Ask me about linguistics, conlangs, and the social use of language

Are you writing a story in which characters use language to communicate? Then you may need to think about linguistic worldbuilding!

(While I debated about whether to post this here or in Worldbuilding, I think here is more appropriate, since I intend to draw on my knowledge of a real-world subject I have a degree in and help people apply real social and linguistic theory to a fantasy setting. Mods feel free to ask me to move the thread if appropriate)

As a PhD candidate in linguistics, I am always disappointed when reading an otherwise good fantasy story where very little thought has been put into language use in the world, especially when harmful stereotypes crop up. Since linguistics isn't a very commonly taught subject, I want to offer free advice on how to make the use of language in your world realistic and appropriate. Having well-thought-out language use in your story can help a lot with your general worldbuilding as well, such as tying in history and culture. Feel free to hit me up with questions about language use in your world, big or small!

Here are a few examples of the kinds of things I can answer questions about:

• Conlangs and the development of phonology, grammar, orthography and other technical aspects of a fictional language
• Dialects of major languages in your world and how they might reflect social structures
• Registers and the systematic use of particular styles of language that characters might use based on context
• 2nd language use and accents that realistically reflect what it might be like for a character to communicate in a non-native language
• Language boundaries and how strict or flexible the boarders between different languages might be in different parts of your world
• Signed languages and how to incorporate them realistically into a world
• Translation, especially between different species or groups with very different modes of communication
• How to write vernacular dialects without falling into harmful stereotypes
• Historical language and how to represent language that has changed over time

Ask a question and I'll do my best to point you in the right direction by giving you examples of real world linguistic situations that might work as good models to draw on!

 

Yes, bring me your conlangs! I'm experimenting with building my own, but I really want to help others start or polish their own conlangs!

 

First, I would say that having few verbs and robust adverbs is more of a lexical feature than a grammatical one. If you want to think about how this might fit in to the culture, this kind of structure would suggest that they value creatively descriptive language and make lots of fine-grained distinctions in the manner of doing something, maybe even thinking of manner of doing as being a broader category than the actual activity they're doing. This could be an interesting way to tie a slightly technical description of this language feature into the story as a way of showing something about their culture. Also, a real language would probably have a strict ordering for adverbs, such as speed always before trajectory, or something like that. You could also simplify the grammar by having the adverbs come right after the verb, or even be attached to the very as suffixes. For example, you could have a SOV language that read something like "He (subject) the grassy park (object) walked-through-fast-difficult-tired-wiggling (verb+manner). Lots of ways you could do this!

There are many world languages with verbs that don't conjugate, like you describe. The one I'm most familiar with is Mandarin Chinese, which you could look at for more ideas on how that works. What you're talking about with schemes or being serious isn't actually tense, but there is a term for it! Look into "grammatical mood", which is also a common feature of many languages.

Here's another fun term to look into: discourse markers/particles. Essentially, they're short words that are often added at the end of a sentence that don't change the meaning of the sentence, per se, but play a role in discourse flow, mark speaker attitude or mood, compare ideas, or other features. Some argue that emoji serve this function sometimes in English writing, but English in general doesn't have a very robust system of discourse markers. However, languages like Chinese and Malay use them a lot. Check out Singaporean English for an example of an English dialect that has borrowed discourse markers from other languages. I'm imagining that your whistles could serve this kind of function. This would be especially interesting if someone was trying to learn their language and didn't realize the whistles were part of the sentence, and so could never get things quite right!

What is the writing system like for them in general? Are you suggesting that they write in and alphabet and then have ideographs for these other concepts that can be combined with the alphabetic part? This is not something I know of any real language doing, but it could be interesting! Alternatively, you could make the writing all alphabetic (and these extra bits could be spelled out and function as titles or nicknames) or make the whole writing system ideographic, especially if you want to suggest that their names have a meaning in their language. For example, maybe Aliffe means "oak tree", and so their name is [oak tree symbol] [leader symbol] [humor symbol] etc.

Oh so many! Such a large portion of language is metaphoric and we don't even realize it, so pretty much any idiom, when translated literally, will be meaningless. You can just look up literal translations of idioms for lots of examples. You can also just try to think about all the metaphorical language we use in English and how it would sound if translated literally. Kick the bucket? Cat out of the bag? Even seemingly uninteresting phrases like "turn on/off the light" (Chinese uses "open/close") or "tidy up" (up where?) or "fall in love" all could sound very weird if translated literally to a language that doesn't have the same lexical connotations.

This is a great start for language building! My main advice would be to think about how this language reflects the culture and ideals of the people who speak it. In this way, if you have other characters from different backgrounds interact with them, the linguistic issues (mistranslations, difficulty learning the language, misunderstandings based on different norms) can be tied to the cultural issues, which will allow you to share information about the language with your readers without boring them with technicalities or requiring them to learn a bunch of words from the language. I hope this all helps!

 

Thanks for asking about this! I feel like this topic is one that deserves more attention, since it's relevant in any story, but that people don't often realize is even something they should consider. There's a lot to say about this topic, so I'll just give a broad overview of common issues, but if you have specific questions relating to a specific story or writing project, let me know!

A common myth in linguistics is that language affects the way people think. While there are some small ways that this might be true (mainly related to how people prefer to organize concepts), the truth is that language is largely a reflection of how people think. The types of linguistic choices a society makes is a result of what kind of things they value and how they view the world. In other words, language is inextricable from culture, and when building a fictional culture, you should think carefully about the linguistic choices you're making, even if you're doing it all in English. But people also aren't truly limited by the language they speak, otherwise it wouldn't be possible to learn another language. This is also why language is constantly changing. So in the same way that people might accept or reject certain parts of their culture and interact with other cultures, people can also accept or reject linguistic norms and change a language to better reflect their personal worldviews.

Most importantly for those who are writing in a single language, what is the relationship between different dialects and styles of speech in a culture? Are any of your characters going to "speak" a non-standard dialect? If so, how are you going to represent that in writing? For example, is it really important for you to write a word with a non-standard spelling to represent a pronunciation difference, or are you just implying that a character is uneducated? Non-standard dialects often carry with them lots of stereotypes, and so writers sometimes use "accents" to say something about a character's personality, when in reality, an accent only says something about where a person is from or what community they grew up in. So a careful use of dialects and accents in a story can be a way to indirectly show a culture's subdivisions by region, social group, or status/power. A careless use of dialects and accents can perpetuate harmful stereotypes.

Not to mention the interaction between different languages! If you have a world where different species of people speak different languages (elves, dwarves, etc), what happens in a city where many species live together? Which language becomes the dominant one of the society and why? Who has to be multilingual and who gets to be monolingual? What kinds of borrowing and language mixing will happen? All of these choices say something about the social organization of a society, and how different groups of people view each other.

Like I said, this is just a broad overview, but I hope it inspires you to think more deeply about the linguistic landscape of your world! If you give me specific examples of the culture and societal organization of your world, I can draw on real-world examples to help you figure out what kind of realistic linguistic landscape might arise from that kind of situation.

 

Out of curiosity, in what sense do you think it's misconstrued? My understanding is that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis does suggest that language is a limitation, which is why most linguists reject all but the very weakest versions of it (linguistic relativity).

I did look into E Prime, out of curiosity, and it strikes me as being more of a psychological thought experiment than a linguistically-supported idea. I definitely see what you mean about wanting to show that immortal beings would think differently than mortals, but I'm not sure getting rid of "to be" would really do this, because it serves so many grammatical functions in English besides just making statements of identity or truth. My suggestion would be to not dispense with "to be" entirely, but to build a more robust and obligatory system of evidentials for this culture ("it seems", "I saw", "I believe", "it appears", "I suspect", etc). While English does have evidentials, it's not as robust as in some languages, but making it obligatory might serve to show how these people are less concerned with objective "truths" and more concerned with how someone acquired the knowledge or how they experienced and event. Maybe it's not what you're aiming for, but it could be interesting to consider!

 

This is where keeping in mind the social implications of language is important, even when you think what you're talking about is structure. I'm sure you didn't mean it this way, but it sounds like you're suggesting that Korean is so exotic that it's practically non-human. This is a very common linguistic trap people fall into, thinking that their native language or languages they've learned are "normal" and anything different is "exotic" and therefore somehow deviant, which is clearly not the case. In fact, English doesn't really have a subjunctive tense, or at least not a grammatical one! If you're certain that a language feature is not used in any human language, then it might be a good candidate for an "alien" language, but be careful that you don't just pick things that feel "alien" to you, but are really just reflections of your own linguistic biases (which we all have, so no accusation meant, but just make sure to be careful).

 

I love this! Very cool, and it sounds like you have a lot of good ideas. Yeah, there's always the difficulty with storytelling in one language about a group that presumably speaks another language, but I think you're right that the best way to deal with this is to have names and a few important words from the language used, and perhaps some meta-comentary about the languages. Inventing a conlang is definitely not always the way to go!

This is all very neat! I can see where you're getting the inspiration for some of these words from, and it sounds like that's important to helping your readers understand that their language is derived from common ancestors of modern languages. I don't think you need to worry too much about the technical details of historical linguistics, but if you look up some common words from modern languages and change them a bit, as if they developed differently, I think your point will come across. Another fun thing could be to mix languages! For example, English has a lot of words with roots from both Greek and Latin that got mashed together. I would also take a little bit of time to consider what writing system this culture would use. You could either go with the Roman alphabet, to make things easy, in which case you'd want to think about how spelling might have developed over time, or you could pick another writing system that was widely used at the time of the language-mixing, in which case you could just spell the words however you think they'd be pronounced, but you could mention that the writing system represents them differently. Just a little texture element you could throw in!

Good catch, checking in about this, because I do see some red flags here. One is the use of what's known as "eye dialect", which is when you spell a word in a non-standard way to represent that the speaker sounds "different" somehow, but the non-standard spelling actually doesn't change the pronunciation. For example, you used "yu" for "you", and even "ya" for "you" is not an abnormal way to say it in fast speech in most English dialects. The danger here is that you're indexing "otherness" and possible "lack of education" without actually adding anything to the reader's understanding of what the character sounds like. On the other hand, dropping the "h" in "here" and "her" is safer, because it actually clarifies a pronunciation difference. You should still be careful, even with this though, because it's hard to escape the association of "non-standard spelling" with "lack of education" in fiction, especially if they're supposedly all speaking in a non-English language anyway. What does it mean that you've given this dialect to some characters and not others? Well, it means you see this dialect as abnormal in some way, and presumably you associate it with daemans. It's a tough issue, and there's no one right answer for how to portray different accents in writing, since you have to count on your reader to fill in the blanks, but it's worth thinking carefully about. At the very least, make sure to run it by a speaker of the dialect you're using to make sure they don't find it offensive or horribly inaccurate. When in doubt, sensitivity readers are a great resource!

 

Sign languages are an under-used and often misunderstood type of language, so it's cool that you might use one! Make sure you look into some of the basics of how signed languages work (there are a lot of them, but they often share general features such as inclusion of facial expression or body position). For a species that's half fish, you could definitely play with the idea of them having significant biological differences from humans that might effect their signing (number/type of limbs available to use, differences in vision underwater, etc.) or speech (if they normally breath underwater, do they have the same lung/mouth shape as humans, or are there slight differences that make it impossible for them to produce certain human sounds?). A signed language could have a unique, dedicated writing system, which would definitely not be alphabetic or syllabic (since those are based on speech sounds), so ideographic/hieroglyphic is a good choice. If the common tongue is also written ideographically, that might make it easier for these fish people to learn and offer a better starting point for them to be able to learn human speech. Lots of possibilities here!

This is tricky, and the safest (though probably least satisfying) answer would be to narratively describe how their speech sounds. I.e. " '...' the deaman blurted in that quick, half-pronounced way deamans always seem to talk." Since every aspect of language is relative (surely the deamans don't think of their own speech as being fast, but of everyone else's as being slow), you can do a lot by being explicit about how other characters perceive their speech style.

If you want to incorporate something more specific to show how they speed up their speech, I would suggest maybe abbreviations (you could come up with some really interesting ones), contractions, and dropping syllables/vowels might be a better way to go. Dropping the "h" in "her" makes the word look shorter, but phonologically, it has more to do with flow than with the actual duration of the pronounced word in rapid speech. If you start dropping syllables, on the other hand, you'll definitely be able to fit more speech into less time. And while there are definitely abbreviations specific to real social groups that could be a bit stereotype-y on their own, if you systematically make an effort to drop as many syllables as possible and invent your own unique abbreviations for them, it will seem less like you're basing them off of a real group and more like they're a unique, fictional culture that you can build up from scratch and have more control over. And coming up with all the abbreviations could be a lot of fun, especially once you get them interacting with characters who speak other dialects and have to try to keep up, along with your readers! That would be my suggestion to easily avoid possible stereotyping, though I'm sure there are other options as well.