Before reading about the epic saga of my creation of the fictional Kithnen language, I want to share a little history of myself in relation to the context of languages. My mother is a Jewish-American, while my father is an Englishman with Scottish ancestry. While both of them had great-grandparents who spoke other languages natively (Yiddish and Scottish Gaelic respectively), by the time they were born, both of their families were monolingual in English. As was I seemingly destined to be, born to two white parents without any meaningful familial connections outside of the Anglosphere in 2001, one of the most xenophobic years in US history (OK, I’m technically a first-generation immigrant, but since my dad came from an English-speaking country, that isn’t a big factor in my life). 

 

However, I would come into heavy contact with foreign languages from a young age. For the first five years of my life, I had a Honduran nanny, who taught little impressionable three-year-old me a couple dozen basic phrases in Spanish. A few years later, I spent four years of my life in Miami, living in a neighbourhood where the good majority of people spoke Spanish natively, to the point where in my school, it was taught the same way that English was. While everyone also spoke English, I was still quite lacking in my peers’ ability to speak Spanish, and for four years after I left Florida, I was uncomfortable talking in something other than English, despite the fact that every summer I would go on a big vacation with my family, usually outside the Anglosphere.

 

          This all changed one day when I was in 8th or 9th grade. I was browsing Wikipedia, as I am wont to do, when I found a certain page. It was about different language families. I have an obsession with categorizing things, so this was the perfect thing for me to become addicted to learning about. For years, I learned about how different cultures were related to one another, how not only were English, Spanish, French, and German, but also Russian, Greek, and even Persian and Hindi all derived from a single ancient language. Eventually, I found this website called Omniglot, which had profiles on every language you could think of. I would spend hours on this site (hours that I should have spent on homework, or even, ironically, on this project). The early part of this period overlapped with the time when I was a big fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s works. I knew how he had developed fictional languages for his characters to speak, but as I became more addicted to languages, I learned that it was the opposite: he had written Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, etc. as an excuse to use languages he had already created. Good old JRRT introduced me to the idea of conlang, fictional languages constructed artificially as an ideal global lingua franca, as in the case of Esperanto; for use in a work of fiction, as in the case of Star Trek’s Klingon; or just for fun. 

 

            However, this wasn’t my initial idea for a project. When I came to the Academy, I was already a junior, and therefore, even as I was adjusting to a whole new style of education, I had the Senior Project looming in the not too distant future. While focused on other things at the time, in the last third of the year, I began thinking about a few different ideas. I wanted to do something artsy and expensive, similar to what the then-seniors were exhibiting. My first idea was to document abandoned places in the mysterious hills of western Franklin County, an area I was completely unfamiliar with before switching schools. This then morphed into an idea to make a film in the style of The Blair Witch Project (which, at the time of this writing, I have still never seen) at one of these abandoned places, but I threw that out when a couple of my friends had similar ideas. I don’t really remember having other ideas, maybe building something or running a lot, but eventually, I decided to think about how I could use something I was actually interested in. I thought long and hard, and eventually decided on making a language. That was the beginning of a longer, harder journey.