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Ahmed HassaninJanuary 12, 2015English201-Professor McCormackSociology Report Final Version Introduction:Conlang stands for constructed languages, which means the making of your own language. You have to build your own words, pronunciation of vowels, sentence structure and grammar. Sounds pretty complicated to me, so why would anyone want to do so. One might create their own language as a way to express themselves and connect to the world, or maybe to get recognition from the general public. Whatever the reason behind the creation of the language it is not an easy task, but rather one that one enjoys. “Conlanging is to linguistics what painting is to art history, or hacking to computer science.” ( Emrys, P.g.1) The author here makes the connection that creating your own language is a big part of linguistics. Linguistics is the study of language and its structure; therefore, saying that creating your own language is a huge part of language studying. While we are on that topic of creating languages a very popular made up language, was created by a Jewish eye doctor in 1887. His language was a mixture of Latin, Polish and German roots. Today this language has over 1,000 native speakers and about 10,000 people speak it. The reason I am mentioning this is because he based his language of his spoken languages and of course the bases of languages Latin.In this experiment we are going to selectively chose four participants with different spoken first languages and give them 6 sentences and ask them to recreate them in their own made up language. In this experiment the researchers wanted to see if the first language of a person influences their ability to create their own language.Methodology:As they have done their research and thought about it, to create a language you need some kind of foundation, maybe Latin, Spanish, Arabic. The point is they want to choose about 4-6 students with different spoken first languages. Luckily for them they had diversity in the classroom and they believed it could make this experiment work. For the experiment they believed that they could use Mayra who is a Spanish speaker, Catherine who is Chinese (not sure it is his first language), Ji-young who is Korean, and for this next student its pretty interesting, Michael who is Filipino knows about his language and culture but does not speak it. It would be pretty interesting to see if he would mix English with his knowledge of Filipino to create his own language. In case the participants mind was blocked, the researchers had printed some Latin symbols and numbers that the participants could use. The researchers had six sentences, two were simple, two were compound and two were complex. They told the participants to recreate those sentences in their own made up words. After that they analyzed why they chose those certain words, and see if it had anything to do with their language or creative mind.Results:The purpose behind conducting this experiment was to see if a person’s first language would influence their ability to create their own language. The researchers predicted that a first persons language does affect the ability for a person to create their own language. After conducting the experiment the here are the results that they received from each individual. Mayra: Mayra who is of Spanish background decided to write her sentences in a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese along with images to describe certain actions. Sally was one of the names in the sentences and the interesting thing is that Mayra chose a symbol to represent the name. When I asked why that specific symbol she did not know but I believe it was just her creative mind saying that symbol looks cool. She also uses drawings like wind to represent Swift, Taylor Swift’s last name. She also uses a drawing of a road to depict and illustrate the word Street. Very interesting and creative way of using languages she knows with drawings. Catherine: Our next participant is Catherine of Chinese background. Also chose to base her language of Latin symbols, Chinese characters and drawings. She also used numbers like 2 instead of too and 4 instead of four. When I asked her of her word and symbol choices she said I had nothing in mind really it was all improvise and whatever came to my mind I put down on the paper. She also mentioned that the only two Chinese symbols that she remembered she put down as part of her language, which is the whole purpose behind this experiment. The last thing that was pretty interested is that she named the language Jamie Carpio, after her best friend Jamie who is also in our class, which had nothing to do with the words or drawings.Michael: Michael was our next participant of Philippines decent, decided to create his language based of only drawings. The only time he used words was for the names in the sentences. He told me that in the back of his mind he was going to start his language with some of the Spanish background he has but he completely changed his approach. Hieroglyphics was one of the thoughts that came to his mind while creating this language, which is pretty creativity. He also based his language on the Emojis that we use in our daily text messages and wanted to express himself through drawing rather than text. “ Words are invisible, but drawings are easily understood.” That was the whole mentality and creative side behind the decisions that Michael decided on his language. Definitely not what was hypothesized but something we can work with. Ji-Young: Ji-Young’s first language is Korean and you can tell by her accent. Anyway she based her language on Korean and English alphabet. The name of her language is Korglish. 5 vowels a, e, I, o, u are in her language. Her language is mainly based on pronunciation so if you ever want to spell something all you have to do is sound it out.The results were basically quiet what was expected; even though Michael was the only one that did not use an official language he was still using the language of texts and hieroglyphics in a way. Discussion:After conducting the experiment and viewing the results, they believe that not only does a persons spoken languages influence their ability to create their own language; it’s more like the persons previous knowledge. To make this experiment better we could use more people that speak different languages. For the experiment they used three girls and one guy, which is something that could be improved for the future. Maybe gender does have something to do with thinking, which can affect how people think when creating their own language. This might be able to be proven with Michael in this experiment who was the only participant to not use language like they expected but rather went on with pictures. The setting is definitely something that we can also improve on. All our participants were from the same classroom, we all knew each other, which made us comfortable, and it might have hindered our results. To improve this research we need conduct this experiment on random people in the streets and see how well they improvise and incorporate the language in their own made up language. References:(n.d.). Retrieved January 11, 2015, from - the online encyclopedia of writing systems & languages. (n.d.). Retrieved January 11, 2015, from ................
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