This page showcases my conlanging based on select excerpts.
My approach to conlanging varies significantly based on my goal for a specific conlang, but generally aims for naturalism within the relevant project’s confines.
This aligns with my view of conlanging as either experimental linguistics – where, apart from some key feature(s) to be investigated, other parameters should remain mostly unchanged – or speculative linguistics in analogy with speculative fiction, using conlangs as a creative medium.
Click on any of the accordion items below to open and learn more.
Excerpts and Explanations
Given this conlang’s origin story as a project during my MA in Medical Humanities, it is to date less fleshed out than I’d like, and should be deemed a sketch or excerpt from a language rather than its full form.
The goal was to sketch a language with linguistic features that are usually – in pathologising accounts – seen as autistic language deficits/differences in order to demonstrate that such differences are language-dependent and always relate to societal neuronormative standards.
The conlang is presented in form of a – perhaps somewhat flippantly written – language guide to reflect the target audience, assumed to have little prior linguistic knowledge. The following is an excerpt from that language guide, but you’ll also find the full version as well as more in-depth explanations here.
This conlang serves as background worldbuilding in a secondary-world fantasy setting for fiction. While it is an a priori conlang, i.e. developed from scratch, I wanted to invoke specific associations with the language’s orthography and (to a lesser degree) grammar and phonology.
This is why Castlelandish incorporates a form of initial mutation; a morphological feature for which Celtic languages are famous. However, the historical processes – also sketched during the development – which gave rise to the feature in Castlelandish were quite different to those in Celtic languages, given this is a secondary-world setting.
Choices regarding the orthography were also made so as to give the language a Celtic, in particular (Irish and, first and foremost, Scottish) Gaelic, look; see for instance the frequent use of clusters comprising preceded by another consonant. Nevertheless, the language as a whole functions very differently from any inspirations.