve a central, defining function in sentences in other ways. For example, consider the Spanish verb “soy,” a first-person present tense conjugation, and the English equivalent “am.” Spanish speakers can say “Soy Groot” (I am Groot) without actually directly mentioning the subject of the sentence (“I”)—the implication is clear enough. Some say that Spanish works this way because first-person Spanish conjugations are unique and only ever refer to “I” as the subject, so the subject is known even when dropped; if this logic held, then in English you could say “Am Groot” without it sounding like a broken sentence. The issue is, “Am Groot” is a broken sentence no native English speaker would say. Therefore, the Spanish ability to leave the subject of a sentence implied with certain verb conjugations is actually just a hard-coded feature of that system, but it is one at least influenced by Spanish verb conjugation.

That was four paragraphs’ worth of examples and anecdotes to try to illustrate this point: verbs are the center of a sentence, and you get to decide your unique rules verbs will play in your language. How extensively will your verbs conjugate, and how will their forms change when they conjugate? What will they conjugate to? First person? Number? Gender? Distance between the subject and the object? A combination of all of the above? Or will they not conjugate at all?

Other Grammatical Features

If you want to keep developing your language past this point, it’s entirely up to you to decide what other features you want in your language and how those features will manifest. There are simply too many options for me to attempt to describe them all to you. Here’s just a handful:

1. How will complex sentences be formed in your language, or will complex sentences not be a part of your language?
2. Will you make use of noun case in your language? (It’s kind of like verb conjugation, but for nouns. Russian is an example of a language that makes heavy use of noun case.)
3. Will word order change with different types of sentences? (For example, questions could be marked in your language by changing the placement of the subject and the verb.)
4. Will your language have ergative-absolutive alignment? (Bit of advice: don’t do this to yourself.)
5. Will your language have mandatory linguistic variations determined by the speaker’s gender, or the speaker’s social status relative to whomever is being spoken to?
6. Will your language feature very tight rules or frequently-broken rules? Either way, why?

None of this is required. Your language is your language, so cultivate it to fit your needs. Be careful not to let the language overgrow—just like how some writers get so lost in worldbuilding that they never actually write, it’s very possible to get so lost in language development that you never finish the story the language was meant for.

If you’re not sure what kind of things your language needs to be capable of doing—grammatically—an easy way to generate ideas is to collect a list of sentences and translate them into your language. If you don’t know how to do something in a translation, you now can make a choice on whether or not (and, if so, how) to make that translation possible in your language.

If you want to make your language more fleshed-out than I’ve provided guidance for here, I would recommend reading Mark Rosenfelder’s The Language Construction Toolkit; Advanced Language Construction is also excellent if you find a new passion when you begin creating your language and want to see just how far you can go. David J Peterson’s The Art of Language Construction is also very good. These books can provide you with far more details than the scope of this article allows.

As always, keep detailed notes so that you can remember your own rules later.

Advantages

Deciding on basic grammatical features doesn’t have to add much time to producing an initial linguistic sketch (for a naming language), but it will allow you to create sentences in your invented language following intentional, replicable rules. (Of course, the more you decide to develop your language the more of a time sink it becomes.)

In addition, beginning to decide on grammatical features before you start writing sentences and phrases in your language will help you to keep the language more internally consistent; this is useful if you ever feel you will want to build out the language more.

Disadvantages

Building a grammar that is distinct from your native language has the potential to be as mind-bending as learning a new language—particularly if you are not already familiar with multiple languages.

This is also more-or-less the point where I, at least, began to see diminishing returns. While there’s a small audience of readers who love to immerse themselves into encyclopedias on fantasy worlds (and who would love detailed representations of a fictional language), most readers will skip over longer pieces of text composed in a language they don’t understand. Readers have an easy enough time picking up names and even learning the meaning of a small number of fictional words, but once it starts to feel like you’re asking them to learn an entirely new language they might disengage—possibly even from the story.

Method 3 Steps Summarized

1. Decide on your language’s grammatical order for the following sentence parts: subject, object, indirect object, and verb.
   1. You may decide on a different order for different sentence types.
2. Translate simple sentences into your language to discover things your language can and can’t do, then decide if you want to add grammatical features to your language (or intentionally keep features out) based on that information.
   1. You may want to start with making decisions on verb conjugation, although you don’t have to.
   1. If you need help knowing where to start, begin with verb conjugation and go from there.

You can find a personal example of a partially complete language here.

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_{Copyright © 2023 by David Ludlow}