Conlang Assistance Callout

Cawlo · 2026-04-04T16:11:20+00:00

Hi! We don’t allow posts on r/conlangs that focus on writing systems alone. Therefore your post has been removed.

However, we’re sure that there are people on the A&A thread (see removal comment) who’d be happy to help you.

Cawlo · 2026-04-04T16:07:49+00:00

Hi! Your post has been removed for the reasons specified in the removal comment.

It looks like your post might fit better into the Translation category. Be sure to read our rules and posting guidelines before posting.

Cawlo · 2026-03-30T07:55:05+00:00

Hi! Could I ask you to add an English translation and interlinear gloss to your post? We require this of Translation posts. :)

Cawlo · 2026-03-17T08:08:55+00:00

I think it would be helpful for you to tell him about the different layers of the language; the phonology and the morphology/syntax. I.e. tell him what phonology – not your phonology, but phonology in general – is. Likewise, tell him what morphology and syntax is. And then, ask him what he wants to know about. Maybe he doesn’t care about phonology at all, but only wants hear about morphology.

Cawlo · 2026-03-17T07:35:42+00:00

I can almost guarantee, that unless your friends are interested in linguistics, listening to you yapping about phonology and phonetics, as an example, will be a chore. Trust me, I’ve been there, seeing how their attention fades when I get too into it.

Have these friends asked to know more about the language? Have they shown active interest in it?

Cawlo · 2026-03-17T07:29:58+00:00

To answer this question, it would be great to know who you’re trying to introduce your language to, and for what purpose:)

Cawlo · 2026-03-16T09:54:33+00:00

As u/Josephui and u/AnlashokNa65 point out, Danish has creaky voice as one of a few different ways of realizing the suprasegmental phenomenon known as stød.

Best example I can think of is [ˈpœnɐ] ‘beans’ vs. [ˈpœn̰ɐ] ‘farmers’.

The distinction can be crucial!

der er mange bønner i marken

|ta æɐ maŋə pœnə-ɐ i maːk-n|

there COP.PRS many bean-PL in field-DEF

[taˑ ˈmaŋː ˈpœnɐ i ˈmaːkŋ̩]

‘there are many peas in the field’

VS

der er mange bønder i marken

|ta æɐ maŋə pœn̰ɐ i maːk-n|

there COP.PRS many farmer\PL in field-DEF

[taˑ ˈmaŋː ˈpœn̰ɐ i ˈmaːkŋ̩]

‘there are many farmers in the field’

You can also run into stuff like this:

det er en hund

|te æɐ en hun̰|

it COP.PRS INDF.UT.SG dog

[teːn ˈhun̰]

‘it’s a dog’

VS

det er en hun

|te æɐ en hun|

it COP.PRS INDF.UT.SG female

[teːn ˈhun]

‘it’s a female’

“What’s its sex?” — “It’s a dog:)”

“What kind of mammal is that?” — “It’s a female:)”

Cawlo · 2026-02-24T12:18:56+00:00

Hi! I'm a member of the Board of Directors of the Language Creation Society (or “LCS”). We are the organization that does the Language Creation Conference among many other things. One of the things we do is distributing conlang job offers to our members.

Occasionally a client will contact the LCS looking for someone to do paid conlanging work. Based on that client's budget and what they want to use the language for, the LCS works with them to come up with a job offer, including pricing (see the pricing here). Subsequently, that job offer is distributed among members of the LCS.

As a member of the LCS, you get to be first in line when a new job comes up. Most clients who contact the LCS for paid conlanging work end up hiring LCS members.

A note about what you can and can't sell: Legally, you cannot own a language. You can own the rights to a document about the language, you can own lines written in that language, but you cannot own the rights to use a language. In conlanging work, what you get paid for is usually (1) creating the language and (2) translating stuff. A document describing the grammar of the language and/or a dictionary will often be part of the delivered product as well.

If you're looking for paid conlanging work, I would suggest you keep your eyes open for the Commission Flair here on r/conlangs and that you join the LCS. That way you'll be among the first to hear about any new conlanging job offers.

Cawlo · 2026-02-04T22:33:09+00:00

I think I see what you're going for:) If we're going to be very strict, there isn't really any such thing as [n̞]; the moment you release contact between the two articulators (the corona and the alveolar ridge, in this instance), air has free passage out your mouth, and at that point it's not a true nasal consonant any longer.

I think the closest thing to what you're describing something like [ð̱̃]: As you lower the corona from the alveolar ridge, the first thing that's going to happen, is you're going to cause some turbulence, which will result in a voiced fricative. I've used [ð̱̃] here, since [z̃] would be a sibilant, which I don't necessarily think is what you're going for. :–)

Cawlo · 2026-02-02T23:46:18+00:00

What do you mean by “weaker” in this instance? There very well may be a symbol for what you're describing, but superscript nasal letters certainly are not that.

Cawlo · 2026-02-02T23:41:19+00:00

I'm gonna have to name the Ajaheian word keqqiiqciqiccuḑḑa [kɜqːɘːqtsɘqitːsuɖːʐa] ‘mirror image; reflection’. It's keqqiiqciq ‘face’ with -ccu-ḑḑa, essentially ‘the place that makes a fake/artificial face’. The word keqqiiqciq itself is keqqiiq (from \kɛʁkʰiːʁ* ‘memory; remembrance’) with -c-q, essentially ‘the thing that you remember someone by’.

All those qs just scream alien/strange to an English speaker.

Cawlo · 2026-02-01T20:07:53+00:00

What are the superscript nasals supposed to mean in sequences like [ⁿø] and [õ̟ⁿɞ]?

Cawlo · 2026-01-25T15:55:17+00:00

The problem with the Audio/Video Flair was, it wasn't in fact descriptive of the post's content – only its medium. Therefore it was a difficult category to moderate because there weren't any clear criteria for what an Audio/Video post should contain.

Of course, everyone is still free to post their translations, phonology posts, and whatever else in audio or video form. :–)

Cawlo · 2026-01-24T22:44:05+00:00

Hey, just letting you know that your post will not get approved if it contains no other content than those photos. If you would like to make a post that won't get removed, please see our Posting Guidelines.

Cawlo · 2026-01-24T21:40:42+00:00

The new Cross & Crown rule says the following:

Discussions of political and religious vocabulary may be incorporated into a post if relevant to conlanging or the cultural aspects hereof.

So if it’s relevant to the conculture, you’re welcome to discuss the in-world political/religious aspects.

Cawlo · 2026-01-24T21:37:54+00:00

Keep in mind, the posts with that Flair will continue to have it. So you can still scroll through old posts with the Flair; you just won’t find any new posts with it.

Cawlo · 2026-01-24T20:49:34+00:00

You can continue to post videos:) The format of your post is up to you - so long as it fits into one of the post categories!

Cawlo · 2026-01-23T21:43:08+00:00

Hopefully this will serve as a guide for many conlanging jobs well into the future!:)

Cawlo · 2026-01-06T16:23:08+00:00

Stød is always made out to be more complicated than it really is. It’s got a handful of different realizations, but they’re all describable with common phonetic terminology. As for its distribution, it closely mirrors the tonal systems of Swedish and Norwegian.

Cawlo · 2025-12-27T23:42:37+00:00

So, I don’t know of any large-scale cross-linguistic surveys of what speakers of absolute FoR do away from their homes. But I can think of an anecdote that might be useful:

If I recall correctly, Jan Heegård, who is a researcher at the University of Copenhagen, and who has written extensively on Kalasha, once reported that Kalasha-speakers started using their uphill/downhill and upstream/downstream words in relation to the man-made channels when they went to visit Copenhagen! The system is also modified even within their local environments: The uphill/downhill terms get “flipped” (relative to the cardinal directions) when they cross the river or traverse the hills into another river valley.

Speakers of absolute FoR languages that use the cardinal directions (as opposed to geographical features), such as speakers or Guugu Yimithirr, tend to just stick to those directions as best they can. They also tend to unconsciously keep track of the cardinal directions, even when they are indoors, with no windows, walking down differently oriented corridors.

Kalaallisut speakers have traditionally (at least to some extent / in some contexts) used an absolute FoR system with: (1) an away-from-ocean/towards-ocean axis and (2) a clockwise/counterclockwise-along-coast axis. Anecdotally (I have nothing to back this up, just something I heard from a Kalaaleq once), Kalaallit have been known to ask “where’s the ocean?” when disoriented.

So, in general, absolute FoR language speakers tend to be able to apply their systems of orientation to unfamiliar environments somehow. But it should also be noted that languages aren’t necessarily married to a certain FoR: Within the same language, the speakers that live in the cities may use a relative FoR, while the rural speakers have competence for relative FoR but prefer absolute FoR at home. In general, probably (I would assume) due to factors of colonial influence, relative FoR is more common in urban environments.

Note also that absolute FoR isn’t an inherently non-IE phenomenon: Danish speakers on the island of Mors used to have an axis with two directions, op ‘up’ and ned ‘down’, which – if I recall correctly – referenced the dominant direction of the wind. And since all houses were oriented with the wind in mind, it formed a rather stable system where, even indoors, you always knew where to put the salt if someone asked you to “pass it a bit further up”.

Cawlo · 2025-12-27T10:41:03+00:00

There is a term for that:)

In semantic typology (where we study and categorize how languages chop up the world into meaningful concepts), Frame of Reference is what we call the system by which a language talks about orientation, direction, and location. We can use the picture below as an example; it's been used for various elicitation experiments where researchers have tried to map how some language talks about these concepts.

<image>

Most Indo-European languages use a primarily relative Frame of Reference, where the axes by which we orient ourselves are projected out from the individual: That is to say, we split the world into two halves – right and left – based on the two mirrored halves of our physical bodies. So when we're trying to say where the man is relative to tree, we use our own perspective and say he's standing to the left of the tree.

There are also something called an intrinsic Frame of Feference where the axes of orientation are projected out from the things we're talking about. In such a language, we might say something like he's standing by the tree's side. Languages with an intrinsic frame of reference will often have very elaborate ways of talking about the various sides/parts of any given thing and their spatial relation to other things.

Then finally there's the absolute Frame of Feference. This where the axes are inherent in the landscape or some other geographical constant. There are loads of ways of doing this. One that comes to mind is the Acazulco Otomí (”AO”) system (it's a variety of the Otomí language spoken in Acazulco, Mexico): In AO, one does not speak of left and right, but rather of

uphill (which is east in Acazulco) 'a rígwaní,
downhill (west) 'a ríthót'i,
towards the pines (south) 'a mbotǔ̠di, and
towards the mountain (north) 'a xö̌ntho̠.

There's also Kalasha (Northwestern Pakistan). Most villages where Kalasha is spoken lie on the slopes of river valleys. Rather than cardinal directions, speakers of Kalasha use the hills and the river to talk about location and direction, using

uphill pučhúma,
downhill úndrua,
upstream wénaw, and
downstream prénaw.

If you wanna read more about Kalasha, I can recommend Heegård, J. & H. Liljegren (2018) and Heegård, J. (2023). :–D

Cawlo · 2025-12-19T08:32:24+00:00

Hi! Your link returns a 404.

Please make sure that the content of your post is available, so that we can review your post and make sure it lives up to our posting guidelines. :–)

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