So You Want To / Create a Language Family

So you’ve created a conlang. Now you want to turn it into a full-fledged language family. Language families emerge when proto-languages diverge into multiple languages. Those languages then often diverge into multiple other languages that evolve over time.

All languages evolve over time with slight changes every century. Over time, these changes add up to the formation of entirely new languages. If a group of people speaking one language diverges into two groups that do not contact each other or rarely contact each other afterward (as was common in pre-modern times), they will take different directions and eventually evolve into two separate languages that are not mutually intelligible.

Creating a language family rather than a single conlang can add realism to your world. In addition, they can represent historical trade and migrations occurring over time within your world.

Step 1: Start with Your Proto-Language

• Begin with your proto-language. Find its phonology and transcribe it into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Keep a list of the phonemes (sounds) that your language contains in the IPA.
• Determine its syllable structure. How many consonants before and after the vowel are allowed in a syllable in your language? How many consonants are necessary in a syllable (if applicable) Transcribe it like (C)(C)V(C)(C), with C representing consonants and V representing vowels. Letters in parentheses represent optional consonants/vowels, while letters not in parentheses represent mandatory consonants/vowels.
  • If your language has different syllable structures for initial, medial, and final syllables; list them
• Transcribe key grammatical features. Determine the order in which the subject (S), verb (V), and object (O) go in. For example, English is a subject-verb-object (SVO) word order language. Hindi is a SOV language.
• Do adjectives come before or after their nouns? Do adverbs come before or after their verbs?
• Does your language use articles (a/an, the, etc.)? If it does, describe what purpose each article performs.
• If your language contains inflectional endings on nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and/or conjunctions, list them. Create a chart similar to this one listing all verb/noun inflectional endings: https://imgur.com/6opI9cG. If your language includes different inflectional endings for different categories of verbs or nouns, create a chart for all of them.
• If your inflectional language contains any grammatical exceptions, create a list of them.

Step 2: Create a Language Family Tree

• Create a language family tree. This should look something similar to this one: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/IndoEuropeanTree.svg
• Your language family tree should include the dates at which each language on it was first spoken.
• If languages that you are creating have changed over time to the point where they are no longer mutually intelligible, count them as separate languages.
• Create proto-languages for language branches that your language will diverge into using the following steps.
• After you have finished creating those languages using sound and grammatical changes, use those as new proto-languages that diverge into several new languages and repeat from step 1.

Step 3: Choose Sound Shifts

After you have finished the first two steps, determine which sound shifts you want to add to your diverged language.

Sound shifts are when phonemes (individual sounds) or combinations of phonemes within a language are replaced by similar phonemes or combinations of similar phonemes.

Types of Sound Shifts

• There are several types of sound shifts, all of which are described below:
  • Assimilation: When a sound becomes more similar to another sound (taking a path through the IPA chart towards the targeted phoneme).
  • Dissimilation: When a sound becomes less similar to another sound (taking a path through the IPA chart away from the targeted phoneme).
  • Lenition: When a consonant changes from a stop to affricate or fricative.
  • Fortition: When a consonant changes from an affricate or fricative to a stop.
  • Nasalization: When a vowel followed by a nasalized consonant changes into a nasalized vowel.
  • Elision, aphaeresis, syncope, and apocope: When sounds are lost in a certain position within a word.
    • Elision: The loss of unstressed sounds.
    • Aphaeresis: The loss of sounds at the beginning of words, usually sporadically.
    • Syncope: The loss of sounds in the middle of words, usually sporadically.
    • Apocope: The loss of sounds at the end of words, usually sporadically.
  • Epenthesis: The introduction of a sound between two adjacent sounds, either irregularly or regularly.
  • Prothesis: The introduction of a vowel before consonants at the beginning of words.
  • Haplology: When a repeated syllable is deleted in commonly used words. (ex. haplology > haplogy)
  • Metathesis: When two sounds switch places. This is usually sporadic and not part of a complete sound law. Write down all examples of metathesis in words that you will change in your list of sound laws.
  • Sandhi: When consonants change at boundaries between words. This generally takes the form of X consonant changes to Y consonant before Z consonant.

Create Sound Laws

After selecting sound shifts from the changes listed above, create sound laws. A sound law is the list of all sound shifts that apply to your language evolving from one to another.

Sound shifts sometimes arise because speakers from another language learn the language in question. Since they have difficulty pronouncing many of the phonemes, they substitute them with others. If a large number of people with a different first language learn the language in question, this may become a valid sound shift and become accepted by native speakers.

If you wish to consider this into your language, look for similar phonemes in the source language and apply them to your language. Substitute similar phonemes into your language. If they have trouble pronouncing a certain syllable structure, add vowels or remove consonants to make it easier for them to pronounce as a sound shift itself.

First, create a list of phonemes that you wish to sound shift. Then, determine what phonemes or tonemes could result using the following resource cataloging every known sound shift from a parent language to all of its daughter languages: https://chridd.nfshost.com/diachronica/

Create a sound law using a list; an example (late Vulgar Latin to Old Spanish) is shown here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Spanish_language#Internal_history

Step 4: Choose Tone Shifts and Tonogenesis

If your language is tonal, you may want to add some tone shifts. Tone shifts are similar to sound shifts but result in tones changing to different tones.

Tonogenesis is when tones develop in a previously non tonal language. This often happens when speakers of a different tonal language learn the proto-language. Tone shifts are when a tonal language changes which tones it uses in speech.

Laws of Tonogenesis

Tones generally form based on the onset or coda consonants in a syllable. The onset consonant is the first consonant in the syllable and the coda consonant the last.

Here are the tone patterns for all onsets and codas in a language. Low means a plateaued low tone or a falling tone. Mid means a neutral tone. High means a plateaued high tone or a rising tone.

Onsets

• Voiced nasals: Low
• Voiced plosives: Low
• Fricatives: Low
• Voiced sonorants: Low
• Breathy voiced plosives: Breathy-Low
• Voiceless approximates: Mid
• Glottal stop: Mid
• Voiced fricatives: Mid/High
• Voiceless nasals: High
• Tenuis plosives: High
• Aspirated plosives: High
• Voiceless liquids: High
• Implosives: Creaky-High

Codas

• Voiceless nasals: Low
• Aspirated plosives: Low
• Voiced plosives: Low
• Fricatives: Low
• Voiceless sonorants: Low
• Implosives: Low-Creaky
• Glottal stop: Mid
• Long vowel or rising diphthong: Mid
• Voiced nasals: High
• Tenuis plosives: High
• Voiced sonorants: High
• Breathy voiced plosives: High-Breathy

Tone Shifts

Tone shifts refer to languages with tones replacing their tones with new tones. Start by creating a list of tones present in your language. Then, run them through this to determine which tones could replace them: https://chridd.nfshost.com/diachronica/

After doing so, make a list of tonal shifts similar to sound shifts and list them.

Step 5: Translate Phonology to Orthography

Now that you have created sound shifts, create a list of phonemes found in your new language. Determine what letters/syllable signs that you will use to transcribe each of the new phonemes. Create a new orthography for your new language.

If your orthography is not phonemic, create a pronunciation key that includes all of the phonemes to teach the language. You can either use the IPA or create your own notation that suits your language, such as pinyin.

Step 6: Determine Prefix, Suffix, and Ablaut Changes

After you have completed the above three steps, take out your inflectional chart and chart of prefixes and suffixes. Sound shift any prefixes/suffixes/ablauts that have changed when sound shifts occurred. For example, the inflectional suffix -pin could change to -fiŋ if there are p > f and n > ŋ sound changes.

Create a new inflectional table with all prefixes and suffixes sound shifted to their new values.

Step 7: Pick Semantic Shifts and Suppletion

At this point, you can determine which grammatical changes and suppletion you want to include in your new language. The two terms are defined below.

Semantic Shift

Semantic shift occurs when the definition and/or connotations of a word changes. For example, the word “awful” once meant “inspiring wonder (awe)” and “idiot” was once a medical term for intellectually disabled people.

Semantic shift can be triggered in several ways:

• Fuzziness (the word is not well-defined and a more specific meaning is given to it)
  • A subcategory of fuzziness is dominance of the prototype, which occurs when a specific definition of the word becomes more widely used following an incident (ex. “segregation” now generally refers to acts of racial discrimination rather than its original meaning of “separating or setting apart”)
• Linguistic prescriptivism (the word is given a more specific definition by an authoritative source such as a reputable dictionary)
• Euphemistic treadmill (the word describes a topic that is considered taboo or controversial in a society and is continuously replaced by newer words to avoid social stigma)
  • Words used to refer to sexual intercourse, excretory functions, and violence/aggression have been repeatedly replaced to avoid the social stigma associated with the former word; “shit” and “piss” were previously socially acceptable words to describe such functions
• Aesthetic-formal (the word is phonetically similar to a word considered offensive or taboo and becomes avoided; the word “niggardly,” meaning “withholding for the sake of meanness or greed” has become taboo owing to its phonetic similarity to an offensive word)
• Cultural importance (using more fanciful or formal words to describe a concept because the culture that speaks the language places a high importance on said concept)
• Changes in the referents (changes in the world lead to different uses for words; “computer” originally referred to a person calculating math problems by hand)
• Worldview changes (changes in how the world is perceived; the term Negroid isn’t used to refer to a black person today)
• Prestige/fashion (a different language gains prestige and a loanword from it becomes more widely used, such as “cilantro” rather than “coriander”)

Suppletion

Suppletion is when a word is replaced entirely by a synonym or word affected by semantic shift. For example “goed” was replaced by “went” during the course of grammatical changes of English. If you wish to include suppletion in your language, write down a list of words that will be replaced by sound shifted words from the original language.

Step 8: Pick Grammatical Changes

Word order, adjective-noun order, and adverb-verb order change over time in languages.

A single word order change can only change the order of subject and verb or the order of the verb and object, never both at the same time. For example, SOV word order can change to SVO, but not VSO without first changing to SVO.

The most common word order change is SOV to SVO. The inverse word order shift is very rare in comparison, and generally only occurs under the influence of a SOV language.

The same applies with adjective-noun order and adverb-verb order, which can reverse (often because of a different language’s influence)

Write down any word order changes that you have in mind for your new language.

Step 9: Wrapping It Up

Create a new document detailing your new language. List all words in their new orthography with a pronunciation guide to show how they are pronounced. Create a grammatical guide to detail how the language is used.

After creating this document, your new language is finalized!

Step 10: Repeat from Step 1

Repeat the process from step 1 for each of the other languages in your family tree. Apply new sound shifts and grammatical changes for each language that you are creating using the original conlang.

You can also use your new language as the parent language to create new languages as part of your family tree, if that is what it calls for.