Artistic languages

An artistic language (commonly called artlang) is a constructed language designed for aesthetic pleasure. Language can also be artistic to the extent that artists use language as a source of creativity in art, poetry, calligraphy or as a metaphor to address themes as cultural diversity and the vulnerability of the individual in a globalizing world.

Unlike engineered languages or auxiliary languages, artistic languages usually have irregular grammar systems, much like natural languages. Many are designed within the context of fictional worlds, such as J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. Others represent fictional minority languages in a world not patently different from the real world, or have no particular fictional background attached.

There are several different schools of artlang construction. The most prominent is the naturalist school, which seeks to imitate the complexity and historicity of natural languages. Others do not attempt to imitate the natural evolution of languages, but follow a more abstract style.

Several different genres of constructed languages are classified as 'artistic'. An artistic language may fall into any one of these groups, depending on the aim of its use. Overlapping with artlangs is the group of philosophical languages, languages derived from some first principle.

By far the largest group of artlangs are fictional languages (sometimes also referred to as "professional artlangs"). Fictional languages are intended to be the languages of a fictional world, and are often designed with the intent of giving more depth and an appearance of plausibility to the fictional worlds with which they are associated, and to have their characters communicate in a fashion which is both alien and dislocated. By analogy with the word "conlang", the term conworld is used to describe these worlds, inhabited by fictional constructed cultures.

There are two major categories of fictional languages.

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