Conlangs: Yea or Nay?

So, I am an avid user of the amazing subreddits r/Worldbuilding and r/Conlangs, and there seems to be a love-hate relationship with the subject of the latter on the former. (I hope that makes at least a little sense.) Some people are dead set on the opinion that conlangs (that is, fictional constructed languages, à la Sindarian, Klingon, and others) add an extra layer of immersion that using a natural language (such as French) can't provide. On the other end of the extreme, there are people that absolutely despise conlangs, and would close a book at the first sight of "Kakya chûvke motyenarra."

The questions a lot of people have because of this ongoing war are, "Are conlangs necessary?" and, "Should I use a conlang in my story?".

The answer to the former is a resounding "no." You don't have to use a conlang if you don't want to. Heck, if you want a conlang but are too lazy to flesh one out, you can probably pay someone to do it for you. But you don't have to invent a language to write good fantasy or sci-fi.

The second question is also easily answered. If you want a conlang, make one! If you're into languages and linguistics at all, they're great things to play around with. I personally have two conlangs for Rocosia that I'm working on right now: Anvalu and Rocosian. They're useful for naming places and people while retaining a distinct Rocosian flavor. No natural language available has the kind of feel I want, so I created my own to get that feeling. And if that's the boat you're in, more power to you! Go wild, use weird features, mash features and sounds of natural languages together until you have something that's distinctly yours!

However...

There are right and wrong ways to do a conlang. Here are a few of the wrong ways to go about constructing your own languages.

Relexes are a no-no. Every conlanger ever will tell you this. A relex is basically English, but with different words. (So, the lazy man's conlang.) It has all the same grammatical features and sounds as English, and there's nothing special about it except for different spelling. When people start conlanging, a relex is often the first thing they make. When "claddagh sea ra baugh" means "They saw the dog," you have a relex. Why not mix it up and have it be "seacladdagh rabaugh," "claddagh baugh sea," or something similarly not-Englishy? There's a whole wide world of cool grammatical features out there, why not use a few? (Relexes of other languages are equally as annoying. "Ja n'appane Marie" is pretty obviously just French. If you want French, use French. Nobody's going to kill you if your fantasy world where France doesn't exist has place names like Monte d'Anges or Grandevielle. I, for one, would love a Musketeer-era, French influenced world. That would be awesome.)

In the same vein, ciphers are even lazier. A cipher is a type of code that uses letters and symbols to encode words. (My first conlang was one of these. There was a key at the back of the book. 'X' stood for 'a'. Why?) So, if you have a code like 1=A, 2=B, 3=C, and so on, "cab" would be '312'. The same "why not"s for relexes apply here.

Tôó måńÿ dįāčrîtïçś! Diacritics, or the little marks above and below letters, (also called accents) are cool. There's no denying that. What better way to spice up a language and make it feel not-Englishy by adding a ˇ or a ˊ? (Or any of the other many, many options out there.) For all their coolness, some people forget that in real life, diacritics serve a purpose. A tilde over an 'n' makes it nasalized, so it sounds more like "ny". A bar through an 'o' turns it into a completely different sound, 'ø', in Swedish. So, if "nu" sounds exactly the same as "nü" in your world, and there's no historical reasoning for this, (French âôîû denote that an 's' use to follow them) you may need to make some changes.

NOT. LEARNING. THE. I. P. A. The IPA, or International Phonetic Alphabet, is this chart. It looks pretty overwhelming, huh? Lots of symbols making lots of sounds, and so many of them! Well, if you want to save yourself a whole bunch of linguistically-induced headaches, learn the symbols of the sounds you want in your language! PLEASE. (Especially if you want to start posting on r/Conlangs. They get pretty annoyed with people who don't use it.)

"But Austin," I hear you saying, "why should I learn the IPA? I know what sounds I want! 'A' as in 'cat', 'ch' as in 'loch', I can remember those!" To that, I say that you can literally just put a SINGLE SYMBOL down on your phonetics sheet that tells everyone, no matter what their language or accent may be, EXACTLY what sound each of your letters makes. EXACTLY. Instead of "'ch' as in 'loch'," you can put /x/. That's it. That's the sound. Anybody, anywhere, who knows the IPA will go "I know how that's pronounced!" and you'll be able to know exactly what past you meant when you look at your sheet and see /a/, instead of going "How is 'ah' pronounced?" (NOTE: if you include a glossary in your book, it may be more helpful to have pro-NUN-see-AY-shun GUYDS, because peasants your readers won't understand something like /prəˌnʌnsiˈeɪʃən gaɪdz/.)

USING YOUR CONLANG TOO DANG MUCH. HO-LY CRAP. I love conlangs, I really do. I'm reading LOTR right now and every time anyone speaks a different language, I get excited. I love it when people write songs in their conlangs and have a character sing them around a campfire during a quiet part of the story, when everyone's just hanging out. But when EVERY. OTHER. DANG. WORD. is something I have to flip to the glossary for, I get mad. Oh, I get mad. I want to tear out the pages of whatever book I'm reading and break the spine by throwing it against a wall as hard as I can.

Here's an example of the thing that annoys the ever-living snot out of me:

"'Laéthu eó naéne?' he asked. It had been dghennámha since I had heard it spoken of. The meighdrúmha tiú had told me that chaéthuá so many times, it was engraved in my memory. How could I have forgotten it?
'Naéṁh cleṁh...' The beginning lines of the laéthu began to come back to me."

GAH. No translations, no explanations, random nouns that could be English but aren't because "LOOK AT MY CONLANG–" the list goes on and on. I know exactly what the above is saying, because it's one of my (non-Rocosian) conlangs, but I'm STILL irked. Another mistake is having a character swap between your conlang and English (or whatever language you may write in) mid-sentence. Just like you don't hear Spanish speakers randomly toss in a Spanish word or two while speaking, your characters wouldn't either. If you'll pardon my small tangent, there's one main reason weeaboos are annoying: they mix Japanese with English. "OMG, Tammi-chan, that's so kawaii! I daisuki it so much!"

*Shudder*

As with the weebs, your characters will be a pain in the dgháthuámh if you have them switch languages every other word.

"But Austin!" You cry, "How else would I insert my conlang into my story?"

Well, there are a few ways. Probably more. Heck, maybe you could invent a new and innovative way to work your conlang in. Maybe your story focuses on an in-world linguist trying to decipher a language, like in the movie Arrival. (Which I still haven't seen, but really really want to.) Maybe the fact that your characters don't understand the language is crucial to the plot. But you'll have to read the next part of this little half-rant-half-advice-column to find out the most common ways that people work their pet projects into their narrative!

Signing off,
Austin

(Hope I haven't made you too mad! ;) )