Fictional Languages!

[DokiDokiTsuna]

I love me a good conlang~. So I wanted to start a topic to talk about them! Learning them, constructing them, decoding them, whatever floats yer boat.

I'm currently working on my own conlang for an upcoming novel. It's an analytic language that mixes together a lot of French and Japanese grammar. ^^; Here's a demonstration:

Language: Sinevel
Alphabet: a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, kc*, kg*, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z
*'kc' is an upper click (using the tongue), and 'kg' is a lower click (using the throat). Sinevel is supposed to be like a 'bird language', and a lot of Western readers aren't familiar with languages that have clicks, so I thought it would be fun to put some in. ^^

Sample Text:
Men q chana dai truine ten (It's a problem, which we have to endure)
Kgesen chri sensi la? (Why do you feel like this?)
Cha nilfei ch’ selkaine (I cannot stop myself)
Tanjie wn lumet hojyu (The sacred colours of the past)

The most tedious part of making a fictional language is expanding its vocabulary. Every time you try to write anything, you find you're missing a word, and then you have to go back and get a whole new word family in your dictionary. =___= But it has to be done...

I find the most efficient way is to try translating other texts into your language. That way, you end up adding words you'll actually need, and you can look for grammar holes as you go. For instance, while I was translating the stuff the sample text came from, I found I didn't have a way to use non-adjective modifiers. =/ So that was fun.

P.S. The upcoming novel is called OWL. I have nothing but cute pictures to show for it at the moment. ^^

[orchidesyl]

that so cool! i have two fictional languages im working on that's written in only in dashes and dots and spoken in whistles, and the other is written in swirls and circles, not too sure how it sounds. It's going to be in my comic Atlas' Odyssey and in the update later today there's gonna be a sneak peak of the whistle language lol

when i have a good version of them ill share it here

[AllynCrowe]

I don't really use fictional languages in my current story since it's historical fiction, but I love to make references to very exotic and unknown religions/cultural customs.
Especially African, Southern American, Roman, Scandinavian/Germanic and Asian cultured hold some really cool folklore. My personal favourite is still the Germanic folklore, since I feel it's very underrepresented. Anglosaxon storied have sort of replaced the more Pagan and frightening aspect of old tales. I remember reading the original fairy tales when I was a little child, that have been completely Disneyfied and mostly forgotten by the general public.

In terms of creating things with that, I love creating lore, theories and myths around those kind of things. Which ranges from self made fairy tales to tell in my stories, to Gods in fantasy settings, and even philosophy/theology inspired concepts to explain magic or supernatural things.

So not really my own language per se, but own cultures and customs and myths

[375]

Omg I love fictional languages!! The only problem is that I never really constructed an alphabet for myself but just a dictionary I suppose as well as days of the weeks, hours, weekends, etc. I mostly did it for This Is Fine, my weirdo romance story because it had so many different species and such.

[zigmenthotep]

I'm working on two for an upcoming project (goblin and high-elven). I've spent the most time on goblin since the story is very goblin-centric and I plan to use it a lot in the overall branding. It's mostly German and Japanese based (large numbers of compound words, loan words, and a very Japanese particle system.) but with adjectives after nouns, because that make more sense always. I've also got a fairly complete abjad writing system worked out.

And you said let's talk about constructing them, so...
I find the best way to start is just spouting out gibberish, then start refining that into what sounds do and do not exist in your language (for example, goblin lacks a "th" sound and contains a lot of hard consonants, giving it a choppy cadence). From there it becomes deciding how words are made (e.g. is someone who makes shoes a "shoemaker" or a "cobbler"). This is where you really need to think about the culture the language comes from, whatever concepts are fundamental to their culture are also going have a big impact on language. For example, you may have heard that Eskimo languages have an absurdly large number of words for snow, and they do, because have good reason to have different words for different kinds of snow. This is a particularly good example because it's easy to remove words from your native language (like a subterranean culture not having a word for sky) or replace them with compounds (like replacing "adventurer" with "violent-scavenger") but harder to stop and think about what things would facilitate words that don't directly translate into your native language. Gender is another big consideration, what words are gendered, are they masculine or feminine by default, how are they feminized or masculinized? Obviously the stricter a culture's gender rolls the more likely their language is to be heavily gendered. Basically the point I'm trying to make is avoid making a one-to-one substitution of the vocabulary of your native language.
Next is grammar... honestly, just steal it. Use whatever grammar you like, if you've never studied another language check out a few and take whatever bits you like, I mean that's basically how modern English came about.

And now I ramble about writing. If you've never looked into other writing systems, it's a fascinating subject, seriously go read up on Hangul, it's super neat. Probably the most important aspect of designing a script is determining how it would be written. If you look at a lot of eastern writing systems you see a lot of curves, varying line width, and more complex design, because these systems were developed by people writing with brushes. In contrast, if you look at Latin or Runic alphabets you see a lit of straight lines and simple design, as those languages were often carved or chiseled. Back to my own experience, I designed goblin script to be made exclusively out of no more than three straight lines per character as goblins are likely to only have the most rudimentary of writing tools, usually their claws.

Just to kinda put everything together, here's a goblin word.

Which is "drak-ba" which translates directly to "darkness person" and approximately to "dark elf" (or Døkkálfr). But because dark elves are the elves goblins are most familiar with it's also the root for all other kinds of elf, like high elves (ha-drak-ba) or wood elves (feh-drak-ba). And humans are "hoom-ba" since goblins don't have a word for them and have to borrow one from a fantasy language that is conveniently similar to English.

Well I'm tired to I'll stop now, but if y'all want more ramblings about language construction theory I'd be happy to oblige.

[PennieWagner]

I absolutely love doing the very same thing!

[PennieWagner]

This was absolutely fascinating as well as very helpful for my own ventures into fictional language structure. I've already implemented feminine and masculine structure into what words I have, but I've been sort of writing the language as I go with the words that pop up and I need to make. I've also struggled greatly to figure out a style for the script or even if I'd need to worry about script at all. But grammar...Yeah, I haven't bothered with any of that, truthfully. I really need to....

[DokiDokiTsuna]

I find the best way to start is just spouting out gibberish, then start refining that into what sounds do and do not exist in your language

That's such good advice! I wish I'd thought of it earlier...I was thinking about Sinevel's overall sound lately, and I realized I wanted it to sound more like birdsong: lots of 'ch' and 'tr' and more e and i vowel sounds. Unfortunately, that was after I'd already made up most of the foundational words. ^^' I'm in the middle of editing it right now, to get it more in line with my vision. Which is what inspired me to start this topic~

whatever concepts are fundamental to their culture are also going have a big impact on language.

I kinda wish I had more to work with in that area, because that sounds fun...as for Sinevel, the most important aspect of their culture is song, so 'song' and 'language' are the same word: sinevel. ^^ The word itself literally means "action-object", power given form. And the word that means "to sing" is sinesine, which is literally "to do-to do". XD Singing is doing. So there's that...
...but not much else. For instance, they have no concept of gender; so that's out. Religion is kind of a big deal to them, but it's more of a fact of life than a special ceremony requiring its own vocabulary...sigh.
BTW, my linguistics professor last semester hated that thing about Eskimos having a huge number of words for snow; he insisted that it was BS. ^^; Although, he never did say how many words they do have...

Probably the most important aspect of designing a script is determining how it would be written. If you look at a lot of eastern writing systems you see a lot of curves, varying line width, and more complex design, because these systems were developed by people writing with brushes. In contrast, if you look at Latin or Runic alphabets you see a lit of straight lines and simple design, as those languages were often carved or chiseled.

That's INSANE. I never thought about that...like, not in real life.
I only have one fictional alphabet that I use for all my "unknown language" needs, which I designed maybe 4 years ago. I liked it so much that I just changed its look to suit any new fictional context. For instance: for an underground society, I made it angular, so it'd be easy to scratch into walls.
The society in OWL writes with ink and reeds, so maybe I'll try "varying line width" like you mentioned. I can't wait to see what it'll look like~

[TheFalseVyper]

I have always wanted to create a fictional language, but I over think everything about it!

There are so many places in my story that adding a different language would add so much immersion!

[zigmenthotep]

Howdy, I'm back to talk more about language, because I'm a nerd.
So one thing I forgot to mention in my previous post, determining what sounds do and do not exist in a language is something that's useful even if you're not constructing and entire language, because it can also tell you what kind of accent a speaker of that language would have. But now back to writing systems, because I barely scratched the surface.

So basically writing systems fall into 3 categories.
Alphabetical: where each symbol corresponds to a single phonetic sound (or multiple single phonetic sounds depending on context) obviously I'm using an alphabetical system right not.
Abjad: Similar to alphabetical, but only consonants are written, which may seem odd, but if I wrote "pncks r grt" you can probably understand that without vowels. However, vowel notation can (and has been) added to abjad scripts. Hebrew and Arabic are both abjad scripts, the dots I use in the goblin script are specifically inspired by the vowel notation in modern Hebrew.
Abugida: Similar to abjad, but characters are consonants/vowel pairs and usually expressed as a variation of the primary notation of the consonant, as opposed to abjad where any vowel notion is secondary. I'm actually quite unfamiliar with this type of system, but see Thai or Hindi for examples.
Syllabic: Each character represents one spoken syllable. Honestly, aside from the need for more characters syllabic script is pretty simple. Each character can have a specific syllable (or multiple with specific notation) like Kana, or can be constructed of smaller phonetic characters like Hangul, seriously go read up on Hangul, there's a reason why linguistic nerds love it.
Logographic: And the most complicated, logographic scripts are those where each character has a meaning rather than ac pronunciation (although they may have a pronunciation independent of meaning too) so essentially like Chinese or Hieroglyphs.
Which is a convenient way for me to segue into the topic of script "degradation." One of the things that can make a script look fake is being too perfect. Real scripts evolve and simplify over thousands of years just from people writing them and becoming more efficient. For example: Hiragana is a less ridged version of Katakana, which itself is simplified from Kanji, which itself evolved from a more representational logoraphic system, which likely evolved from pictographs. Something like Kanji may look complicated, but feels very natural when you actually write it. In comparison, hieroglyphs are always gong to look and feel awkward. Here's a fun example, did you know that the Y in "ye olde" is actually a Þ? Medieval scribes had gotten into a habit of writing Þ in such a way that it became almost indistinguishable from a Y, and that (in combination with the popularity of the TH combination and desire to cut down letters for movable type) resulted in Þ being lost from the English alphabet, and people reading those poorly witten Þ's as Y's.
So how do you make a script look natural? Simple, take your nice fancy script and write out each character hundreds of times very fast until doing so feels natural, then look at the later ones and pick out the most consistent version. Basically you're trying to condense thousands of years of use into a few minutes. Just for funzies here's another example.

Once again, this shows how writing medium can affect script, the carved characters getting more angular and the brushed ones getting smoother.
In closing I would just like to add that anyone who just does a one-to-one character substitution as a "language" is a scrublord.

[zigmenthotep]

BTW, my linguistics professor last semester hated that thing about Eskimos having a huge number of words for snow; he insisted that it was BS. ^^; Although, he never did say how many words they do have...

Yeah, the popular concept is complete exaggeration. It's just like how we have words for dirt, mud, sand, rocks, gravel, clay, etc. which are all just specific types of earth.

[nerdyxredneck]

Hey emm, I am just a nerdy redneck who sometimes yeets sometimes skeets but I also do create my own language. My favorite one so far is called Belmor. It is a fully functioning language with grammar rules, special letters like [dhth], [mo], and [kye]. The design of the letters is inspired by Cyrillic Azbuka, but also by Japanese handwriting, Jewish Hebrew, and also some Arabic lols.
The language also contains several strange rules. Such as Writing from right to left and then from left to right, etc. Also, there is no spacing between the words, however, space is replaced by a special letter which looks like [W]
The language also have a number system of 8, and every sentence is marked by number at front.
Now I am working on second version of Word installable font version 2.0 which will enable people to use this masterpiece of mine in daily lives.

[nerdyxredneck]

[burginlewis]

I spent a Very. Long. Time. writing a conlang for a fantasy story once. Grammar, phonology, orthography... I think I had most of the Language Construction Kit out at Zompist memorized. My dictionary got up over a thousand words. I even wrote a font.

And didn't finish the story that the language was for.

I still have my language, and can write in it. Today I use it for my passwords. It's certainly handy for that. But mainly what I learned from all that work is that conlangs are shiny distractions if I'm trying to get serious writing done. From now on I will go no further than a phonology and a necessary word list. I just don't need the time suck.

[Maps]

I’ve always been so interested in trying his out. My characters speak “Vernajjian” and “Jaedan”, but usually I just indicate what language they have used (aka “Where were you?” Roenan asked in Jaedan).

It would be cool to actually create parts of the languages and insert it into parts of my story for a final version.

[WriterLinXiaolong]

This sounds really interesting! I'll try doing this when I make a new project which I already have an idea on. Let's see how it goes

[vothnthorvaldson]

Ah!
Er....
Well...

I have a fictional language for my comic. But I force myself to not work on it because I love doing that so much, it takes all my time.
At first, I was reasonable. I only wanted a script to be able to write in the comic language on road and shop signs. I choose two scripts I know (Tamil and Phoenician) as influences.

Then I thought I would do a cursive script. That's prettier, but that's more work.
Then I started to think of the pronunciation. More work. More letters too! With several versions each because cursive, right?
Then I thought the different regions in my comic must have different pronunciation. More work.
Then I started working on the grammar. More work.
Adding ridiculous amount of vocabulary. More work.
Time to draw the comic disappeared...

So I don't touch the language anymore. I will spend another 10-20 hours checking spelling and pronunciation of all the words/names I want to use, for consistency, but that's all (I've still not reach the part of my comic where I need the script)

[Kiweevil]

In the native language of the universe my comic takes place in, there's no long "ee" sound. Instead they use a "hue" sound. Confuses the hell of my partner.

[elyss]

I do don't switches for my comic. I have an idea of how they'd sound, but I'm no linguist and have zero patience

[Vinius]

I have a couple of ideas about fictional languages, they're very raw and basic, but I enjoy making up stuff! Learning different languages also helps a lot. For example, a lot can be taken from Japanese, that's a really difficult language for me, but that's so inspiring in terms of coming up with new rules for my own made up languages.