Conlang

A conlang, short for constructed language, is a language devised by a person or group for a particular purpose, unlike natural languages, which emerge gradually from human interaction. The purposes sort the field: international auxiliary languages such as Esperanto (1887) exist to be spoken, engineered languages pursue logical or experimental designs, and artistic languages exist for art and story. The practice is older than the label: Hildegard of Bingen's 12th-century Lingua Ignota is described as apparently the first entirely artificial language, Tolkien's Quenya and Sindarin fixed fiction's standard, and Klingon (1985), Na'vi and Dothraki carry the craft into modern film and television. One stated rationale matters most to novelists: a constructed language gives "fiction or an associated constructed setting an added layer of realism."

For a novelist a conlang is worldbuilding at its deepest layer: names, script fragments and grammar that imply a culture rather than decorate one. It is also a continuity surface, because every published word, name and rule of the language becomes canon that later chapters are read against, so choices belong in the story bible from the start. Begin small, with a sound system and a naming style that can survive hundreds of chapters. The full treatment is how to create a fictional language, and the realism a language buys is verisimilitude: a world whose names are consistent feels authored rather than improvised.