Logan Kearsley lived in Belgium for three years as a child, but didn’t realize other languages were cool before moving back to the anglophone United States, where he started conlanging at a still-young age and eventually studied Russian in high school. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and a Master’s in Linguistics, and has had the opportunity to study a wide variety of languages while working to develop software for teaching and learning foreign languages at the university level and researching language pedagogy. He also reviews foreign-language and conlang content in film, audio, and written media.
There’s more to a naming language than just a phonology and a list of words. This article, originally written as a writers’ guide for the Drintera RPG project by Shewstone Publishing, surveys the diversity of naming systems used by real-world cultures to provide inspiration for conlangers, authors, and game masters.
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This article was written by Logan R. Kearsley, ©2024 Shewstone Publishing LLC. It may be distributed and modified under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED).