Behind the Scenes

Design Aesthetic

Every language we hear is made of sounds, and the sounds of a language affect us in many ways.  Not only do they forms the words we use to understand meaning, but they conjure up all we know, or think we know, about a culture.  So while we may have aesthetic reactions to how a language sounds, it can also affect our emotional reactions or subconscious assumptions about the speaker and their culture.  With my background in linguistics, phonetics, and history, I can build the language you need to resonate with your setting, plot, and characters and enhance the story you want to tell.

Translation & Composition

Languages are not random piles of sounds; they need words, phrases, and grammatical structures.  As humans, we can easily tell the difference between random sounds and structured enough to have meaning.  Your conlang will need words and structure to make it believable, whether for single lines overheard on the operations deck of a multi-species space station, haggling exchanges over the price of goods at the bazaar in a high fantasy adventure, or a dynamic oration to immerse and excite your audience on the eve of battle.  I can bring linguistics, rhetoric, and poetry to bear for the lines and novel writing systems you need.

Accent Coaching

Your talented acting cast will need to understand their lines and where the most meaningful points for emphasis are located within them to give their best portrayal.  No one learns a conlang in school, so when it comes to conlang lines, everyone is a second language learner!  Thanks to my professional background in foreign language teaching and language acquisition, specifically in learning to hear and pronounce the sounds of foreign languages, I can provide individualized accent coaching, meeting each member of your cast right where their skills are and guiding them to an expert, dynamic delivery!

Contact
E-mail me at [email protected] for your constructed language consultation!
I have been a member of the Language Creation Society since the release of Archive 81 in 2022.

Languages: Toolbox and Parts Shop

Those of us who do constructed languages respect existing languages not just in their own right, but as the most authentic kind of inspiration for creating new languages.  Drawing on training in linguistics and experience with a broad variety of living and historical languages, we can combine and recombine features of human languages to create entirely new ones.  While any conlanger can draw inspiration from any languages they can learn about, more extensive experience with a broad range of languages is extremely helpful.

My own language experience, aside from my native English and German, which I teach professionally, includes many Germanic languages (Dutch, Icelandic, Norwegian, Gothic, Old Norse, Old English, Old Saxon, Old High German, Middle High German), Turkic languages (Turkish, Uzbek), and additional exploration of the Semitic languages (Arabic, Syriac), tone systems (Mandarin and other Chinese varieties, Bantu languages of Africa), and North American indigenous languages (e.g., txʷəlšucid, a language of the Coast Salish family spoken in northern Washington State and southern British Columbia; Stoney Nakoda, a Souian language spoken in southwest Alberta).

In addition, I'm familiar with several existing constructed languages and the design choices of their creators (e.g., Dothraki, Esperanto, Ithkuil, Klingon, Láadan, and Khuzdul and the Elvish languages of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth).

Current Language Creation Projects

Currently, I'm working on 4 human-usable a priori language creation projects...
  • Antichthonian is the artlang spoken by the Antichthonian akephaloi described in sources from Antiquity and early modern Europe by cultures around the world near the equator, where tales of these marsupial people from the Southern Hemisphere reached ancient historians and naturalists.
  • Nwâfzjùúl is the artlang spoken by the Gwìífeza̋kwáás zȍfû Nwâfzjùúl, an extraterrestrial species of spacefaring explorers from Zjǎŋgwéèts, an earthlike moon of a gas giant orbiting the orange-red dwarf star Zéèl, who have periodically visited Earth in survey missions every few million years.
  • Paranthropic is a multimodal artlang that uses both speech sounds and facial and manual gestures. It is spoken by the modern descendants of some of humanity's hominin cousins who have been travelling interstellar space with the Gwìífeza̋kwáás zȍfû Nwâfzjùúl since the latter's last scientific survey of Earth about 2 million years ago.
  • Pelàrkast is an artlang spoken in the nation of Pelàrkas, situated in a fantasy/brasspunk setting.  This conlanging/worldbuilding project is a collaboration with other conlangers from the Language Creation Society, and an opportunity for us to learn from each others' expertise and conlanging techniques.
  • Nejtiesie is an artlang/engelang language isolate spoken in NesKoitoeplen Rólon, a remote cryptocartographic island nation in the Indian Ocean. The aim of the ongoing Nejtiesie project is to develop a tool for foreign language teacher professional development workshops, to remind them of the perspective of a beginning language learner.

 Previous Constructed Language Design Work

Find me on IMDb for my contribution to Episodes 6-8!

Archive 81 (Netflix Original Series)

In 2020-2021 I was contracted to create the Baldung constructed language for the Netflix Original hit show Archive 81, which released in January of 2022.  Following the creative and aesthetic vision of creator Rebecca Sonnenshine and the context of the show's scripts, I created a fictitious late medieval Germanic dialect based primarily on the Old Saxon language of Northern Europe.  Thanks to the attention to linguistic detail and elements of authentic Germanic poetry, this custom language constructed for use by the enigmatic Baldung witches enhanced the show's aesthetic quality and fans' enjoyment of the streaming series.
You can find out more about my Baldung project in the press and on YouTube.

Space: The Infinite Edge
(Mind's Eye Society LARP)

In 2017-2018 I led a team of Mind's Eye Society volunteers (now Modern Enigma Society) in creating a conlang for the Space: The Infinite Edge LARP chronicle.  We created the language of the Stygians, an alien race that was already crossing the galaxy through the Underworld to visit distant worlds when ancient Sumer in Mesopotamia was young.  As an a posteriori conlang, Stygian sounds, words, and grammar are derived from Sumerian.
Listen to the audio of this Stygian text or get a closer look!
Over several millennia of independent use by extraterrestrials, Stygian developed its own phoneme inventory, including ejective obstruents, and a lexical high-low tone contrast (via multiple stages of tonogenesis).  Stygian, often used for spaceship bulkheads in zero G settings, uses a syllabic featural script that is conceptually similar to Korean Hangul.  It is written in a flowing reverse boustrophedon style (similar to the Rongorongo script of Rapa Nui) along a cursive axis similar to Modi, Balbodh, and Bengali.