I first got interested in constructed languages because of fantasy and sci-fi worlds, as I imagine is the case for many conlangers. Recently, though, I’ve been getting more interested in constructed languages unconnected to fictional worlds—ones invented for the creator, or other people, to use in the real world, not as part of the worldbuilding for a made-up civilization.

One of the intriguing things about these languages is the variety of reasons that people create them. These can be grouped into a few categories:

• International Auxiliary Languages (IALs) – Created to serve as a common language to enable clearer international communication. These languages tend to use simple grammar, often with vocabulary drawn from various existing languages, with the aim of being easy for people from any background to learn.
• Logical languages (loglangs) – Languages created to be free of irregularities that are common in natural languages. These are often created around specific hypotheses about language to explore the way languages work.
• Philosophical languages – Languages made based on a philosophical idea or principle, often with the goal of creating an “ideal language”, or to create a language that’s better able to express scientific or philosophical concepts.
• Mystical languages – Created to facilitate communication between the speaker and the divine, or to describe mystical experiences to other believers.
• Artistic languages (artlangs) – Languages created basically for the fun of it—fictional languages usually fall under this category, or any language created for humor or artistic effect. These are the least likely to be “functional” languages with a complete grammatical structure or vocabulary that would allow people to truly communicate using it.

I’ve been reading novels in Spanish for about a year—successfully, at least. One of my main motivations to become fluent was so I could read Marquez in Spanish, and as a chronically impatient human, I made an aborted attempt at Cien años de solidad a few years ago, well before I had the skills to navigate it. I had to stop multiple times every sentence to look up words I didn’t know, making it impossible to just sink into the story; I set it aside after about a page.

Unlike Tolkien, Gene Roddenberry didn’t set out to write languages when he created the Star Trek universe. In fact, it was linguist Marc Okrand, not Roddenberry, who did most of the heavy lifting for the best-known Trek conlangs, Vulcan and Klingon, both of which made their on-screen debuts more than a decade after the original Star Trek series was already off the air (Vulcan in 1982’s Wrath of Khan and Klingon in 1984’s The Search For Spock).

While these are the only two official, fleshed-out conlangs in the Star Trek universe, it’s become a fertile breeding ground for linguistic experiments and creations. Snippets of Ferengi, Bajoran, Romulan, and some two dozen other languages have made appearances in Star Trek episodes in either spoken or written form, making the universe a great one for aspiring conlangers to study.

Language and culture are inextricably linked. Using other languages in your fiction can help to create a three-dimensional, fully-realized world for the reader, but it can also pull them out of your story and leave them bored, confused, or frustrated if you overdo it.

Like many aspects of fiction (and life), it comes down to finding the right balance. This tends to be especially difficult for those who write their own languages—and understandably so. It takes a lot of work to write a language and you want to show it off. The best way to do that, though, is to integrate it smoothly into your overall storytelling.