Creating new languages is a bunch of fun, but that's not the only reason why you should go for it. It also looks SUPER DOPE when your story contains a whole new language and adds to the professionalism of your writing.
The idea may seem overwhelming at first, but really, once you find a system it's not that complicated.
Fantasy languages most often come to life through:
• taking inspiration from Latin and remaking it to your liking
• mashing up a few languages together
• making up completely random new words
But first, think about how large is the language's role in the story. If it's used only a couple of times, you don't need to make an entire language - create only the words you'll need.
If the language appears more often, there are couple things to remember about. Please keep in mind I'm not a linguist and this advice comes from my own practise.
First: what will be the sentence order? Will it follow english, or perhaps japanese? Or... Something else entirely?
Typically, sentence in english flows like this:
adjective → noun → verb.
...but in your language it doesn't have to be this way.
With nouns, think of how singular and plural will differentiate. You can also decide if there will be feminine and masculine nouns. If you're feeling brave, think of the inflection. Personally I prefer to avoid it because of how it complicates the language.
How will you say "I" or "you"? Is it something you need to say every time? Is there "she" and "he" or is it all gender neutral?
Now about adjectives. Again, you can choose to make feminine and masculine adjectives. Think of grading, how will it work in your language?
Verbs are my favorite to make. Create rules for present, past and future tenses, however many you want there to be. Go with inflecting or not.
Really fun to do is creating curse words. Get creative here and come up with something hilarious.
Continue the process with the rest of the parts of speech depending on how many you need to be there.
Another interesting aspect of language you can explore is the level of formality. Have a look at Japanese for inspiration. Will the sentence look different depending on who the character is speaking to?
If you feel like additionally complicating your life you can also play with dialects and change the language according to your own dialectical rules. The differences can be small or big enough for the characters to not be able to understand each other.
As you can see, creating a fictive language is a bit like a game. If you're interested in this topic, look up constructed languages - conlangs, for short. There's a community of people online who enjoy creating their own languages and sharing them with others.
Together with creating your own language you can also create a writing system. Just take a piece of paper and start doodling shapes or whatever feels like it could work. Here you can also play with the rules: will one symbol stand for one vovel, or perhaps a syllable? Or one symbol for one word, like in Chinese kanji?
Think of how will the readers understand this new language. Will you include a dictionary at the end? Or will you add annotations with translations? Or perhaps it's something meant to be slowly uncovered, only by those who care to stop and analyse it for a moment.
Have fun creating something entirely yours and implementing it in your stories. You'll notice how they will grow with their own languages and writing systems. Cool!
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