B's Quick-Start Guide to Artistic Languages

By: @fragmented_imagination in Informational > World-Building
Created: 11 Jan 2025, 06:29 PM
39   4   2

Creating a language is an interesting challenge for an artist. While there is technically no prescribed manner to making an artistic language nor are there many standards which determine whether an artistic language is good or not, I have devised a process to smoothly start the process from conceptualization to digitalization while covering the beginning aspects of creating an artistic language, the development of both orthography and phonology.


Step 1: Write it out!

Perhaps one of the most realistic aspects of an artistic language is its visual appeal and the ease with which it can be used. In order to accomplish, the conceptualization process should start with simply writing it out. While bizarre shapes and clumped elements make a language look pretty, to form something with a dose of realism, your writing system (assuming you wish to employ something other than any of our real-world writing systems) should be written by hand at the very start of the process. Using thin lines and hand-drawn shapes gives the impression of utility and history, which can be built on later with typefaces and different pen and brush styles. For now, a pencil or a ballpoint pen should be your start.


Step 2: Phonetic assignment

Once you know what your language looks like, it is time to decide what your language sounds like.

I have a more thorough explanation for this process in the ALCA journal, so I will keep this step short. Well, shorter. What this boils down to is developing your orthography, what sounds each symbol of your writing system represents. You can do this one of two ways.

Method 1: The Easy Way


This is simply using letters of your native language to assign sound. This is easy since you already know what your own language sounds like, so you can reassign the sounds you use to your new alphabet. You don’t need a pronunciation guide.

The problem with this method is that you can easily turn your alphabet into a cypher language, which just substitutes your alphabet to replace your own language. Of course, if you follow through with creating unique words, this is not much of a problem, but it easily allows other elements of your native language, such as prosody and syllable structure, to influence something which, ideally, should not have anything in common with your native tongue. One might avert this by omitting certain consonants or vowels or adding sounds from other languages, preferably those that your native writing has readily-available spelling for.

And then there’s…

Method 2: The Hard Way


Forget your native language for now. Let’s build this thing from the ground up!

Instead of using your native spelling, you can refer to a more widespread method of describing pronunciation. For this, I often reference a chart of the International Phonetic Alphabet, which not only features consonants and vowels but also describes other features of pronunciation such as secondary articulation, timing, and intonation. While relatively overwhelming, keep in mind that most real-world languages perhaps use a quarter to a third of the basic consonant and vowel sounds on the chart and perhaps a handful of the modifying features at most. So the key is to figure out what kind of logic you want your language to use.

Of course, you probably aren’t going to use IPA to constantly write out a readable form of your language, so don’t forget to write out a transcription that’s easier for you to read.

Also keep in mind that, no matter which of the above methods you use, your language does not necessarily need to have one sound assigned to each symbol. Some letters can bear two or three different sounds (which you can designate as changing depending on if other sounds/letters are nearby), you can have a combination of letters represent a single sound, or you can have a silent letter which serves as a purely orthographic feature to be used to differentiate words that otherwise sound similar. In the course of designing over eighty languages, I have used all three of these spelling options and even made a couple I didn’t mention.


Step 3: Lay out a font

Now that you have a written language, it’s time to work to preserve it, and nothing ensures the ease of building and preserving a language like putting it on a computer. But we need to do something before we start making a typable language.

You see, unless you know how to expand a font to include letters outside of Unicode and then bind them to your keyboard in a way that lets you type your language your way (… not likely), you will probably do as I have and design the font as a cypher for your language, one which corresponds to your keyboard. In other words, for each letter of your language, you’ll want to use that equivalent key on your keyboard.

This requires some planning. I have included a template that corresponds to the basic layout of an English-language keyboard. The idea is to fill it out the template in order to lay out how you plan to design this font, which keys are supposed to be which of your letters. It’s a messy process, so I often make additional keyboard charts to help remind me which letters are where.


Step 4: Make the font

For this, as I have mentioned on the ALCA group (same journal in the link above), I recommend the Type light TrueType/OpenType font editor, a freeware program with a basic toolset. It’s as simple as creating a glyph, editing the shape to your original notes, and then saving and installing the font on your computer. A link to the download can be found at the end of the journal.

This is not an easy process. As straightforward as it is, without a more thorough package, you will need to test the font in your favored word processor in order to adjust the font to your intended design. If you are new to font editing, I suggest experimenting with the shape designs to get a better feel for the way the program works.


Step 5: Do it all over again!

Once your font is done, the next step should be to take your notes and type them out and expand them into a more detailed and orderly system that is easier to refer to as you build your language. Once you have the writing system the way you want, it becomes all about building grammar and vocabulary.


Step 6: Have fun!

Congratulations! You have a language to build!


Comments (4)

Posted: Friday, 17 January, 2025 @ 09:05 PM

I've mentioned before that I've never really experimented with conlangs, largely down to intimidation over mapping out the logic, and this gives me a proper roadmap. I don't know how much you've dabbled in logographic notation à la Chinese/kanji, but I presume it's a more complicated system than the phonetic approach detailed here.

The note on keyboard mapping hints at just how hardcore dedicated practicioners are. :O I also never considered how computer fonts are actually designed, but probably should have expected vectors; I have some proficiency with Inkscape and it's a subject I could probably write on: I'd briefed a friend once but that was mostly just walking through how to use the software, rather than general design principles. (I'm not a hardcore vexillologist, but until I SVG'd I never knew how badly I was hobbling myself. :P )


Edited 1 time.
Posted: Friday, 17 January, 2025 @ 09:05 PM

@Thorvald: I have dabbled in designing a logographic system. Three, actually. Yeah, they present their own problems. Unlike phonetic systems, logographic systems require making a much larger database of glyphs. If you'll recall the journal post I made on building vocabulary, you can see that using logographs turns into not only building a vocabulary, but making new glyphs each time you have a new word. One system I've come up with is an alternative to contemporary Chinese characters, so I have a reference point which makes designing new glyphs less of a hassle. However, with the other two, they aren't intended to be related to Chinese in any way, so they're massive blank slates. One can ease the process with a series of subglyphs similar to the radicals used in Chinese, but even that presents with its own issues, such as having to come up with new subglyphs to accommodate new, complete logographs. As you can imagine, these other two are barely any larger than twenty glyphs so far. One doesn't even have a supplementary phonetic reference, and neither one of them are intended to function with Chinese's one-character-one-syllable scheme. Never mind actually typing them; it's easier to just pull up the whole list and select from there.

Well, the thing about keyboard mapping, I learned quickly that one reeeeeeally needs to plan these things out before dedicating to it. Going straight from paper to font is a sure way to create a mess, especially if you're doing more than a simple cypher script. Most of my languages don't use the full English alphabet, so I often have to assign characters to odd keys. Things get even trickier when you're not even doing a simple alphabet; one language, Udrhazzh, has to be organized by articulatory features on a Korean keyboard because it has nearly 600 letters (an exercise in the hypothetical that escalated faster than I had thought). Keymash is about as tricky as a logograph with only 38 native components because there's absolutely no visible correspondence on the keyboard at all (of course, it was designed to be kind of batshit insane anyway). And Bo? It uses a syllabary with the added feature of compressing words into blocks of characters; the translation of the UDHR almost has to be read with a magnifying glass. 

So, if you have anything in mind for a constructed language, I'll be glad to lend a hand.

Posted: Friday, 17 January, 2025 @ 09:05 PM

Huh. This was a lot more intresting and fascinating than I thought. I kind of want to do something like this now 🤔 Especially the font design thing intrigued me.

Edit: what the heck is happening with the emojis.. 😅 ok, nvm it works now


Edited 2 times.
Posted: Friday, 17 January, 2025 @ 09:05 PM

@ragukokarn: I have more material to look through on the Artistic Language Creator Alliance group page. And I'm always happy to help you get started.

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