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popular presentations was by Don Boozer, a librarian at the Cleveland Public Library. His language, Dritok, was born when he began to wonder if it was possible to make a language out of chipmunk noises. He started constructing a voiceless language, carried solely by clicking, popping, and hissing sounds. The loudest sound in the language (used for pejoratives) is a sort of forceful pig snort. The examples he gave sent waves of glee through the audience—they sounded so strange, so inhuman, but there was a detectable structure or system that gave Dritok a scent of “languageness.” He had also worked out aspects of a cultural context that would help the language make sense. Dritok is the language of the Drushek, long-tailed beings with large ears and no vocal cords who value solitude and quiet. They also use gestures for some syntactic functions. People immediately started asking questions: “How do they yell?” “Do they make art?” “Can they use whistling?” “Can they throw objects to get someone's attention?” “Do they have thick skin?” Boozer hadn't yet worked things out that far, but it was clear that if he wanted to, he had the blessings of the conlang community. They were clamoring for more.

Watching the presentations at the conlang conference got me thinking that I might like to make a language of my own. I came up with lots of ideas: a pan-conlang hybrid, formed from the features of various other invented languages; a language that used English words, but with different functions and meanings from those they have in English; a language whose phonemes were physical objects that had to be juggled in distinct patterns to make words; a language where every word is defined by its relationship to one specific concept; a language where the mesage has to be physically eaten and digested to be understood—immediacy of communication could not be a factor in that culture. I realized as I came up with these ideas that they were too “clever.” I had no desire to sit down and fill out the details of how any of them would work. I was moved not by the muse but by a desire to impress, to be seen as creative or original. I wanted to inspire that feeling of delight, to get the admiration and the respect that I had seen expressed for certain conlang projects, but I didn't want to do the work. I was that guy who wants to play guitar in order to get the girls, that woman who wants to write a novel so she can go to fancy New York cocktail parties. I wasn't driven by a need to practice the art, to satisfy a personal vision; I just thought it would be cool for other people to think my language was cool.

I guess I don't have it in me. I'm not a language creation artist. But I can still be a language creation art appreciator, which itself takes a certain amount of work and background knowledge. The more you know about language and linguistics in general, the better you can enjoy the truly elegant or complex idea, and the better you can tell the good stuff from the lazy stuff, the mature solutions from the beginners' mistakes. One of the presenters, John Quijada (whose own language, Ithkuil, has been thirty years in the making and claims as its influences the “consonantal phonology and verbal morphology of Ubykh and Abkhaz, certain Amerindian verbal moods, Niger-Kordofanian aspectual systems, Basque and Dagestanian nominal case systems, Wakashan enclitic systems, the Tzeltal and Guugu Yimidhirr positional orientation systems, the Semitic triliteral root morphology, the evidential and possessive categories of Suzette Elgin's Láadan, and the schematic word-formation principles of Wilkins' Analytical Language and Sudre's Solresol”), compared the activities of the conlangers at the conference to a convention of biologists getting together to create an animal. “They would know and appreciate what they were doing, but it might be hard to explain to nonbiologists why some choices were praised as brilliant, some got a laugh, and others got a groan.”

At a very basic level, language invention is an expression of the creativity that is latent in all of us. Children