Don Boozer has been interested in invented languages ever since discovering Dr. Seuss’s On Beyond Zebra in his elementary school library in the 1970s. A librarian by trade, Boozer created the exhibit Esperanto, Elvish, and Beyond: The World of Constructed Languages which appeared at the Cleveland Public Library in 2008 and the 3rd Language Creation Conference in 2009. Boozer currently serves as Secretary/Librarian of the Language Creation Society and maintains The Conlanger’s Library online, and tweets from the official LCS Twitter account: @fiatlingua.
Abstract
Based loosely on the exhibit Esperanto, Elvish, and Beyond: The World of Constructed Languages, “Conlanging: An Introduction to the Art of Language Creation” provides an accessible primer to the history and practice of language creation for the non-conlanger. Conlangers should be able to refer to the article when asked “What is conlanging?”, “Where did it come from?” or “Why do you people do that?” For the conlanger, some points of the history of conlanging may also prove interesting.
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