How to Invent a Conlang

Create your phonology. The phonology of your language will be the way that it sounds. If you want to make a very mellow, smooth sounding language like Italian or Telugu, incorporate a lot of relaxed vowels like i, ɛ  ə, ɑ  and u. Also make sure that single consonants are isolated between vowels. There should be more glide, liquid, and nasal  consonants (w,y,l,r,m,n,ŋ) than plosive, fricative, or Africa tell ones. (p,b,t,d,k,g,f,v,s,z,h,θ,ð,ʃ,ʒ). If consonants do cluster, they should be only in pairs. These pairs should not have two consonants of the plosive, fricative, or affricate together. If you want to make a very tense, rhythmic, wacky, or harsh sounding language like arabic or German, use tense vowels such as ɪ, æ, ʊ, and ai and try to cluster consonants as much as possible. Do not stray from glide, liquid, or nasal consonants but make sure that there are significant numbers of the other types. If you want to make your language nice and grumbly, make sure most of your consonants are voiced.

Create your word order. The first thing to do when creating your word order is to decide the relationship between the subject, object, and verb. In terms of world languages, SVO and SOV are the most common, VSO is much less common, and VOS, OSV, and OVS are very rare but exist. After you invent the general structure of the sentence, determine the arrangements of adpositions, adjectives, and determiners around the nouns that they modify. Keep in mind that post positions are a possibility. Next, determine the arrangement of ad positions and adverbs around verbs. The arrangement of adpositions to nouns and verbs should be the same.

Create your verb conjugation system. Verb conjugation systems are very important for languages! The two most important inflections for verbs are tense (I ran, I run, I will run) and aspect (I run, I am running, I have run, I have been running). Sometimes languages have different conjugations for the number and person of the subject. An example in Spanish would be voy, vas, va, vamos, vais, van. Another very useful inflection for verbs is mood. However, since most verbs are in the subjunctive mood, I recommend that mood be an occasional inflection as apposed to an elemental one.

In my own conlang, yummy, verbs are always conjugated for tense, number, person, and aspect with three consecutive, agglutinating inflections. verbs are occasionally conjugated for mood. For example, the word "kamalenu" is separated into "kamal-", which means "run", "e", which means "present", "n", which means "I", and "u", which means "simple aspect". One can replace "e" with "a" for past or "i" for future. One can also replace "n" with "m" for "you", "l", for "it", "v" for "we", "j" for "you all", and "d" for "they". One can replace "u" with "a" for progressive, "atu", for pre progressive, and "ati" for post progressive". Thus, in order to say "they had been running", you would say "kamala data".