So, I have a dilemma. I'm part of the LGBTQ+ community and as such, I have an overwhelming desire to put words into my conlangs for such terms. However, I'm trying to make my conlangs more or less naturalistic, so I don't know if making terms for things such as straight or gay or bi or pan or trans or whatever would be unrealistic. I get that it probably depends on the culture of the speakers as a whole, but I'm still stumped. Thoughts?

Consider that, by all accounts, English is a natural language, and we have the words “straight”, “gay”, “bi”, “pan”, “trans”, etc. All languages can talk about all things, it’s just a matter of how many words it takes, what their etymologies are, and how usual it is to discuss such things. For example, English has a lot of terminology for dealing with freeways and how we interact with them (on ramps, off ramps, tailgating, lane splitting, traffic jams, sigalerts, etc.), and I imagine this language is completely foreign and all but useless to an English speaker living in rural Australia—let alone to an English language learner from Mongolia who plans to move to rural Australia.

Back to the question at hand, for your language, you have to consider the culture, the timeframe, and the history of your world. English has a lot of new coinages for LGBTQ+ (new meaning last 60-70 years) because: [a] old terms fall out of use for very prosaic reasons (happens all the time); [b] old terms become stigmatized and fall out of use for that reason; and [c] there may not have existed a specific term before. There are lots of things that don’t have specific terms and don’t have words because we feel we don’t need them. For example, the inside of a microphone cover, as opposed to the outside. Not very useful to have a word to talk about them separately. If you had to, you’d just say “the inside of the microphone cover” and that’s fine, since it doesn’t get used very often.

A lot of LGBTQ+ terminology is useful because there are lots of gender identities and orientations that, while they’ve existed since time immemorial, have not been recognized by society at large—or, if they have been recognized, they’ve been demonized. Creating a new term (or bringing a term which may not have ever been used in the mainstream into the mainstream) means that it won’t have any historical baggage carried with it, and those claiming it can create its history. It’s also just useful to let people know “Hey! This is a thing! If you were wondering ‘Is this way that I am a thing?’, the answer is ‘YES, it’s a thing! And it’s a good thing!’ Now you have a term for it!” Sometimes it will help people to understand their own feelings simply by having a term to latch onto—that will allow them to say, “I am X!”, whatever X happens to be.

It’s impossible to consider the LGBTQ+ terminology we have in English today without considering the history of each term and, more importantly, the history of LGBTQ+ people in the English-speaking world. I think it’s an interesting and open question to ask, if we started history over again and this time maybe there wasn’t widespread prejudice against LGBTQ+ groups, would common, everyday terms like “gay” and “straight” exist? Certainly in a world where there are universities and textbooks there would still be terms for everything (I don’t think an academic discipline can exist without nomenclature), but we’re talking about terms that everyone would use regularly. Would we be talking about gay characters on television today, or would there just be characters where it’s totally unsurprising if any of them are interested in any person of any gender for any reason? Would there even be the “OMG turns out X character is gay/bi/lesbian!” plot twist anymore, or would it feel as dated as the “It turns out she wasn’t a virgin on her wedding night!” plot twist (for which, by the way, see the history of literature)? Would it even be a thing for people to regularly demand of another, “Oh, does that mean you’re straight/gay/bisexual/male/female? Tell me for absolute certain! I HAVE TO KNOW RIGHT NOW!”, or would that be considered so rude that it simply wouldn’t happen (or, more probably, would the desire for certainty like this even occur)?

This line of thinking always leads me to a rather unsettling question: If one is making one’s own Earth-like world, is it possible to have a society of humans where a minority (ANY minority) isn’t harassed, oppressed, categorized, or exoticized by the majority at any point in time in its history? Or is human nature such that that’s a totally unrealistic fantasy?

When you’re creating a naturalistic language, this is the type of thought process that goes into vocabulary creation. Sometimes it’s simple (e.g. usually the word for “rock” is pretty uncontroversial. Though, of course, how the word is used depends on the culture—consider various usages of the word “stone”, for example), but most of the time it involves imagining or reimagining the entire history of the universe. I’m not sure if that’s useful for you, but what you should do is consider what your world is like, and what it was like. Where did your language come from? How were LGBTQ+ individuals treated throughout your language’s history? If they were oppressed or shunned at some point in time, did they obtain their civil rights (or were there multiple such instances depending on the group)? When? What was happening at the time? How were they discussed by those who oppressed them? How did they talk about themselves? Did they have a time of increased linguistic creativity? What would they draw from? If we create a brand new word in English, we don’t put together a random string of letters: We go to Latin. We go to Greek. We create portmanteaux (smoke + fog = smog). We create words that rhyme with other words. We create acronyms (which, by the way, are ONLY relevant if your language has an alphabetic/abjadic writing system). We base words on names of people or places. We zero-derive terms from other words that have other meanings. What would your people do? What is their Latin and Greek, for example?

When it comes to expanding a lexicon (which is a lifelong undertaking), you don’t have to answer all these questions at once. I like to think of it as story writing. You go to a period of history and start coining words for what was happening, thinking of what movements were in vogue, what people were at the forefront, what events happened. You can go piece by piece, strand by strand, and little by little build up the fragmented history that is your modern lexicon: the epic of your people. That’s what a language is, after all. An imperfect and tattered record of everything that happened to everyone who spoke the language previously. (Which, to totally switch topics, is one of the many reasons why it’s devastating whenever a natural language dies. A language is an imperfect history that can’t readily be told any other way than by continuing to exist in the minds and mouths of its speakers [or the hands of its signers].)

But yeah, this is why doing it the naturalistic way is hard. It’s not a simple matter of saying “x means y”, “z means a”, etc. But in case you got the impression from somewhere, it does not mean that “good” naturalistic languages can’t have LGBTQ+ terminology. Not at all. It’s simply a question of how such terminology can be naturalistically reified. A tough but worthy endeavor.

Thanks for the ask!