phonology

"If you think of Sindarin - one of the two main Elvish languages - it's very much based on the phonology and grammar, at points, of Welsh," she said.

By the end of last year, her first full school year teaching this method, Hurt said 80% of her first-grade class had aced a phonology test — nothing she’d seen before in previous years.

“I didn’t realize that there is actually a sequential order in phonology that students should be learning their sounds — biggest to smallest,” Hurt said.

At Wellesley College, Dr. Angela Carpenter teaches the foundation of language creation, which she dices into roughly six blocks: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, grammatical rules of verbs, and nouns and what they indicate.

He starts with the phonology, or sound, then moves on to grammar, starting with nouns, “because they’re simpler.”