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6 Constructed Languages People Actually Built

Tap a language to see who created it and what makes it distinct.

Esperanto

Created by L.L. Zamenhof in 1887 with the goal of giving speakers of different native languages an easy-to-learn international auxiliary language. It's still used by hundreds of thousands of people today, making it the most successful constructed language in history by a wide margin.

Klingon

Designed by linguist Marc Okrand in 1984 as the language of an alien species in a science fiction franchise. It was built with enough systematic depth that a real community of fans learns and converses in it.

Dothraki

Created by linguist David J. Peterson in 2009 for a fantasy television series, expanding a handful of scattered words from the original novels into a complete grammar.

Elvish (Quenya and Sindarin)

Created by linguist J.R.R. Tolkien over the early-to-mid 20th century. Tolkien reportedly built the languages first, purely as a personal passion, and later wrote the novels as a world to give them a home β€” rather than the other way around.

Toki Pona

Created by Sonja Lang in 2001 using only around 120 words, making it an extremely minimalist language and something closer to a philosophical experiment in expressing complex ideas with the fewest possible words.

Interlingua

Developed by the International Auxiliary Language Association in 1951 by extracting vocabulary shared across several Romance languages descended from Latin, so that speakers of those languages can understand a fair amount of it without ever formally studying it.

Why do people build constructed languages at all?

Constructed languages are generally built for one of two purposes: auxiliary languages like Esperanto, meant to support international communication, and art-langs, meant to bring a fictional world to life. Both require the painstaking work of designing a full grammar and vocabulary system entirely from scratch.

Curious about the writing systems of real-world languages?

If you're interested in the writing systems actually used by the world's natural languages, the guide to major world alphabets and scripts is worth a look too.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Esperanto actually widely spoken?

Exact numbers are hard to pin down, but it's estimated that hundreds of thousands of people worldwide study or use it, and international Esperanto conventions are still held every year.

Can I actually learn a constructed language from a movie or TV show?

Yes β€” some of these languages are complete enough that fans have produced real learning materials and dictionaries for them, making it genuinely possible to learn one.