A constructed language, or conlang, is an invented language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Famous examples include Esperanto, Klingon, and the various languages in the Lord of the Rings series.

The University can now claim its own constructed language, called simply UChiconlang (pronounced oo-chee-con-lang). It was developed as a group project by the student organization UChicago Constructed Languages Society.

The Society was cofounded in 2024 by Alice Wang and Ryan O’Farrell, both Class of 2027, who are known as its prime ministers. The society has about 15 members “in good standing,” says Timo Kiep, Class of 2027, minister of communications, “though we don't actually have dues, to be clear.”

It was Wang’s idea to create UChiconlang as one of the club’s first activities. As of early 2026 UChiconlang had about 300 words in its vocabulary.

Together, the club’s members know an enviable number of languages: Arabic, Akkadian, American Sign Language, Finnish, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, and Yakut (spoken in Russia), among others. In addition, O’Farrell is a fluent speaker of Toki Pona (“the language of good”), a constructed language of fewer than 150 words. One of those words, umesu (to win a Toki Pona game), was contributed by O’Farrell himself.

The Core chatted with members of the group on Discord. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Is it common for constructed languages to be made by a group?

Ryan O’Farrell: It’s much more common for one person to create most of a conlang and then watch as it gets “refined” by the community of speakers. This definitely happened with Toki Pona, and I think the early history of Esperanto is similar.

How do you make a conlang? Do you start with vocabulary, or grammar, or something else?

Zvi Gomez Fisher, Class of 2028: You’re supposed to start with phonology, the sounds the language will have.

The main linguistic inspiration for me was Hebrew. There are certainly similarities with other world languages, like the lack of inflected tense, shared with Mandarin among others, and SOV [subject-object-verb] word order, shared with Turkish among others.

When you’re constructing a language as a group, do you ever have creative differences?

Gomez Fisher: The closest we ever came was during a discussion for how to form the plural. We had to axe a proposal in which the plural morpheme would include the relative orientation of each object in question, because we couldn’t figure out the math. I only got as far as Calc 2.

What does that mean, “relative orientation of each object”?

Gomez Fisher: I have no idea. A bunch of people were arguing with pens on the table facing in different directions. Filippos [Tsoukis] could probably explain it better.

Filippos Tsoukis, Class of 2028: There was an idea to have a way of expressing the permutation of objects, in addition to their number. It wasn’t very successful.

If you have a number of objects and you name them and fix their position, you can rearrange the objects. The different rearrangements are what was meant by permutation—so, swapping pens around. It turns out this kind of designation has an algebraic structure where you can multiply permutations.

As well as a constructed language, you’ve also created a constructed pidgin, Pigi. How do you make a conpidgin?

O’Farrell: Stick a bunch of people who aren’t allowed to use a common language in a room and force them to communicate. The UChipidgin was the result of a single meeting where we banned everyone from speaking English, except ahoy, for whatever reason.

Ellie, Class of 2027: That was definitely my favorite part of the conpidgin. I think ahoy got used because people didn’t realize it was English.

August Fink, Class of 2027: Ahoj is “hello” in Czech I think.

O’Farrell: It pulled vocab from a lot of different languages. For example, suwi, which grew to mean “cookie,” is borrowed from the Toki Pona word for “sweet,” and the plural suffix -lar was borrowed from Turkish. So the UChiPidgin word for “cookies” ended up being suwilar.

Zvi [Gomez Fisher] tried to introduce the word wal as a demonstrative (e.g. “this,” “that”). But it’s really hard to convey the meaning of a demonstrative without a substantial vocabulary, so all he could do was point around the room and say wal. This led everyone else to take wal to mean a generic noun (“thing”).

Is there a vocabulary list for the pidgin?

O’Farrell: There’s no vocab or grammar list for the pidgin. You have to learn by immersion, although I’m not sure if we have competent speakers since it’s from last year.

Aria Ullman, Class of 2028: We actually got pretty proficient in it for a couple weeks, but then we stopped practicing and lost it.

What sounds characterize UChiconlang? Is it true that “Northwestern” is unpronounceable?

Gomez Fisher: That is correct. It sounds vaguely eastern Mediterranean. It’s very unique, at least among the languages I’m familiar with.

I see in the working document about the UChiconlang, “fun” and “death” are intrinsically linked.

Gomez Fisher: I think there’s only one word for both of those things.

Does the UChiconlang have an invented history? Is this a language that all UChicago students and alumni should ancestrally speak?

Gomez Fisher: Unfortunately no, but I’d 100 percent vote to canonize this.

Read about the UChiconlang translation of the alma mater.