Challenges

Speedlang Challenges

I organize speedlanging challenges twice a year. I post a smallish set of requirements and give people about two weeks to create and sketch out a language that has those requirements. Since I’ve started, they’ve grown from about three participants to over twenty! Here are the compilations.

  • Speedlang 4: Spring 2019 (phonation, vowels, archiphonemes, reduplication, no concatenative morphology, animacy, word classes)
  • Speedlang 5: Fall 2019 (harmony, marginal phonemes, prenasalization, bipartite stems, information structure, aspect, spatial relations)
  • Speedlang 6: Spring 2020 (phoneme neutralization, suprafixation, sound symbolism, unusual agreement, factivity, classifiers, kinship terms)
  • Speedlang 7: Fall 2020 (pitch accent, vowel features, converbs, apophony, differential object marking, diachronics DLC: Jespersen’s cycle, loanwords, sound changes)
  • Speedlang 8: Spring 2021 (quantity distinction, one glide, suprasegmentals, asymmetrical negation, indefiniteness, open pronoun class, insubordination)
  • Speedlang 9: Fall 2021 (asymmetrical plosives, featural metathesis, word size constraint, symmetrical voice, disfixation, causatives, spooky DLC: non-human sounds and vocab)
  • Speedlang 11: Spring 2022 (diphthongs, grammatically restricted phonemes, templatic morphology, discourse markers, evidentiality)

Wondering why they start at number four? Lucy hosted three before I started! Here’s her repository.

Wondering why they skip ten? Mareck hosted an off-cycle speedlang 10 in Winter 2021.


Relays

So far I’ve organized one relay, with help from Slorany and Zethar. It ran from December 1, 2019 through March 30, 2020. I’m going to make a page for it in the future, but in the meantime here’s the writeup I put on Discord.

 


Lexicon-Building

As part of my duties as a mod on r/conlangs, I’ve helped organize the annual Lexember word-building challenge in 20192020, and 2021.

My friend Page is hosting the 2021 Junexember lexicon building challenge in June and July 2021 and asked me to host it on my website.