Skip to main content

My Top Six Conlanging Tools in 2025

Hello! I'm still alive. And I'm still conlanging.


A brief summary of the decade-long hiatus: we moved from California to Texas at the beginning of 2013, and I was really busy with work and starting a lightsaber group, cosplaying, gaming and other geeky things after the move. I wasn't sure what else I had to add to the conlanging space while all these movies and TV shows with amazing conlangs were dropping left and right.


In 2009, we got Avatar with the Na'avi conlang by Paul Frommer. In 2011, we got Game of Thrones with Dothraki fleshed out by the very awesome David Peterson. In 2013 we got Defiance, Syfy's TV series with multiple conlangs by the still very awesome David Peterson. Maybe I wanted to sit back and let the pros teach me for awhile, but I kept playing with conlanging here and there. Whenever I thought about MakeALAng, I couldn't get into the same headspace and come up with anything that I thought would be of broad interest. 


In 2022, I was amazed to find a few of my old posts being referenced in various articles and Youtube videos, which was incredibly flattering. My intent with MakeALang, from the beginning, was always to try and break down the complex bits of conlanging and simplify things both to increase my own understanding and hopefully make it more accessible for others.



This year I'm doing a lot of writing, and I wanted to write some more for MakeALang!


So lets start things off easy: a list of My Top Six Conlanging Tools in 2023.


1. IPA Chart. An interactive page showing all the IPA phonemes - and you can click to hear them. Basic but classic.


2. IPA Reader. An online tool that reads the IPA phonemes you input, and a great way to double-check you are getting your sounds right. 



3. LanguaGen. Made by the same guy that was behind the go-to Awkwords site (Ian A. Cook), LanguaGen is the new resource for word generation. A fantastic tool - simple and intuitive. Click the HELP button in the top right corner to get all the details, create the rules and it can generate as many variations as you need. There are some additional conlanging tools (still in beta but can be used) linked in the upper right of the screen tha are worth exploring, but may be higher level than what you're looking for. Good to have on hand for when you GET to that level, though.


4. Excel/Google Sheets/Open Office. Spreadsheets remain an incredibly useful conlanging tool. Google Sheets is accessible across devices


5. 625 Words. Years back I cited Rick Harrison's ULD as a good wordlist to use for word generation, which it still is. However, 2000 words is a tall order. 625 words is much more manageable and great for using as roots to combine and make other words. Links to pdf file that can be copies and pasted into spreadsheets.



6. Vulgerlang. If you want a computer to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, this is the tool for you. However, if you don't know any of the concepts and principals of linguistics, the results won't be so great. At the very least, this can be a great tool for gaining deeper understanding of how all the pieces of linguistics fit together. 

BUT, once you gain a better understanding of linguistics, Vulgerlang can really help speed things up, especially if you can give it a list of 625 words that you already like. 


So there you go, short and sweet. Have a great day and keep building your conlanging toolbox!

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tolkien's Alphabets

I was working on my fonts for my conlang again and I starting thinking about alphabets in general, and I thought it would be fun to do a post on Tolkien's Middle Earth alphabets, Cirth and Tengwar. First, let's take a look at Cirth , which was used to write Khuzdul, the dwarvish language, as well as Quenya and Sindarin, the elvish languages. It was based on the Norse & Anglo-Saxon Futhark runes. There's nothing very fancy about this alphabet, it functions much the same as our own; each glyph represent one character. But note that the different letters correspond to each other in certain ways: letters that are phonetically close to each other look similar. P and B, for example. B is pretty much the "voiced" form of P (voiced means that your vocal chords are engaged and vibrating). B looks just like P but its got that extra little stroke sticking out there, making it look like an R. Same thing for T and D, and K and G. And those are just the plosives; lo...
3 comments
Read more

Orthography - Making Your Own Alphabet

This is Part One, Part Two , Part Three The idea of making up my own alphabet was probably the first thing that attracted me to conlanging. After I learned Bulgarian, I made up a code that was based on Cirth and Bulgarian . I sent my brother the code and would mail him letters using it, just for fun. I started thinking about developing a new alphabet later, when I was playing the Myst games, and I saw the flowing script of D'Ni  (D'Ni is a conlang Cyan/Richard Watson developed for their games and books). First things to consider as you start developing your alphabet - What do you want? a phonetic alphabet a non-phonetic alphabet (like English) or a syllable-based alphabet (meaning one character per syllable, like po, kee, ot, or kel, would be represented by one character/Tibetan is syllabic) or an abjad, which would be a consonant-only-alphabet, and all vowels would be represented by diacritic marks (Hebrew and Arabic are examples) A little research on Omniglot will...
20 comments
Read more

Numbers in your Conlang

This topic comes up every once in awhile on the conlang forums - numbers in your conlang. This post goes out to you, Janko Gorenc. ;) Usually the biggest issue of these threads is simply, what base do you want for your number system and why? The base for your number system basically means, how many numbers are there, before you go up to the next "place" in the numeral system? Now, most of the world uses a base 10 number system, and its probably because people have 10 fingers. But we could have had a base 5 number system, and a lot of conlangers play with this. Or, you might be developing a language and culture for an alien culture that has 12 fingers, or six limbs, or nine tentacles! Whatever base you want, for whatever reason, I wanted to provide a brief tutorial on how to calculate or translate base 10 numbers into another base, or vice versa. If you want to know more about number systems before diving into this, read these Wikipedia articles on number systems....
4 comments
Read more