Songvocablang

Matthew McVeagh | my conlangs

A language whose vocab is all taken from one (real) song.

To make it practical with a decent lexicon size a long song with many words and references would be needed. English-language examples include:

• REM – End of the World

• Billy Joel – We Didn't Start the Fire

• Don Maclean – American Pie

• Leonard Cohen – Hallelujah

• [traditional folk] – Sir Patrick Spens

If I was to do this I could maybe try it with the lyrics of several different songs at once. The first thing to do would be to count the words in each song and see how the total it compares to e.g. Toki Pona's vocabulary at 120. If no song has that many maybe try using the words of several songs combined.

Once a song or set of songs has been verified as suitable in terms of number of words, if there is more than one candidate it might be useful to align the word lists so they are parallel in terms of equivalent properties. For instance shorter words could be reserved for simpler and more basic meanings, such as particles or the most general/basic content words.

If there are a decent number of words of common stem content, e.g. where there are a few with inflections or derivational affixes added, these could optionally be grouped for common meaning/lexicality in the conlang. Or I could just treat them as different lexemes!