Hi there, my name is Carsten and you’re looking at Ayeri, my ongoing project to create a constructed language.
I’ve long been interested in languages and linguistics, and invented languages were a kind of gateway for me into that. When I read J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings way back in 9th grade, I was somehow fascinated by the languages in it, and I started looking for information on them a little after I finished reading the books. I soon came across Mark Rosenfelder’s Language Construction Kit and his forum, the Zompist Bulletin Board, and gave inventing my first language a try. Ayeri is not my first such language, though.
For me, working on an invented language is a little like building toy models, I guess, for example, from that popular Danish brand of plastic bricks. It’s a similar creative process for me, just with the bricks and pieces replaced by sounds and syllables. I loved playing with those bricks as a child, and it looks like I still enjoy tinkering with things today. It also looks like I’ve come not only to enjoy building models, but also to analyze in retrospect how I made them, in other words, to pick them apart and derive the building instructions.
When I’m sometimes using the term fictional language here, I’m referring to the contrived nature of these languages, similar to the way you’d come up with the events in a story: they may be plausibly close to, but not the result of the natural course of human interaction, but instead, spring from the imagination of an author. However, Ayeri is different from the popularly known likes of Quenya and Sindarin (“Elvish”; Tolkien), Klingon (Okrand), Láadan (Elgin), Na’vi (Frommer) or Dothraki (Peterson). These languages are all part of the world-building of literary or filmic works of fiction. On the other hand, in my work on Ayeri, world-building and creative writing have never been high on the list of priorities.
So while world-building is not my primary ambition here, it’s also not my aim to create an auxiliary language like Esperanto (Zamenhof), to create a language of the Lojban variety (Logical Language Group), which tries to be as logical as possible, nor to make a language like Ithkuil (Quijada), which is engineered to take information density to an extreme, or Toki Pona (Lang), which is geared to minimalism. Instead, what I’m concerned about in the work on Ayeri is:
- Learning more about linguistics as I go, because building an artificial language needs research into natural ones if you want to do it well. I quite enjoy the feedback loop between research and creative work.
- Using this information from research to artificially create something that comes reasonably close to the way natural languages work.
- Playing and tinkering with personal aesthetics regarding language sound and structure.
After a few attempts at making up languages—which left me unsatisfied because they were too close to the two foreign natural languages I was learning in school at the time, that is English and French, as well as to my native German—I started working on Ayeri in December 2003, then still in high school. I’ve so far stuck with that. And while I’m not constantly improving and reworking things, I do some work at least occasionally. A long-term commitment, if you will. For fun, compare something very old from the “Examples” page with something very recent.
As potential works of art, too, constructed languages (often abbreviated to ‘conlang’ on the internet) maybe deserve some public exhibition, which is why this page and its predecessors were created—not least because there are more like-minded people out there on the internet.