Tex:
One… difficulty that I see with this is that there’s a thin line between adaptation of a culture and appropriation of a culture, and a lot of it boils down to why you picked the language you did. Are you carrying over other aspects of Italian culture, such as food, clothing, and customs? Or are you taking the language out of context? Just adding in Portuguese won’t throw readers off enough, if it’s the latter case, and you run the risk of upsetting some readers if your intentions aren’t clear.
What do you consider “Italian”-ness? It might help to compare Italian to other Romance languages, and see if what you consider hallmarks of Italian are consistently markers of Italian and Italian alone. Depending on what you find, you may either look into the different dialects of Italian (Regional Italian, Languages of Italy ), further back in Italian’s history (also History of Latin ), or to linguistic cousins of Italian ( Romance_languages ).
Since you seem to be conlanging a new language a posteriori, I would personally recommend at least three languages, in order to have enough material to work with and avoid looking too much like any one source language. One Reddit thread [ https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/370blu/making_a_conlang_based_on_real_languages_how_to/ ] makes an excellent point, with pertinent advice, on how to create new vocabulary in a conlang based on real-life languages. One term I think you may find helpful to know for this is relexification, as it covers the topic of new words being added into language based upon another language’s vocabulary set.
Zompist has a Language Construction Kit [ https://www.zompist.com/kitlong.html ] , which gives an excellent primer on the finer points of linguistics as applied to conlangs. This ask on StackExchange’s Worldbuilding section gives in-house resources for conlanging, and there’s an entire conlang section on Wikia to sample from.
David Crystal has published a book, Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (ISBN: 978-0-521-51698-3, for the third edition), which should be immensely helpful if you’re able to access it – Cambridge University has a PDF on the book’s front matter, which also lists a table of contents, so you have some starting points to work off of.
Saphira:
If you want to base a language on another language, you may have accidentally made your job a thousand times easier. There are a few components to simple con-langs (I am not educated enough for complex ones, Vulgar gave me the best willies in years), which can be broken down into a few groups.
1. How it looks. These are your characters, your symbols, and your punctuation. This is your visible aesthetic. To fine tune this up, write your letters often. Consider yourself relearning how to write, and the more you do the characters the more they will mutate into chaos. They’ll become consistent and easy to write eventually, and there you go. It’s a wild ride. Enjoy this one.
2. The Vocabulary. This is your dictionary, and honestly the most tedious bit. It can also be a fun part! I would start with casual conversation first (go through characters introducing each other) and you can work out from there. That will allow you to use the language in it’s most basic forms, so you can get the auditory or linguistic feel for how it sounds. Let’s start using Italian here. If there are specific sounds to Italian, specific linguistic tics and cues, start weaving them in here. Avoid whole words, just some auditory cues to the language, or how they pronounce certain letters.
3. Grammar. Here’s where having a base really helps. Granted you’re also working a lot from Latin here. Consider this language of yours Latin’s Grandson. Working from these two languages, it can help how you orient your words in a sentence, how verbs are conjugated, how punctuation (any non-verbal parts of the language) influences the meaning and the speaking of the words. You can literally and directly rip from Italian here. Draw parallels, or simply use Italian as inspirational points, allowing you to use similar concepts in entirely alien ways. You can go as simple or as complex as you want, and learning more about how language works and what a lot of those symbols linguistic study uses will go a long way.
Creating a language is a major undertaking, but in its true form, a language is born and refined in use, not in a lab.
Brainstormed:
Honestly, how much of it will you be using? Names for places and people and cultural things, sure, but the actual story will be (I’m assuming) in English. If all you need is a naming language, that’s pretty simple! You can manually work out a consistent word pattern to use for names, as is guided somewhere in the Language Construction Kit mentioned by Tex, or you can use the free section of the Vulgar language generator to put in Italian-ish phonetics and generate thousands of words. Otherwise, you can look at Italian or other Romance-language slang and see how the slang words evolved from “proper” words, and then twist the rest of the language into a different-sounding version of itself. Kinda like how in future dystopian stories there’s always some corrupted version of a well known name, like Nuyaksee for New York City, or something similar.
If you need a real grammar set, but for simple things like short sentences, common cultural ritual phrases like How are you, or other relatively easy purposes, you can come up with a list of the most common words to quickly learn a language [ https://fluent-forever.com/the-method/vocabulary/base-vocabulary-list/ ] and then use Italian grammar, or another grammar structure. I would recommend using the grammar structure of a different Romance language, to prevent it from being just a copy-paste of Italian with different words.
Making a genuine, in-depth conlang is a huge undertaking, made both easier and more difficult by basing it off an existing language. You might have a good base to start from, but it requires at least decent if not fluent knowledge of how your base language works, and a consistent way of translating it over into your conlang form. If that’s your goal, I recommend you get to know Italian very well, if you don’t already, and then sit down and go through the Language Construction Kit, as it’s probably the best resource to guide you step-by-step through conlang creation.
Ok, so, I’m trying to create a language for my country which is based on Italy. I’ve been trying to base the language on Italian (and mixing some Portuguese so it isn’t just Italian) but I’m kind of stuck between too Italian and not enough Italian. Do you have any tips on building a language based on an already existing language? Thank you so much!
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