My name’s Ángel Serrano Sánchez de León. I’m from Spain and my mother tongue is Spanish. I’m the proud creator of the Aingeljã conlang.
For an unknown reason, I’ve been interested in languages since I was a child. During the summer of 1986, I suffered from a skin disease that made me stay at home for several months. With so much free time, I watched a documentary about Phoenician language on TV, so I started to wonder how it’d be to create my own language.
I hadn’t heard about Tolkien’s languages nor Esperanto when I created my first conlang. It was too childish and, unfortunately, I don’t keep any notebooks from that time. It was a mere Spanish-based language, where I used an invented alphabet for writing.
I must surely have appeared too weird to my family, because conlanging is not a very common hobby, at least when I was a teenager. A sister of mine did find it curious and began to say that I was inventing “Angeliano”, which means “Ángel’s language” in Spanish. From that word I derived my first, and so far only, conlang: Aingeljã.
Hmmm, so how is Aingeljã pronounced, you might ask? Well, it’s very easy. This word has three syllables: Ain-ge-ljã. ‘Ain’ is pronounced like the ending of ‘nine’. ‘Ge’ is like the verb ‘get’. ‘Ljã’ is the stressed syllable and is probably the hardest part to pronounce for an English speaker, though. It’s a diphthong (the joining of two vowels). The ‘j’ represents the same palatal semivowel as the first sound in ‘yeah’. The final ‘ã’ is just a long ‘a’ as in ‘far’ (as an Englishman would pronounce it). Don’t get scared with this nasal tilde (~). It’s there just for spelling and etymological reasons and has nothing to do with pronunciation. The IPA representation of Aingeljã is [ai̯ŋgeˈlja].
My Aingeljã conlang was really born between 1992 and 1993, after I had studied some Latin at high school and after my personal contact with other Romance languages, such as Catalan, Galician, French and Italian.
In 2002 I created the Aingeljã website, where I published my first version of the Aingeljã grammar, completely written in my conlang, and some vocabulary. I wrote some posts in several forums and I received some interest from the conlanging community, especially from Jan van Steenbergen, the creator of Wenedyk among other conlangs. I’m currently working on a refurbished version of the grammar, which I hope to publish very soon.
Langmaker.com, the unfortunately disappeared web devoted to conlangs, established that Aingeljã ranked 118 in the list of most popular conlangs of 2005, among more than 1400 participants!
Since 2014 I belong to the so-called Language Creation Society, which is a dream come true.
I can’t imagine my life without conlanging. However it’s only a hobby. If you’d like to know what I do as a living, you can visit my professional website.