Conlanging in "Fantasy Land"

[Ž.J.]

Hey guys! Hope you're all healthy and doing fine!
I want to talk a bit about conlanging in worldbuilding. I'll ask y'all a few questions:

-Have you ever created a world especially created for your conlang? Similar to what J.R.R. Tolkien.
-How much do y'all focus on conlanging in your worlds? Do you just invent some "gibberish" sentences when you need them or you focus on "linguistic realism" and make the conlang more deep.

 

[Yora]

All I ever bother with is to have a consistent sound for personal and place names that come from the same culture. For that, I pick a real language that has a tone that people associate with a general culture or aesthetic and then put together a big list of names for people and places from that language. That will then be my reference for typical syllables, suffixes, and length of words to create my own made up names. They don't mean anything, but they sound like they come from the same culture.

I have one region with the cities Hadakar, Abil, and Sharaz, which are all made up, but sound like they could be actual Iranian names.

Unless you are an Iranian language speaker and think it sounds both familiar and strange. There's an old American videogame that has a place called Uschtenheim, which I instantly recognize as being supposed to sound German, but which still sounds super fake to me. You can also have it many languages that some typical name-fragments actually have both specific meaning and grammar, which you can butcher completely with this approach.
But made up words sounding like something funny in some language is something that can always happen, so I don't worry too much about it.

 

[Gospodin]

All I ever bother with is to have a consistent sound for personal and place names that come from the same culture. For that, I pick a real language that has a tone that people associate with a general culture or aesthetic and then put together a big list of names for people and places from that language. That will then be my reference for typical syllables, suffixes, and length of words to create my own made up names. They don't mean anything, but they sound like they come from the same culture.

Not dissimilar to what China Miéville did with The City and the City.

Ul Qoma is vaguely arabic and Besźel is vaguely slavic. No gobbledygook, unparsable dialogue in need of subsequent narrative illumination. He does just as you mention, keeping nearly all references as place-names and personal/surnames. He did his research, though, for linguistically minded folk like myself. It's a police procedural told the lens of Weird Fiction and there's a murder victim made reference as Fulana Detail. It caught my eye because Fulana and Fulano are the words we use in Spanish to refer to nameless randos or Jane/John Doe's. The word fulano, though, comes into modern Spanish as part of the Moorish Occupation. It's originally an arabic term. At first I thought he goofed (unlikely, given the source) and then I realized he knew better than even I did.

 

[Insolent Lad]

I have attempted only one fully-formed language, and that is ‘Zikem,’ the artificial one created by the wizard Hurasu for his subjects. Yes, like Sauron invented the Black Speech for the orcs, but Hurasu is much nicer guy and a unifying tongue for his people seemed a practical idea — especially before they became fruitful and multiplied! I don’t have all that many words, making those up as needed, but I know the grammar because it is both simple and logical, and there are no irregularities as in languages that grow on their own.

Incidentally, many of the root words I use in it come from Etruscan. I’ve never made it quite clear whether Hurasu picked that up in our world or if they spoke something like it where he came from. And I may never bother to decide. Most of the languages in my primary world are descended in some degree from those we know — or knew millennia ago. Many are pidgins in origin. I try to keep them consistent even while recognizing that ‘real’ languages often are not. So I’ve borrowed from Proto-Indo-European models and from Basque and from Pacific languages, and tried to be somewhat consistent in dealing with linguistic drift. I also simply made up words that sounded right for the language.

I also recognize that in ‘advanced’ societies names may draw from other cultures (as in our own) so I don’t worry much about their meaning. I only attempt to make them sound right in the language to which they have been adapted.

 

[elemtilas]

Hey guys! Hope you're all healthy and doing fine!
I want to talk a bit about conlanging in worldbuilding. I'll ask y'all a few questions:

-Have you ever created a world especially created for your conlang? Similar to what J.R.R. Tolkien.
-How much do y'all focus on conlanging in your worlds? Do you just invent some "gibberish" sentences when you need them or you focus on "linguistic realism" and make the conlang more deep.

Caveat: unlike many~most folks here, I am not a writer by profession nor do I wish to tilt the mass market windmill. So my perspective is broadly geopoesy first, writing stories is supplemental thereto.

I have never, at least consciously, made a whole cosmos specifically for a language. Though I have made countries or small worlds within the cosmos of All That Is for (usually quite tiny) snippets of invented language.

I do tend to focus, from time to time, on language invention and the result has been a rather large number of documented languages. Several are quite well documented, to the point where you could study the grammar and write sensible nothings in that language. I have at least five languages where this could be done easily, and perhaps two more where this could be done if I hadn't been procrastinating at writing out the grammars. There are perhaps another three dozen in various stages of "sketchiness".

 

[D. Gray Warrior]

I make conlangs as one of my primary hobbies, although I'm not as good as I like to be.

My main conlang is for a tropical island culture, and the main influences are Navajo and Ojibwe for grammar and syntax, while the phonology is based loosely on Swahili and Greek.

 

[Aldarion]

I did sketch out some languages, but in the end abandoned it as it is too much of an effort for a hairsplitter such as myself. I would never be able to just "create some words" like Martin did; either I'd create a whole language myself, or nothing. So I opted for "nothing", at least for now. EDIT: I did try to keep genetic and spatial relations between real-world languages I used in mind, so if I do opt for conlanging, I will not have to rework the entire setting; rather, it will be relatively straightforward plug-n'-play change.