May 5, 2006 - UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

The results are in, and the First Language Creation Conference was a great success.

You may ask, here, what is the LCC? For that matter, what is language creation?

Language creation -- or 'conlanging' (short for "constructed language") is the art, science, and hobby of creating new languages. People do it for a wide variety of reasons -- everything from fleshing out a fictional work, aiming towards world peace and mutual communication, trying to create an ideal language, testing linguistic theories, having a secret langauge to use in their diary or share with a close friend or sibling, testing out the boundaries of what language can do, or simply as good fun!

While conlanging has been a famously closeted hobby for centuries now, it is beginning to emerge into the mainstream. There are several hundred conlangers who talk together online on various mailing lists and bulletin boards, hundreds or thousands more who don't know that they're not the only ones in the world who do this, and many thousands of languages that have been created since the first one known of today was made in 1150 AD.

The First Language Creation Conference, held April 23 2006 on the UC Berkeley campus, was the very first serious conference ever to be held on the subject, drawing conlangers from all over the United States, and with hundreds more watching both nationally and internationally, through the recorded videos available online. It was also the largest gathering of conlangers to have ever been held - three times larger than the next largest known.

Conlanging has been increasingly featured in the media and popular culture. It has been featured prominently in interviews on NPR with linguists Mark Okrand and Sarah Higley, popular movies such as Lord of the Rings and the Star Trek series, music from artists such as Sigur Ros and many books -- not all of which acknowledge the extent to which the author may have fleshed out their created languages.

Next year's conference is already being planned, and is expected to be yet bigger and to draw more people, this time internationally.

For more info, videos, audio interviews, reviews, photos, supplements, and other material, please visit http://conlangs.berkeley.edu/.

Fiat lingua.