Goal: Set an intention for your language
Note: Focus on your reasons for wanting to create this language. This will be your guiding force throughout the year.
Tip: Write your goal in a place where you can see it and refer to it often as you work on your language.
Work focus: Organize/Plan/Structure
All too often, when we set out to create a language, we jump right into the language itself. We are so excited to start crafting the language that we open a document or a notebook and start listing features or otherwise drafting a shape that the language will take. While there isn’t anything inherently wrong with being so excited about a language that you jump right into the work, it is better to first take a step back and ask yourself, “Why? Why am I creating this language?” Having a goal for a language provides a context for it and its future features. It provides a reason for you to keep coming back to the language even when the language creation process gets to the sloggier bits—those moments when you feel like you’ve run out of ideas or when you just don’t want to tackle a particular grammatical feature. Those moments when you want to put the language in a drawer and move on to other things. If you intentionally set a goal for the language and yourself as a conlanger, it makes it a little bit easier and more meaningful to stick with the project, to move past the ruts.
A goal for the creating the language can be a driving force. Sometimes you may have a very specific linguistic goal for creating a language. These goals might be intended to expand your conlanging horizons. Maybe you want to use this year to create a language that has noun classes so you can explore how those might work in a system you create. Or maybe you want to push yourself to create a strict CV-structure language to play with a particular type of sound. But you don’t have to have any linguistic goals like that.
Your goal may be more personal. Maybe you want to create a language that makes you laugh, that will bring a smile to your face when you review its vocabulary list because its forms are so delightful to you. Maybe your goal is to work through the year to have a workable language because you have never created a language before and want to see what it is all about. Or maybe you are a seasoned conlanger who has lost the spark of joy conlanging used to bring you, and you want to discover it again but need a little push to sit down and create something every day.
Whatever your reasons, know that they are valid. Every reason you have for showing up here, showing up every day, is a valid one. It is yours and yours alone.
I encourage you to sit with this prompt for a while and take the time to isolate a prioritized goal from the swirl of ideas you might be having in this moment. If you are a journaling soul, you can spend time writing your thoughts as they occur to you to whittle them down. If you’re a list-maker, you could list your goals and then order them so you can focus on the first—and most important—goal. Maybe you prefer to draw out cognitive maps. Maybe you don’t like to write during this brainstorming process but instead prefer to give yourself mental space to meditate on it. Or maybe you have someone you can talk through your thoughts with because you need to vocalize them.
Just like your reasons are your own, so is your process. Embrace what process works best for you and identify a singular, most important goal you have in creating this language. Once you have landed on that goal, write it down in a visible place so you can return to it. If you are like me and itching to start a document, notebook, or binder for this yearlong language project, then I encourage you to create a title page that might look something like this:
MyConlang
By [put your preferred conlanging name here!]
Goal: [insert your conlanging goal here]
This title page has three parts to it: a name for your language, which I encourage you to leave as MyConlang or some other generic title for the time being. A language name is an incredibly important step that is often best taken when you have a sense for what the language will be. (There are, of course, times when a conlang name will take hold of you, and you may end up crafting a language structure to support that name.) Whatever placeholder you put there, make it something that you will easily be able to search for and replace later on. Something like MyConlang will likely never be written as a string of characters in your document except as a way to refer to your language. That means, later on, when you decided on a language name, you can simply run a “Find & Replace” search, replacing every instance of MyConlang with the language name you’ve newly minted.
Having your goal printed on your title page serves as a powerful reminder that your goal is even more important than the language features you describe in the document. The goal is your driving force.