A short introduction to glossopoiesis
3. Game languages
The simplest and perhaps most common form of constructed language is game languages. Naturally, among children there is a great deal of language creators. But neither all the tongues invented by children are purely ludic, nor all the ludic languages are made by children.
It looks like playing with language in some form or another is part of our linguistic instinct, if we do have one as some authors suggest. Think, for example, of cross-words and puzzles in general... Even processes which have been dignified by poetry, such as alliteration and rhyme, may well have a playful origin, and still have a playful element which can be successfully exploited in game languages, as the creator of, for example, DiLingo (the gutteral utteral rhyming language) must have known.
The least sophisticated game languages are those simply made up by regular alteration of the mother tongue, such as for example insertion of syllables or regular substitution of a letter with another one. There are examples of such languages all over the world: in Italy, for example, we have the so-called lingua farfallina ("butterly tongue") made by infixing an extra syllable after each vowel; English speakers should know about Pig Latin. Many of us spoke one such language in our youth.
Another kind of game language is the parody of a foreign tongue. I too, in a spare half-hour, made one such toy, Fjinnjikulla. It was based upon a list of regular orthographic changes that transform an Italian text into what at the time I thought Finnish would look like. If anything, Fjinnjikulla is a document of my total ignorance of the Finnish language!
If one has wits, spare time and desire to have fun, there's no limit to funny linguistic creation. Even parody of existing constructed languages is a powerful source of inspiration: SUPERL and Plan C poke fun at loglangs (a description of both is found in a collection of humorous posts to the Conlang mailing list).
At times, a playful beginning may lead to a great end. It happened so to King Robert I (born Robert Ben Madison), founder and ruler of the Constitutional Monarchy of Talossa and author of Talossan, who started with the declaration of independence of his own bedroom at the age of 13.
Or the playful element might just be a source of inspiration in a more serious undertaking. Rick Harrison's prospective IAL Zengo, born by the idea of making a language composed of five letter words only, is a good example.
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