#005: A Beginners Guide to Languages That Don't Exist

A word from Freya: This week I sat down with Todd to talk about something I honestly knew nothing about going in: conlangs, the art of building languages from scratch for fictional worlds. Turns out there's a lot more method (and Google Sheets) behind it than I expected.

When did conlangs first show up on your radar, was it a specific game, book, or show that pulled you in?

I was a big fan of Game of Thrones. Spent a long time getting into listening to the audiobooks, literary analysis on YouTube, etc. Dothraki, Valyrian and High Valyrian in the show were some of the coolest things about the series. A language in a fantasy world. I didn't realize at the time it was a conlanguage, but I did enjoy the idea that the world was so immersive it had its own speech, its own cultures. The first time I tried Duolingo, I attempted Dothraki, and I failed hard haha.

Another part of this was realizing that Tolkien used his conlanguages to create an entire world of fantasy, or that Klingon from Star Trek was used to add depth in the same way. It adds a foreign element to the familiar, and with that, I find the first seeds of fantasy are easiest to plant.

Where do you even start when building a language from scratch, sounds, grammar, vocabulary, something else?

Conlanguage begins with worldbuilding. What kind of world does this language exist in? What kind of peoples speak this language? Is their culture one of religion? War? Survival? Fear? You can't ask enough questions early on.

Once you have a foundation, you then move on to sounds. The sounds should reflect the image of the language. Our current major project has a conlanguage in it that I designed to sound like steam. I used the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, to select sounds that imitated steam and machinery for the setting.

From sounds, you decide on the morphology of the words, how the actual sounds fit together. Can a vowel come before a consonant? Are there consonant clusters? Are words simple and short, limited to just a few letters? Or are they long and elegant, bouncing from consonant to vowel and back again?

Then comes grammar. You have to know how your sentences are structured before you start slapping words into them. The biggest rule is typically that a language is one of two types: SOV (Japanese uses this), or SVO (English uses this). There are exceptions, but they're few and far between.

Next is words. I use a Google Sheets document I've designed which lets me put together words at the click of a randomization button, lifting the heaviest load of conlanging automatically. A word is made up of a pattern of consonants and vowels, it might be "CV" (like "to"), or "VC" (like "as"), or "VCVC" (like "like"), or any combination. It's best practice to use short words as bases and build upon them over time so the language isn't overly wordy.

How much of it is "designed" versus discovered as you go? Does the language ever surprise you?

The language development does tend to surprise me pretty regularly. The random generator occasionally generates words that read in English, but are pronounced differently thanks to the IPA. For example, I'm working on a language inspired by Japanese which uses the CVCV format as one of its bases. I generated the word "gate", which reads as gate (the entrance door into a fenced area, for our non-English readers), but is pronounced "ga-tay" because the "e" isn't the same as the silent "e" in the English word. It's also interesting to see how words change and evolve, and what rules can actively apply to a language at any given time.

How does the language tie into worldbuilding? Does it come from the lore, or does building the language end up shaping the lore?

Language is directly tied to the worldbuilding. It's guided directly by the world the characters live in. I think it's interesting to note that language comes from culture. One culture might live isolated for centuries and may never develop a word for "war". One might be tied to nature, and its words are fusions of words linked to plants or animals. A third might live somewhere particularly hot, and speech might be something more limited in societal use.

An interesting example of language shaping the lore is the loose conlanguage of Dovahkiin from Skyrim. It doesn't have a full language, to my knowledge, but it has a word list, and those words are literal magic within the world. It leads to the player making use of The Voice, magic conjured not through intent, but through words that literally conjure the magic itself. One of the game's loading screens actually notes this, stating that dragon fights are basically verbal battles.

Are there real-world languages you're drawing influence from, and how do you use that without just reskinning them?

I've learned a little bit of a lot of languages. I'm fluent in English. I'm getting to conversational in Japanese. I've touched on a bit of Spanish, Korean, Russian and French. The biggest thing to realize when trying to avoid reskinning a language is to ask yourself: "What rules does language X follow that language Y does not?" If both do the exact same thing, you need to add some unique rules to spice it up.

Learning about Japanese particles has shaped some of my languages. Some mark ownership, or topical markers. Some languages mark tense. Some let you put word A and word B together to relay a similar concept, like combining the words "fire" and "chicken" to relay the concept of a phoenix. Variation is up to the user, but it's important to remember these are all just patterns, and there will be overlap with other languages. The phrase "there's nothing new under the sun" is too true, especially when it comes to language.

What's the most difficult part of conlang creation that people wouldn't expect?

Naming conventions. Out of everything I've designed in conlanging, coming up with names is the hardest part. There are so many variations on rules when it comes to names that it leaves a lot of choice. Most common is "Given Name, Family Name". Some, such as Spanish naming, especially those tied to family lineages, use long compounded names. Russian uses patronymics, a sort of middle name determined by your father's name and your gender.

And it's not just the patterns, it's incredibly hard to make sure the sounds for names work well as names, and requires foresight to work properly 100% of the time. This is the stage I'm at with my Japanese-inspired language, and it's been a climb haha.

Is there a conlang from another game or piece of media you look at and think "that's the standard"?

I don't think any conlang should be considered the "standard", much in the same way no one language should be. English became a standard due to flexibility, culture and colonialism, but it's by no means the main language of the world. There's an amazing amount of concepts that can't translate into English directly from other languages. I think it's more important to understand real world languages than fantasy ones. I find a sort of beauty in having multiple languages from multiple cultures and locations. Words are so integral to the human identity that limiting it to just one language would be like losing a part of our identity.

Where do you want to take this? Is there more language work planned for future Renhet projects?

Oh yeah!! My workflow has me able to set a language's bones up in a matter of just a few hours, so it's really not much effort to set up. I'm already working on future concepts for games, and cooking up plenty more immersive worlds for players to explore.

Neo lak, lotla! :)

That’s it for this week!

- Freya, on behalf of the crew

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