I love languages. I did my degree as a double major in computer science and linguistics, not because I ever have any intention on working in the field, but because I found the subject so interesting—the computer science, on the other hand, I both love and intend to use in my career. Now, before I continue, I want to clarify that I do not actually speak any second language fluently. I do know a little French, and a little Italian, and I'm working on learning Esperanto right now.
Now, with that little primer out of the way, let's forget about real languages for a moment, and let's talk about conlangs. For those who do not know, conlang is a portmanteau of constructed language; essentially, a conlang is any language which has been purposefully designs and constructed for use as a spoken or written language use for communication. This distinguishes it from a natural language, such as the languages we are all familiar with, and speak every day, which change and evolve naturally over time, and formal languages, which are human constructed, but are not used for the purposes of communication. Examples of formal languages include mathematical notation, programming languages, markup languages, etc. All three of these types of languages share important features such as syntax and semantics.
Conlangs are a popular topic of conversation among writers and worldbuilders, especially among those who work in novel settings. This is because when you have new species, lots of different countries, and even entire new worlds, it doesn't really make sense for everyone to speak the same language, and if they're not on earth, then it doesn't really make sense for them to all speak different real-world languages like French, Swahili or Albanian. Because of this, many authors and worldbuilders choose to undertake the extremely complex task of conlanging.
Now this brings me to this very project. I've been debating for the last few days whether or not I wanted to bring conlanging into this project. I still haven't made up my mind on it, but I think for now I'm leaning towards not including it. I have two primary reasons for this. First, I don't believe Campfire currently has the capacity to store the information for more advanced conlanging like I would like to do. And second, it would be an insane amount of work; I believe I currently have almost 60 countries defined, and while I definitely wouldn't give each of them a unique language, I would probably have to come up with at least two dozen languages for it to feel right. I would rather put that energy into expanding the world, and future worlds in other ways.
I do eventually want to dive into conlanging at some point in this project, however I think I'll probably start doing that one a world which would reasonable only have two to three languages max. That being said, I do think that I will label each of the kingdoms with a language it primarily speaks, however I'll hold off on actually building out those languages.
- Michael