How to Make a Conlang - Episode 1: Phonology

This video begins our series on how to make your own constructed language! This episode looks at phonology - sounds and sound systems. What are sounds? How are they produced? What types are there? Which do you add to your conlang and how?

Further reading:

Get ahead of the crowd for future episodes:

Chapters:
00:00 Phonology
00:50 Classifying sounds
1:33 English's problems
3:14 The IPA
4:54 Consonants
19:52 Interlude
20:56 Vowels
27:18 Allophony
29:11 Phonemes
30:14 Syllables
32:03 Basic sounds
34:36 Phonaesthetics
36:54 Symmetry
40:03 Sign languages
41:45 Non-human languages
42:57 Outro

[LexisLang]

And it's done. Almost 4 months in the making and many difficulties, episode one is finally here! It's an absolute colossus, but hopefully you enjoy. If you haven't seen the intro video ("episode 0", let's say), I recommend you give it a watch - it'll contextualise the whole series. There's a link in the description or check my channel page. More exciting things coming soon, so stay tuned!

Btw, what do you think of the new music? I'm thinking of transitioning to it fully from my old one - it's much easier on the ears. Let me know your thoughts! :D

[trentonbuchert]

I’ve watched a lot of conlang tutorials and I’ve unfortunately found rather few of them that feel very practical. Ironically, perhaps the most helpful tutorials for me were the ones that didn’t encourage naturalism and instead focused on the artistic side of constructing a language.

Regardless, I think this is a good video.

[pattap]

I can feel your passion for languages. I’d love to learn more from you.
(Excuse my English, I’m not a native.)😅

[_haida]

You've truly knocked it out of the park with this one! Amazing video, can't wait for the other ones of this series

[deithlan]

Great video!
The only nitpick I maybe would give it is that your example of /s/-/z/ variation in English plurals is not one of allophony, as both /s/ and /z/ are two properly distinct phonemes in English. The example you presented is instead one of allomorphy! Where one morpheme (the plural marker) will change forms according to its environment.
A better example of allophony in English could be how the phoneme /h/ will change to a [ç] when in front of an /i/!

[robloxuniverses]

Wait this is new i thought this was like months old

[lXBlackWolfXl]

Regarding 'phonoaesthetics', the simple frequency of sounds also makes a difference. A word like 'lekel' sounds nicer than 'kelek', despite having the same phonemes and even syllable structure. Also, real languages rarely have their phonemes equally represented. In English for instance, the phone /z/ is famous for being rare. Though your phoneme inventory itself can have an effect on frequency. If you have really harsh-sound dorsal sounds, this will be mitigated if you have a high number of coronals since if all are equally represented, then the dorsals will be rarer than the coronals simply because there's more coronals. Another thing to note is that humans tend to find vowel-heavy words nicer sounding than consonant heavy ones. Just look at how people describe Spanish compared to German. You see this demonstrated in fantasy conlangs. Elvish languages tend to be really heavy on liquids, vowels, and open syllables. Orcish conlangs though tend to be really heavy on dorsals and stops, and have lots of closed syllables and even consonant clusters.

I really think more research needs to be done to determine what effect phonemes and phonotactics have on a language's sound. Its hard to pick something when you're given no hint as to what effect everything has. Worse yet, on the freak occasions someone brings it up, they tend to just tell you how to make an Elvish conlang and an 'evil' one, seriously.

Also, in the past I've seen it stated that preferably a language should sound as flat as possible. Can you imagine a woman speaking a harsh-sound orc conlang? Or writing a comedy in it? Or telling a joke? Or writing a horror story in a language like Quenya? Obviously, if you want a language to be usable, or at least make it realistic, it needs to sound as neutral as possible. Nobody however ever says a thing about how to accomplish that.

Phonoaesthetics is a neat idea that was sorely needed, but its still a new field that clearly needs a lot of development.

[Corben-pqnc]

I’ve made many languages thanks to you

[sebastianascencio]

Thanks for your effort. Your content is trully invaluable :)

[entwistlefromthewho]

Why did you pair-up /s/ and /ɬ/ in the Welsh table as having symmetry? There is no symmetry between these two sounds: they're both unvoiced and different places of articulation.

[chao]

great video but making ortography already the second episode seems slightly backwards... why would you create a writing system when there is still nothing to write with it?