Hi, I’m Thora (aka Shivallon) from Germany, and I love languages! This is a website about my constructed languages and the fantasy world I invented them for. Check out this page if you are confused about why someone would want to construct a fictional language.

I created my first proper conlang Kabukanisch for a game I played with my friends when I was around 12 years old. I also loved studying languages, but really hated speaking them, which always earned me bad oral grades – except in Latin, which we didn’t have to speak! When it was time for university, I had no idea what to study. While browsing through the subjects offered by my favorite university, I stumbled across linguistics, which appealed to me, because its description said that it was about how languages worked in general, not about learning to communicate in one of them. At that time, I was also growing dissatisfied with Kabukanisch, which felt uninnovative to me because it took so many features from the few languages I knew (it was the typical relex, i.e. a conlang that copies the grammar of one languages and just glosses it over with unorganized alien vocabulary)… I thought that studying linguistics might help me create a better Kabukanisch, and so I moved out and became a linguist!

While I really enjoy linguistics as a whole, I am most interested in linguistic typology, i.e. the patterns and distributions of linguistic features across the languages of the world, and historical linguistics, i.e. the evolution of modern languages from their earlier stages, the reconstruction of those earlier stages, and the genetic relationships between languages. Studying linguistics and learning about all the fun and weird thing that natural languages do did actually lead me to completely abandoning Kabukanisch and starting to work on a bunch of new conlangs altogether (especially Ryka), which I present on this website.

Apart from natural and constructed languages, I also work with programming languages, as my university career led me from pure linguistics over computational linguistics to computer science and finally to becoming a software developer. I also play a lot of video games.