Understanding linguistic creation: an exploration of the ‘conlanging’ community and their invented languages

Thesis

A ‘conlang’, or constructed language, is a language that has been intentionally created rather than naturally developed. The phenomenon of language invention has historical precedent and a growing place within linguistics. Scholarly efforts in conlanging have largely been centered on the study of international auxiliary languages or, more recently, the application of conlanging in linguistics pedagogy. Research is still lacking, however, when it comes to understanding conlanging as it is currently happening in circles on the internet. The aim of this study is to act as a first step into the exploration of modern conlanging. To achieve this, questionnaire responses from 212 conlangers were examined in tandem with data from three interviews. Results suggest that conlanging is a deeply personal activity, with some commonalities and some variances among conlangers. These findings serve as a proof of concept for the potential for more extensive research in this area to investigate the psychological and linguistic attributes of conlangers, the sociolinguistic attributes of the conlanging community, and the cognitive and linguistic processes behind conlanging itself.

Authors: Woodward, E

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-gazyrzode
• Type of award: MSc taught course
• Level of award: Masters
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: interviews; internet-mediated research; qualitative research; descriptive statistics; quantitative research; exploratory research; ALSLA2024; ALSLA; conlangs; constructed languages; online surveys; language invention; online communities; conlanging
• Subjects: Imaginary languages; Interviews; Statistics; Qualitative research; Quantitative research; Online social networks; Applied linguistics; Surveys; Internet