Creating A Language - Part 2 - Choose your Phonemes

Creating A Language Part 2

Choose your phonemes!Woo! Now we are ready to pick some phonemes for our language. This is the first major step! You can look at the IPA chart and pick as many or few phonemes as you want, but do keep in mind the following:

A phoneme is a distinct sound which cannot be replaced with another without changing the meaning of a word. /i/ and /u/ are distinct English phonemes because /bi/ (bee) and /bu/ (boo) are different words.

Even if you can't hear the difference, if two phonemes are different letters of the IPA, native speakers would be able to. Many non-English speakers probably think it is nuts that we can easily tell the difference between the words beat, bit, bet, bought, boot, but, bat, boat, bite, bout, boyt (not a word, but it could be), etc.

There are "language universals" which means that every language follows a certain rule. There are universals that are mandatory, and universals which are only a very strong trend. When choosing your phonemes, you must follow the mandatory ones if you wish your language to be realistic, and you should truly consider following the non-mandatory ones. (It is possible for there to be exceptions to these rules, but the incidences are so minute as to not be very important for our purposes).


So print out a copy of the IPA, pull out a pen, and start circling your sounds based on the following rules:

(this is not a complete list, but I think it is good enough for this project)

Vowels:
- All languages have at least two vowels, but tend to have at least three, which tend to be /i/ (as in bee), /u/ (as in boo), and /a/ (which we don't use by itself in English, but is common in many other languages. It is between the a in father and the a in cat.). You can have more of course!

-Back vowels tend to be rounded (o, u, etc) (your lips are rounded)


-Front vowels tend to be unrounded (i, a, etc) (your lips are unrounded). (of course there are languages with rounded front vowels like German umlaut o and u, but they also have the unrounded versions too).


Consonants
- All languages have consonants.

- All languages have stops. (you must have at least one sound from the row on the IPA labeled plosive: ie t, d, k, g, p, b, in English (and the glottal stop is also in English));

- All languages tend to have voiceless stops (left side of column in plosive row), nasals (nasal row), fricatives, and /h/

- Approximants tend to be voiced (normal and lateral) (right side of column)(if you have voiceless ones, you probably have their voiced counterparts)

- Stops and Fricatives tend to be voiceless (left side of column) (if you have voiced ones, you probably have their voiceless counterpart, with the exception of /p/ and /b/ where you can have /b/ without /p/)

- If a language has nasal vowels (vowels that sound.. nasally...), they tend to be on vowels the language already has in a non-nasal form (this is indicated with a ~ on top of the vowel).


General
- Every language has at least 11 phonemes and no more than 112.

- Every language has at least 6 consonant phonemes and no more than 81.

- Every language has at least 2 vowels and no more than 31 (O_o).

- The most common sounds are /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/.


So if you would like somewhere to start, begin your language with the sounds /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/, /h/, /i/, /u/, /a/... and then add and modify it from that point.


As always, if you have any questions, please leave me a comment. Also, feel free to leave your phoneme list (please copy and paste IPA letters from this keyboard.) and I will tell you if it's a good one that follows the rules!

If you have a phoneme list you are confident and happy with, you are ready to move on!

Sources and more rules for the truly dedicated:
http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhonologicalUniversal.htm
http://www.personal.rdg.ac.uk/~llsling1/Phonology/universals/universals.html
http://www.vistawide.com/languages/language_statistics.htm