Asklemmy

Interslavic is neat, It's a single language able to be understood by most Slavic speakers, and it works fairly well

Esperanto!

Interlingua is cool. I know a decent amount of spanish and portuguese, and understanding IG interlingua speakers without studying any of the language is very satisfying

+1 for Toki Pona!

It’s a very small language (< 200 words) that forces you to think about how you think. It’s not hard to learn and quite wholesome. The name means “The Language of Good”

Also there is an amazing art scene around the language. Being able to listen to the music keeps me going.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqCH2JzaHCjZ84qxUQXrwAjpKQEowGsn9

It's not a spoken language, but I love the script from Tunic. It was a blast deciphering it. Spoilers ahead of you look into it. Highly recommend the game.

Australian.

Lojban. IIRC it's inspired by the Saphir-Worf hypothesis that states that the capacity for human thought is shaped by the language you speak (side note: this is also explored in my favorite movie Arrival).

As someone who is probably on the spectrum I am incredibly frustrated by imprecise language and misunderstanding between people, and how people always seem to be reading between the lines instead of paying attention to what you are literally saying.

Lojban is designed almost like set-theoretic mathematical expressions, leaving minimal room for ambiguity and misunderstanding. It trains your brain to think about exactly what you are saying. It's like a utopian language for me.

Ironically after it gained only a couple of hundred speakers it started to develop slang expressions and ambiguity. People even wrote poetry and jokes that proliferate and exploit ambiguity or subtext. I guess it's human nature to shun precision in communication.

Elvish from Lord of the Rings really can't be beat. I never learned it but I would if it were more practical.

Klingon

Ithkuil I find really interesting. I’ve never attempted to learn it, but the idea is cool. Gets me thinking about the philosophy of language.

I think Globasa is one of the best attempts at creating an international language without bias toward any natural language family (looking at you Esperanto).

https://minilanguage.com/ is an interesting one to look at. There are exactly 1000 words in the total vocabulary. That’s Mini Mundo though. A second, smaller variant also exists: Mini Kore, with 100 words.

I started learning it too soon after learning Toki Pona and lost steam. But I agree with the design principles. They stem from the observation that Toki Pona, as fun as it is, is just too damn ambiguous for anything non-superficial. All too often speakers need to clarify what they said by switching to a natural language. Even my own Toki notes become indecipherable after a few days.

Toki Pona: fun, therapeutic mental exercise, made even better with sitelen pona. Feels like writing poetry. Never meant to be a useful language. Easy to learn, hard to use.

Mini: useful as a language for general purpose communication. Small, primarily latinate vocabulary. Harder to learn, easier to use.

perl

[email protected] !

For one of my game stories, I made a language called Philter that was replaced by Deen after The Machine War. Still not complete but I have a few characters made.

I find the concept interesting, but I recognise that my own motivation and knowledge of linguistics are significantly short of where they would need to be to make a conlang myself. I have played around with around with VulgarLang a fair bit, which allows me to fake a conlang to my design juuuust enough to do the job for the purposes of tabletop RPGs and such.

Does Silbo Gomero qualify as a conlang? It was made by adapting a way to speak the Guanche language through whistling into Spanish, but I'm not clear enough on the origins of it to know how "constructed" it is. I suppose it can also be considered to just be a version of Spanish. If it does count, it's my favourite

North Jersey Gutter Mouth