What is the best way to learn how to make a constructed language or Conlang?

Answer 1

The websites linked below have marvelous - ENORMOUS - amounts of information about creating your own language. Conlangs are popular with creative writers, and with many other creative people who are fascinated by languages.

Here are some things to keep in mind when coming up with a language of your own:

• Study language - become a language analyst and dissector of words. Learn all you can about how languages evolve and change, and how words and idioms are formed.
  
• If you are a writer, keep in mind how the reader might mis-pronounce your words - instead of tossing in a bunch of random apostrophes and consonants, think about how to spell the words phonetically so your readers will know how to say them - if you don't think readers will bother to say them, you have never been to a scifi convention and passed groups of people speaking Elvish, Klingon, and Pernese.
• You can achieve a sense of variety in your created world by having each language and naming system based on a different cultural group here on Earth - one language might look similar to Arabic, for example, while another might use the tonal qualities of Chinese.
• If you're writing this for a work of fiction, start with a small "glossary" of basic words instead of spending hours and hours creating the entire language.
• You can achieve a good effect by creating your own idioms and slang - your characters are probably not going to have an idiom like "cooked your goose" or "head over heels in love." Perhaps they would say "he has stolen your aura" or "she is acting like a varsok during rainy season."
• Think of how your language evolved in the culture of your world.