Education and Pedagogy in Technical Communication

Inventing Languages: A Practical Introduction

Carolina González. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 2025. 378 pages, plus index.

Index Terms — Communication domains, constructed languages (conlangs), grammar, linguistics, synthetic languages

Reviewed by Geoffrey Hart, STC Fellow (geoff@geoff-hart.com).

Review posted May 27, 2026

If you’ve successfully communicated with family, friends, and colleagues, then you’ve used a natural language (natlang) to achieve this feat. Natlangs are languages that were never consciously planned, and that arose and evolved to meet the needs of a specific people living in a specific environmental, cultural, or historical context. Such languages include jargon and slang, which are subsets of natural languages that arose to meet specific needs. Jargon evolved to express domain-specific knowledge that nobody outside the domain will ever need to know, such as the names of the hundreds of ropes and doohickeys on a ship from the age of sail. Conversely, slang evolved to identify who belonged to a group, and who emphatically didn’t, as in the vocabularies developed by teenagers to distinguish themselves from their parents.

Constructed languages (conlangs) are very different things: they’re deliberately planned and codified, and unlike most natlangs, they may have an authority (usually, the creator) who defines the language’s characteristics and how they should be used. At their extremes, conlangs may bear little resemblance to a natural language. Consider, for example, the language of mathematics that we all grappled with in grade school and many of us continue to use into and after university. Or consider the many computer languages that made the computer revolution possible, from the most abstract binary machine language spoken by computer chips to full-fledged languages such as BASIC that resemble English. But conlangs aren’t purely functional. Fiction is one of their most common uses. However, as Carolina González notes in Inventing Languages: A Practical Introduction, another goal is “[t]o learn how languages work…To serve as a guide to conlanging, while learning more about the languages of the world” (p. 10). She succeeds admirably; students and teachers of languages (not to mention fiction writers!) will love this book!

Languages represent a collection of words that are assembled from morphemes (meaningful units that can’t be subdivided to produce smaller meaningful units) and phonemes(pronunciations) that are structured using a typology (rules for how morphemes and phonemes fit together to produce a word structure) and a grammar (rules for assembling words into sentences). But they evolve as a people’s needs and priorities change over time and mutate to produce irregular and variant forms.

González works through these and other key linguistic concepts step by step, chapter by chapter, following a rigorous, powerful pedagogical structure. Each chapter begins with a list of key terminology that will be explored, with these lists providing an excellent study guide for students who will take an exam in this subject and an excellent refresher if you decide to roll up your sleeves and commit language. The author provides a step-by-step guide to conlang creation, with copious examples and exercises to guide the reader, supported by her encyclopedic knowledge of the linguistic quirks of the world’s several thousand natlangs, few of which resemble English. Although the exercises lack an answer key that would let you confirm whether you’ve correctly understood a point, the book’s instructor’s guide (not reviewed) provides suggested answers.

Throughout the book, González provides concrete, practical advice and a cornucopia of illustrative examples that guide readers through the complexities of creating a language. To make the details concrete, she creates a conlang for a people whose culture is heavily based on salt production to illustrate her theoretical explanations of how that context might influence the design of a language. Each chapter ends with a list of recommended reading, followed by a summary of questions you should ask and answer to reveal how to apply each chapter’s lessons to your own conlang. This also provides a checklist for reviewing specific aspects of the language. Each chapter includes a progressively more complete description of the book’s sample conlang to illustrate the practical aspects of building languages. Readers are frequently reminded to invest time up-front to define rules that will guide word and sentence construction and to refer to them constantly during the creation of new words to maintain consistency. Refreshingly, González isn’t dogmatic and repeatedly acknowledges how your budding conlang may change as you gain increasing familiarity with how it works.

Inventing Languages repeatedly reminds us to remember the language’s context: who will use it, and their environmental, physical, emotional, cultural, gender, hierarchical, and geographic characteristics. Chapter 2 provides a strong description of the requirements imposed by a story’s world that will be useful even for fiction authors who don’t want to create a full new language. For example, there are probably no words for snow or ice in a tropical world and interesting complications would arise for a society with only one gender or with more than two genders.

González also warns about major pitfalls. For example, unless you’re deliberately trying to modify an existing language, it’s better to create your language de novo to avoid ending up with a facsimile of the original. González demonstrates repeatedly how unnecessary it is to start from your native language. Each chapter includes abundant examples from both natlangs and conlangs to clarify the practical meaning of more theoretical concepts. There’s also a good list of fonts and software for typing phonetic notation on your computer, including an online sound sampler.

The book isn’t perfect. I’d like to have seen a list of (say) 1000 essential concepts for words that should exist in most languages, as this would represent a good starting point for developing the rudiments of a language that may eventually grow to include many more words. Such a list would make the challenge of developing a lexicon less challenging. But there are pointers to online lexicons (or corpora) that can get you started. Another problem is the inadequate index, which should have been at least 3x its current size. It omits many key terms (e.g., CV = a consonant–vowel structure) and doesn’t break up longer lists of page references using contextual subheadings. And although the book provides eight-page and five-page appendices for the natlangs and conlangs (respectively) mentioned in the book, they’re cited by chapter, not by page. González discusses how degrees of formality shape a linguistic principle in several places, but this subject merits a separate chapter or a new subsection of an existing chapter. Lastly, although the book is clearly targeted at oral languages (there’s a long and fascinating description of how human anatomy controls the sounds that can be made), I would have liked to see a section in Chapter 14 (on writing systems) that discussed the interaction between language and punctuation, which would be important for creating written languages.

Creating a conlang is difficult and complex. J.R.R. Tolkien famously took decades to create satisfactory versions of the languages used in the world of his Lord of the Rings trilogy. González’s book’s strong pedagogical approach will make it an excellent choice for classroom use, as well as for any writer who wants to add flavor and depth to their story world by adding a language unique to the story. Inventing Languages is 378 pages long, and it’s a dense read because it’s packed with grammatical and linguistic jargon—but it’s the good kind of jargon, which communicates more efficiently and clearly than might otherwise be possible. The writing is lucid and clear, with few (mostly helpful) detours into academic jargon. Creating a conlang is not a casual endeavor. It may be one of the most difficult cognitive feats you ever attempt. But if you love language, you’ll be amply rewarded by González’s detailed analyses of how we speak even if you don’t aspire to language creation.