 Salutan al tío, yaní voldíe vie tío, and today I'm here with Britain Watkins, the director of the upcoming film Conlanging, which is about the art of creating languages. So, Britain, can you just tell us what direction you're playing to take with this film? It's really a traditional documentary. We have interviews, we have an extensive survey of people's artifacts, the things that they create in association with their languages. We talk to the actual people who do this, whether they're famous Hollywood types or just folks you've never heard of before who have it as their favorite hobby. We also talk to some experts who know about Conlanging as a function of Hollywood or other entertainment franchises or perhaps they're looking at it through the lens of linguistics. So, can you tell us where you came up with this idea? How did you come up with the idea of creating a documentary about Conlangs? So, in 2013, my husband and I made an independent science fiction film called Sen, and I created a language called Sinyamda for that film to flesh out the world building. We learned how to do films making that project, and I have seen short films about Conlanging, for example, Sam Green's documentary on Esperanto, but other than that and books like by Erica Ocrant, there's not a comprehensive survey of what Conlanging really is out there, and I wanted to do that in film format. So, recently we're seeing Conlangs pop up in massive Hollywood features left, right, and center when traditionally people would just make up sounds or randomly throw words together when they needed to create that foreign feeling. What do you think is driving this change? I think ultimately a one-word answer for that has to be authenticity or perhaps realism. As budgets are growing and special effects look more and more real, all aspects of the production do better. They're more popular with fans if they come across as more authentic, more real, and having fully fleshed out constructed languages which are grammatical and speakable in an entertainment franchise means that there's also more that fans can do in their out-of-theater time. What can they do to invest in their interest in the franchise? How can they use it to augment their cosplaying at cons, etc. So, a lot of what's coming in supporting and driving the use of fully fleshed out constructed languages in entertainment is the fans and what they demand and what they want for more realism, more depth, more authenticity. So, what do you think is the biggest thing up and coming for the Conlang community? So, looking forward to the year ahead, I think probably one of the big things, I don't like to brag, but I think this film is going to be a big thing. It's going to show a broader section of the general public in a standard 90-minute documentary format, what Conlang is all about, and I hope that will encourage people who've been doing it up to this point to be more out about it and to enjoy it more and to take more pride in sharing their stories about what they get out of it with their friends and family. They don't have to worry about it being misunderstood or some kind of handicapped second-class hobby. Now, as an Esperanto speaker, I've seen a lot of Conlangs. I've even made short films on particular Conlangs. But what do you think is the most fascinating Conlang out there based on its structure or its use? I might have to dodge this question, actually, because I really can't say that there's one Conlang or one specific thing in this landscape that I find the most fascinating or the most amazing. I think there are many Conlangs that are best of breed, and they are done for different reasons. It depends on what the motivation is behind the Conlang. You may be trying to push some kind of grammatical boundary, or maybe you're trying to create something that sounds as beautiful as possible, or maybe you're trying to create something that's really simple and easy for other people to learn, or maybe you are trying to create something that is visually quite stunning when it's written down, and the rest of it is somehow secondary to the importance of the writing system to you. So, the motivation of the creator, I think, determines what kind of bucket or class it falls into, and they're just all kinds of beautiful things all over the place, and we explore a lot of them in the film. I think if you talk about, in terms of being a successful language for international communication, if that was your goal, then Zamenhof did a fantastic job, and certainly nothing is likely to ever surpass Esperanto in being successful as an international auxiliary language. It's just, I don't think it's going to happen again. Now, I've seen mentions of Conlangers wanting others to treat Conlanging as just another art form. So, let's say I'm interested in this art form. Where do I go to find others who are also interested in Conlanging? There are all kinds of Conlang-centric communities out there. So, it kind of depends on where you already are. If you're on Facebook, there are multiple communities on Facebook. If you're on Reddit, there's a subreddit. If you're on Tumblr, just do a search for Pound Conlang or Pound Constructed Language. You will find all kinds of people who are publishing their work there and sharing stories about doing that. A great kind of centralized point to go find a broad, broad listing of all these communities is conlang.org slash communities. Now, let's say for whatever reason, I want to build my own language. What is the very first thing I have to do? Where should I start? I think step one could be a little bit different for everybody. But if you know nothing about it, then I would just do the easiest thing, which is to do some searches online and read up on what is Conlanging and how do people go about doing it. Once you think you might actually want to start, there are books, again, like David J. Peterson's Art of Language Invention or Mark Rosenfelders' Language Construction Kit. The key thing that everybody has to do is find what is going to be your hook, what is going to be your linchpin that will keep you interested through the whole process. Because whether you start with the way the language sounds or you start with the grammatical aspects or you start with some kind of cultural history as the main driving factor, you're going to need something to be your motivation for you to hang in there for the weeks or months or years that it takes to create a fully grammatical, speakable language. It's not something that happens overnight. So find the right kind of stimulus, find the right kind of motivation. Now, I speak Esperanto. In fact, that's the language of my channel. It's very rare that I do these English based interviews. So I have a question now, what does the Konlang community in general think about Esperanto? After all, it is the biggest Konlang out there. It started as a project by one person and now it's entered the realm of living languages. So what does the Konlang community think about it? Well, Esperanto is widely studied by people who create their own languages. I think Zamenhof did an amazing job with it, not only in making it successful as an international language, but also in just the fact that it's really clever. I mean, I find the fact that it has synthetic nature to it, fascinating personally. And by that, I mean that you can take egg, for example, and you can stick it in bone for bonega, for something that's really great, or you can just use it independently as an egg, and use it for emphasis independently. So it's just, it's well designed. In its design, it takes into account that people from all kinds of different linguistic backgrounds are going to be learning and using the language. So it's kind of within the confines of being a defined language, it's also a very flexible toolkit for different creativity that allows flexibility while maintaining mutual intelligibility. I think that's great. It's fantastic. Thank you so much for that, Britain. That was really eye-opening. Now, for you, my dirty little viewers out there, if you've liked what you've seen, why don't you head over to the Indigo page, link right here, and also down in the description, and chuck them a couple of dollars, because realistically, the world needs to hear more about conlangs. And if you've liked this video, of course, give it a like, share it around with your friends, subscribe to my channel if you haven't already, and I'll see you all in the next video. And if you're not there, I will find you and insult you in so many conlangs you won't know where I've started. That's the link in the description, just go there.