built a language for my world and now I'm realizing I don't actually speak any language other than english and it shows
made a whole conlang with grammar, syllable structure, a few hundred words
Very proud of it for months until i handed a sample to a friend who's a linguist and she was polite but pointed out that my "made up language" has almost identical grammatical structure to English, just with different sounds slapped over the top. Same subject-verb-object order and tense structure. It's basically English wearing a costume..her words
tried to imagine how someone in my invented culture would think, I could only really imagine them thinking in English with different labels for things. I don't have another language in my head to draw from, and it turns out you can't build a genuinely alien way of speaking if you've only ever internalized one way of speaking yourself.
Started reading grammars of languages structured very differently from English, hungarian, japanese, mohawk not to steal from them exactly more likely to loosen my own assumptions about what "language" has to do
kinda time consuming but the second draft of my conlang is finally starting to feel like it belongs to a different kind of mindand not just a different accent