Constructed Languages: From Tolkien's Elvish to Klingon

Tolkien Called It His "Secret Vice"

J.R.R. Tolkien gave a lecture to the Johnson Society at Oxford in 1931 titled "A Secret Vice," describing his private obsession with creating languages. He had been doing it since childhood. By the time The Lord of the Rings was published in 1954–1955, Tolkien had spent roughly four decades developing two complete languages — Quenya and Sindarin — with full phonologies, grammar systems, writing systems (Tengwar and Cirth), and etymological histories stretching back to fictional Proto-Elvish roots. He once described the novels as an excuse to create a world in which the languages could exist — not the other way around.

Tolkien was neither the first nor the last to construct a language from scratch, but his rigor set a standard. Modern language creation — "conlang" as both noun and verb — ranges from linguistically sophisticated artistic projects to simple cipher systems, from auxiliary languages intended for international communication to alien tongues created for film. The field attracts linguists, computer scientists, and hobbyists, and it has generated languages that real people actually learn and use.

Types of Constructed Languages

The Language Creation Society, founded in 2007, classifies conlangs by their purpose and method:

• Auxlangs (auxiliary languages): designed for international communication; maximize learnability; politically neutral; Esperanto is the archetype
• Artlangs (artistic languages): designed for aesthetic or narrative purposes; linguistic depth and internal consistency are valued; Tolkien's languages, Na'vi, Dothraki
• Engelangs (engineered languages): designed to test a linguistic theory, achieve logical consistency, or explore cognitive hypotheses; Lojban and Ithkuil are examples
• Jokelangs: parody languages; Pig Latin, Ubbi dubbi — minimal systematic structure, maximal fun

Quenya and Sindarin: Sixty Years of Linguistic Work

Tolkien's Elvish languages are linguistically remarkable not just in their detail but in their design philosophy. He wanted them to be beautiful — specifically, he wanted Quenya to have the quality he found in Finnish (whose grammar he encountered as a student) and Sindarin to have the melodic flow of Welsh.

Quenya is modeled on Finnish phonology: predominantly vowel-ending words, agglutinative morphology, vowel harmony, case system with 10 grammatical cases. Sindarin is modeled on Welsh: consonant mutations triggered by grammatical context, tensed verbal system, noun-adjective agreement in case and number. Both have documented historical development: Tolkien traced the evolution of sounds from "Common Eldarin" through intermediate stages using the comparative method of real historical linguistics — sound changes, regular and consistent, with the same rigor he would have applied to reconstructing a real proto-language.

Klingon: An Alien Language People Actually Learn

Marc Okrand developed Klingon for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) at Paramount's request. He was a trained linguist with a PhD from UC Berkeley, and he deliberately made Klingon violate the statistical typology of natural languages: its dominant word order is Object-Verb-Subject (OVS), which occurs in fewer than 1% of the world's natural languages. The consonant inventory includes the retroflex lateral affricate (tlh), the uvular affricate (Q), and implosive sounds not found in any major European language.

Okrand published The Klingon Dictionary in 1985. The Klingon Language Institute (KLI), founded in 1992 by d'Armond Speers, estimates approximately 20–30 highly fluent speakers (capable of extended conversation) and perhaps 200–250 people with functional conversational ability. Speers famously raised his son Alec as a Klingon speaker from birth until age 5 — an experiment in first-language acquisition that he later discussed at linguistics conferences. The language has been used to perform Shakespeare (Much Ado About Nothing, the KLI translation) and to stage operas.

Na'vi, Dothraki, and the Professional Conlanger

The commercial viability of high-quality constructed languages for film and television has created a small professional class of conlangers. Paul Frommer developed Na'vi for James Cameron's Avatar (2009), starting with Cameron's invented words and extrapolating a complete phonological and grammatical system. Na'vi has a tripartite morphosyntactic alignment (distinct subject marking for transitive and intransitive verbs — rarer than either nominative-accusative or ergative-absolutive systems), ejective consonants, and a phoneme inventory with the glottal stop and velar lateral fricative as distinctive features. An estimated 1,000–2,000 people have achieved conversational Na'vi ability.

David J. Peterson, winner of the Language Creation Society's first "Smiley Award," developed Dothraki and High Valyrian for HBO's Game of Thrones. Peterson's Dothraki drew on Mongolian, Turkish, Arabic, and Swahili for phonological and morphological inspiration, while High Valyrian was designed as a classical prestige language with complex noun class inflection. Peterson has since developed over 70 languages for film and television projects.

Esperanto: The Conlang That Became a Culture

L.L. Zamenhof published Lingvo Internacia (now known as Esperanto) in 1887 under the pseudonym "Dr. Esperanto" (one who hopes). His goal was a politically neutral auxiliary language that could enable international communication and reduce ethnonationalist conflict. The language is famously learnable: a study comparing learner progress across languages found Esperanto learners achieved equivalent fluency in approximately one-fifth the time required for major Western European languages.

Estimates of Esperanto speakers range from 500,000 to 2 million, with roughly 1,000 native speakers (called denaskuloj) raised speaking it from birth. The Universala Kongreso (Universal Congress) has been held annually since 1905 (interrupted only by the World Wars) and attracts 1,500–3,000 attendees. Esperanto has a complete literature, a film canon (Angoroj (1964) was the first feature film entirely in an artificial language), and a culture of international samideanoj (fellow idealists) that transcends the language itself.