I thought I’d finally do my introduction, been thinking about it for several days!
Tl;dr: I know Norwegian, English, Faroese and Norse. I have a local esperanto-community. I think toki pona is neat. Working on my first conlang.
I am a Norwegian-Finn. I’m queer. I only recently took interest in linguistics and language advocacy, but have loved languages since I was a kid.
(Feel free to skip to next part)
My interest these last years has been language advocacy (irl/online), and learning about Norwegian language history and dialects, and Nynorsk.
I have a foundational understanding with French (used to visit a lot). I have studied Faroese for 3 years. I know some Cymraeg. I do tons of stuff with languages on Duolingo just for fun. I mean, fun is what it’s all about, not fluency!
I learnt English through Pokémon and manga when I was around 12. They had stopped translating manga to Norwegian, so to keep going, I started reading English. I feel we often forget English as a language one learns/studies.
Conlangs
Through my teens, I had an off-and-on again relationship with Esperanto. Only a few years ago did I find out about toki pona, but it didn’t catch my interest back then, other than me thinking it was really cool to recognise the Finnish words.
This spring, a friend of mine (irl) took interest in Esperanto. Several of my friends took interest in the language, so I joined too. I knew stuff from before. We had lots of meetups, and even got a physical Esperanto-shelf at the place we hang at. (a queer anarchist co-op book-café.)
This revitalized my interest for conlangs. I went back into toki pona, as I got recommended RobWord’s video just at the right time! I still regularly listen to jan Usawi! I had a lot of fun learning sitelen pona, and would read about etymology. I don’t know tp, but I love engaging with the community, memes and media.
My venture into my first conlang
I have played a lot with language through the years, and as a child I would make my own alphabets. Only just now am I deciding to make a language. I find it very hard to not overthink everything. But since it’s my first one, I’m deciding that I should mess around more than overthink.
I started with Proto-Germanic, and applied regular rules. I have accidentally made something that resembles some old Anglo-Frisian/Saxon dialect, as I took very few traits from Norse, High German or Gothic.
It’s not meant to be a folkspraak. I think if I’d do a setting, it’d be like a pre-christian culture around the north sea. Since I’ve read a lot of the eddas and such, the vocabulary has become very… Tolkien meets Edda.
I might make a thread for my language.