This chapter focuses on how to develop consonant inventories in conlanging. It describes consonant pronunciation, their classification and how they are organized in contrastive sets in languages. This chapter offers suggestions on how to choose consonants for a conlang, including a consideration of phono-aesthetics. It also includes a set of guided questions to facilitate this task and provides conlanging practice. In addition, this chapter describes the consonants of the Salt language.

This chapter focuses on how to combine vowels and consonants into syllables. It discusses the organization of syllables into nucleus, onsets and codas, the basics of syllabification, and how languages syllabify words. This chapter also considers restrictions in sound combination (phonotactics). In addition, this chapter provides a set of guided questions to facilitate the development of syllable structure and phonotactics in your conlang, offers conlanging practice, and describes the syllable structure and the phonotactics of the Salt language

This chapter discusses world-building in the realm of fantasy and science fiction and its connection to conlanging. It explores the connections between language and culture and offers suggestions and a set of guided questions to build a fictional world associated with your conlang. This chapter also covers fictional maps and texts and introduces the fictional realm and a short text connected to the Salt language, a conlang that will be developed throughout the book. The chapter ends with a list of resources and references to explore further.

This chapter focuses on ways to expand the conlang lexicon further by considering aspects of semantics (word and sentence meaning) such as denotation, connotation, polysemy, metaphor and the development of word networks (semantic fields). It also discusses words whose meaning depends on personal, social, spatial, temporal and textual contexts (pragmatics). This chapter also provides conlanging practice, offers a step-by-step guide to expand your lexicon taking into consideration various semantic and pragmatic aspects, and illustrates semantic and pragmatic aspects of the Salt language.

We begin with some longstanding observations about the unusual character of sound change in Australia: first, that there is often a lack of evidence for sound change between related languages; second and relatedly, that sound change is characteristically structure-preserving in Australia: it does not result in changes to the inventory or the phonotactics. This characteristic appears to be behind both the apparent lack of sound change and the widespread homogeneity of inventories and phonotactics discussed in earlier chapters. We discuss one very widespread pattern of sound change – lenition – with respect to the kinds of segments and word positions involved, and the evident failure of these changes to spread through the lexicon in a standard Neogrammarian fashion. Rather, many sound changes appear to have the character of ‘lexical diffusion’. We also discuss the set of changes known as ‘initial dropping’, which affected languages in Cape York, Central Australia, and elsewhere, where radical sound changes did take place, leaving these languages with inventories and phonotactics that are quite different from those found elsewhere on the continent or indeed in the world. Such languages raise questions about the relationship between models of speech processing and language change.

This chapter centers around inflectional morphology, used to convey grammatical meaning, particularly in connection to nouns and other nominal elements. It addresses ways in which natlangs vary morphologically, including using infixes and circumfixes, which are relatively unusual in languages. This chapter also explores ways in which languages express number, gender and case morphologically, and it introduces glossing, a set of conventions used to indicate word structure and meaning. In addition, this chapter provides conlanging practice, includes a set of guided questions to facilitate building the nominal morphology in a conlang, and outlines the basics of nominal morphology in the Salt language.

A number of Australian languages provide evidence that the minimum prosodic word is an important construct. There are alternations in suffix allomorphy that are conditioned by the prosodic constituency of the root. Australian languages evince a wide range of reduplicative patterns, many of which are not widely known to the phonological literature and raise questions about the extent to which these patterns are truly phonological. We also discuss a number of long-distance alternations with a prosodic character. Apart from vowel harmony, we describe two patterns that are rare cross-linguistically: dissimilation of fortis and lenis segments or clusters and dissimilation of nasal-stop clusters, both of which can apply at a distance of more than a syllable between target and trigger.

Metrical structure in simplex word forms shows little variation across the continent. Nearly all languages have a primary stress aligned with the left edge of the word or the root. Most departures from this pattern involve the standard factor of non-initial long vowels; initial onsetless syllables can also affect the location of stress. However, there is one factor that is not attested elsewhere: heterorganicity versus homorganicity of codas. Australian languages also typically evince a characteristic pattern whereby morphemes that are polysyllabic behave as prosodic domains and attract initial metrical prominence, regardless of distance from the edge of the word. Such patterns have proven problematic to model in most approaches to the morphology–phonology interface. We also discuss the evidence for stress from instrumental studies and phonological patterns, the evidence for stress as opposed to metrical feet, and the proposed analyses in terms of intonational phrasing as opposed to lexical prominence.