Properties of Constructed Language Phonological Inventories

Abstract

This paper considers the phonetic distributions of constructed languages (conlangs) as evidence for their ability to reflect patterns of natural language. Ancillary to the aim of this direction of study was the creation of CLIPS, a small database of phoneme inventories sampled from documented conlangs. This interface allows for easy comparison between the inventories of natural languages and conlangs. We find that while conlangs as a set have encouraging similarities to natural language, they differ in important ways. We find that frequency with which certain phonemes occur in conlangs is similar to the frequency with which they appear in natural language. However, we also find that Conlang inventories do still contain segments not present (or even feasible) in natural language. Furthermore, we find that conlangs have a much higher mean frequency index than natural languages. Based on this information, we conclude that conlangs may in fact be influenced by phonetic principles of natural language, but they are not representative of language in general, at least phonetically.