RUNNING HEAD: THE LANGUAGE THEORY
Sociology Report
Construct Language Theory
Pamela Tenesaca
John Jay College
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Creating language is essential for the means of communicating with one another, but to also understand how it was first originated. Knowing how to create a language, can give us an idea of how the other languages were created during ancient times.Conlang is important to society because of its impact in social media, in creating languages, and in linguistics.. For many conlangers, conlanging is an artistic craft just like how singing is to music, and painting is to art. Therefore, Conlanging is a new way of expressing your thoughts and ideas in social media without being judged by others.
Regarding how Conlang reached its popularity, it has brought many people together with the use of the internet web, and social media. Sara L. Higley (2000) introduces us the idea of CONLANG and explained how it has emerge in the social web. CONLANG started about eight years with a group of people who were interested in creating new languages. CONLANG can be best defined as making your own language by using your knowledge of linguistics. It is widely used in the internet and it’s the new trend that many people follow. Many of the people who makeup these languages are called conlangers. Conlangers consists of college students, professors, computer programmers, house wife and other uses worldwide.
Conlangers have their own blogs and websites that have soundbytes and blogs. Conglanging is where anyone can express themselves regardless of their sexual orientation. For instance; the author stated that “The number of gay men on the list has been wondered at as more than coincidental. In a survey I conducted in October 1998, many of the contributors to CONLANG felt that the list put them in touch with an audience that provided them with intellectual and emotional feedback”(2000). Higley's statement is valid because based on her study many gay men had trouble expressing themselves; thus

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RUNNING HEAD: THE LANGUAGE THEORY leaning them to create their own language. . This proves to show that conlanging plays a great impact in peoples' lives.
Emrys, Fink, and Peterson (2015) introduces what CONLANG is and how it is a form of expressing yourself. Conglanging “is a way of directly playing with language—sometimes just for fun, and sometimes to test out a new theory about how language works with the mind” (Emyrs, Fink& Peterson,
2015). Moreover, the author strongly emphasis the idea that before making your own language, you must consider the following: you must know the composition of words (morphology), how the words fit together to form complete sentences (syntax), phonemes, and the order of subject, object and verb in sentences. In addition, the author explicitly explains the importance of CONLANG in linguistics. For instance; the use of conlanging dates back during the early times of ancient Greece. Most of the Greek’s snippets required them to make up words. In the same token, its use can also be seen during the 12th century, when the CONLANG called Lingua Ignuta originated from the Latin language. This shows to prove why CONLANG is very important in the language development of individuals, and its importance in linguistic history.
To create your own language you need to have a cultural background of other languages in order to apply it to your own Conlang. Matthew Jekin (2013) strongly elaborates in the article that it is
“important to some cultural identity behind the language because no language is spoken in a cultural vacuum” (2013). In other words, when creating a conlang, the individual must have a background knowledge of other languages to use that as a basis to creating a new language. He discusses this idea by using works of literature of different conlangers. For instance; the colanguage Skerre, originated from the ideas and features from Latin, Polynesian and Native American languages. The elements of grammar

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RUNNING HEAD: THE LANGUAGE THEORY found in these languages does not influence the conlanguage, instead it gives you an idea of what vocabulary you choose to include.
In conclusion, conglanguage plays a great impact in our society and lives of many individuals. Conlang is new way of communicating with one another, by using our creative minds to come up with something unique and original. Conlang is a new way of expressing yourself without the need of drawing or painting. Instead, you use your linguistic skills to derive ideas from other languages to incorporate in your own conlang.
Methodology
The focus of this language study is to see how a person’s native language plays a role constructing their own language. The hypothesis for our experiment is, in order for an individual to create their own language, they use their first language as a reference. In the beginning of this research experiment, we had a group of 4 John jay college students with different ethnicity backgrounds. There are two people in two groups: group 1 has two female students, and group has 1 male and female students. In group 1 there is one student who is Chinese and the other student is Korean. In group two
We will each give the students 6 sentences; two that are simple sentences, two that are compound sentences, and two that are complex sentences. Moreover, the students will be given handouts of different types of symbols to give them ideas, so they won’t feel overwhelmed. We will also give them
Latin roots and prefixes to give them the basis of creating their own language. We will instruct them to feel free of using any of the resources given to them. We will also inform them that after they are done, they have to come up with a name for their language, and explain what inspired them to come up with

RUNNING HEAD: THE LANGUAGE THEORY these different symbols. Likewise, we will give the students approximately about 15-20 minutes for them to come up with their own language. After we get feedback from our small sample, we will analyze our results to see if their responses correlates with our question and our null hypothesis.
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For this experiment, I and my partner wanted to see if a person's cultural background plays a role in constructing their own language. There was two groups, each group consisted of two people. Group 1 had two female students from John Jay College. Group 2 had one male and one female student from
John Jay College. In group 1, one of the students is Chinese and the other student is Korean. In group 2, one of the students is Filipino and the other student is Mexican. We gave both groups a list of six sentences which are: two simple sentences, two compound sentences, and two complex sentences.
Both groups are supposed to translate each of the sentences in their new language. Both groups were given 15 minutes to come up with their own language by using the symbol sheet, and the Latin prefixes/suffixes sheet as a reference. After time was up, we individually asked them questions based on their new language. The questions that were asked were: “what inspired you to come up with these symbols?” , and “what would be the name of your new language?”.
Participant one from group 1, told us that her background knowledge of Chinese and English inspired her to create new words in her sentences. She named her language “Carpio” and there was no meaning behind it. Based on the participant’s sentence structure, we noticed that she used pictures, some Chinese characters and symbols to represent each word of the sentence. For instance; sentence four is a compound sentence, and it stated “every morning I drink chocolate milk, even though I am lactose intolerant.” Participant 1 wrote “E” to represent “every”, she drew the sun to represent
“morning”, a Chinese character to represent “I”, and she drew a seesaw for the word “even though”.
This shows how her first language Chinese helped her to come up with her own language. She repeats

RUNNING HEAD: THE LANGUAGE THEORY this step for other sentences as well. Another example is shown in sentence 5 which is a complex sentence; it states “As I am walking down the street, I heard someone singing one of Taylor Swift’s song
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“Fairy Tale”. Participant 1 uses a Chinese character for “I”, she drew an ear for “heard”, and she drew a music note and a written notebook for “Fairy tale”. Her creativity and her use of Chinese characters has helped her express her language “Carpio”. The theory of Conlang states that new languages originate from other languages; it later becomes a rule when many people start speaking it. That is how languages are first established.
Henceforth, Participant two from group 1, named her language Koranglish because she said “I used all four of the English vowels in my sentences, and some Korean characters as well”. Moreover, based on her sentence structure she wrote a mixture of English letters combined with Korean characters. The student hardly used any of the symbols sheet and the Latin prefixes-suffixes. Therefore, her language played a big role in creating her own language.
Participant 1 from group used pictures to represent each word of the given sentences. He did not use the reference sheets and his own language to construct his new language. He said “I took the idea of hieroglyphics, and incorporated this idea in my new language”. For instance; sentence one is a simple sentence, and it stated “Sally went to the Halloween party”. Participant 1 wrote Sally in English, he drew an arrow for “went to”, he drew a creepy face for “Halloween” and he drew a birthday cake for “party.”
As a result, participant 1 from group two did not use his first language to help him construct a new language.
Participant 2 from group 2 told us that both the Spanish, and Portuguese language has helped her construct her own language. Based on her sentence structure, she drew some pictures and used both languages as references. With this in mind, in sentence 2, which is a simple sentence states “The cat wants to drink milk.” Participant two approached this by using the Spanish word gato for “cat”, and the

RUNNING HEAD: THE LANGUAGE THEORY
Portuguese word “bebes” for “drink”. It’s important to realize that her cultural background influenced
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As it been noted, only three out of the four participants used their cultural background to help them construct their own Conlang. However, only one participant used a different approach to create his new language. This proves the theory of conlang, which shows how many people over the centuries incorporate their native language into their new language. Therefore, all the languages that we know of now use to be conlangs, before they were legally established.
Discussion
The results in this experiment, in relation to the hypothesis are conclusive, but there is not enough information about the Conlang Theory which makes this experiment invalid. There are many aspects of
Conlang that was not covered in this experiment. For instance; the study of Conlang has to do with the composition of words (morphology), how the words fit together to form complete sentences (syntax), phonemes, and the order of subject, object and verb in sentences. In this experiment we did not tell the participants. Another thing, Conlang is important in social media because it plays a greater influence in the lives of many people.

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Reference page
Sarah L. Higley. (2000) Audience, Uglossia, and CONLANG: Inventing Languages on the Internet. M/C: A
Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/languages.php> (January 12,
2015).
Emrys, S., Fink, A., & Peterson, D. (n.d.). Conlanging 101. Retrieved January 12, 2015, from http://conlang.org/cl101.pdf
Jekin, M. (2014, December 5). Star Wars Ewokese to Star Trek Klingon: How do you invent a language?
Retrieved January 13, 2015, from http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/dec/05/star-warsewokese-star-trek-klingon-language
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