Building an Artificial Language from Scratch

Jœjuca

Abstract

Constructed languages, otherwise known as conlangs, are languages that are artificially created to serve some purpose. Dothraki and High Valyrian in Game of Thrones, and Quenya in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings are some well-known conlangs. This paper describes a novel conlang, Jœjuca: created for fishermen and sailors in the fictional world of Coweun. Jœjuca is used in this fictional world for communication of people that speak different native tongues. Because in its fictional world Jœjuca achieves communication between people speaking different languages, similar to constructed languages like Esperanto, it can also be considered an auxiliary language, or an auxlang. Jœjuca was constructed as part of a class project, and has since evolved past its original purpose and expanded out of curiosity and interest to do so. The following paper is a complete description and explanation of Jœjuca's fictional world setting, linguistic characteristics, and accompanying examples of the constructed language in action. The paper explores the phonology, morphology, lexicon, and even translations of Jœjuca into English.