Conlangery Podcast

That's a question that I'm kind of having to deal with myself, since the Fae are ... well very long lived at least, and living in a world where time is weird. And after that, I'll move onto Celestial, Infernal, and Abyssal, which are spoken by genuinely immortal beings.

It really depends on the nature of immortality. I have to assume that these immortals still experience time in some way (otherwise communication through human-like language wouldn't make sense), so I imagine that their language would just change more slowly. There are forces other than imperfect child acquisition that can change a language. Without the generational transmission, changes would probably result more from a need to distinguish themselves as a social group, or from adopting new words or variations that have become fashionable. They also may be in contact with other beings, including mortals, that they'll borrow words from Or they might straight up forget things and have to re-invent it.

For the Fae, I decided that they're not entirely immortal and they can have children, so their language develops more or less naturally, just more slowly than human or even Material Plane Elven languages.

For the Celestial family, I think there are two main drivers of change. The Infernal speakers (devils), will probably have some more naturalistic changes because they'll be closer to the Material Plane races in some ways. Celestial will be much more conservative, but they'll also be influenced. Both with have extensive contact with the Fae, for reasons that will become apparent.

But the other force will just be social distinction. I will flesh this out on stream, but one thought I have is that many of the changes in Celestial will actually be deliberate reactions to changes in Infernal to distinguish themselves. So if the Infernals have lenition, Celestials might develop fortition as a counter. You might have some asura/daeva* stuff going on, where they choose opposing meanings for words relating to morality an ethics. I'll have to see how that works out.

Abyssal speakers (demons) are gonna be different, though. They're immortal, sure, but as the embodiment of chaos, I imagine they'd go absolutely wild with innovation, especially in the constant social turmoil of the Abyss, where another demon could conquer the whole thing tomorrow! I have a lot of worldbuilding questions to answer about the Abyss.

Nope. I very deliberately chose for most of the dialects to have a retroflex approximant /ɻ/ -- which is found in many English dialects -- and for Dusk to have no rhotic sound at all (it merges with /l/).

Ndăkaga, my "Draconic", does have a trill, which I will sometimes emphasize for intimidation factor. I like trills. But for the Faerie dialects I made the choices I made specifically to get away from some stereotyped choices, and also to actually convey that English is one of my inspirations for the language(s).

If your goal is naturalism, there are a lot of benefits to taking the historical approach. So much of the interesting parts of language come through historical development, especially the fun features we find more natural sounding. Some things that historical conlanging can help you with are:

Interesting phonotactics and phoneme distribution: If a language has some oddly specific phonotactic constraint, it's probably changed something. For instance, Spanish very specifically bans initial /s/ + consonant clusters and adds /e/ before them in foreign loans. Look into it and they actually added that initial /e/ before all Latin /sp st sk/ clusters, and that constraint sticks today. My Ndăkaga doesn't have any initial clusters with /j/ because any cluster of consonant + /j/ either became a palatal consonant or was simply lost.

Irregularity: What I call "regular irregularity", where some inflectional paradigms differ from the default in some particular way, come from history. Spanish "shoe verbs", where you can have verb stems alternating e <> ie or o <> ue come from vowel breaking rules you can observe elsewhere interacting with stress shifts in verb conjugations. Even less predictable irregularities, like English strong verbs, have historical sources (in this case, Proto-Indo-European ablaut).

Dialects/sister languages: If you want any dialect variation or a language family, even if you're not planning it now, you'll probably want to work historically. Mark Rosenfelder observed a couple decades ago that working forward from a protolanguage is much easier than working backward. For a small example of why you should have a protolang first: in my interview with Paul Frommer, he mentioned that, when adding a new Na'vi dialect, he had to manually go through and decide which words had /i/ vs /ɪ/ in order to create the (presumably original) distinction. If he had a protolang where that distinction had been lost, he'd just have to edit a sound change file, and he'd probably have more time to do other things with it.

So yeah, the historical method is super useful. You can do all of these things just working synchronically, but it's a lot harder and more prone to inconsistency. The caveats are that you'll need to learn how to do historical work on top of synchronic typology, because you have to also create (at least some of) the protolanguage just on typological principles. You decide what time 0 is, but you can't just not have a time 0, and we don't know enough about what the very first languages were like to start at the beginning of time (at least for oral languages).