Languages

[thecoldembrace]

I have a personal love of languages. I can speak several fluently, yet I cannot seem to pop my mind into the mode to "make" a language. I have tried over and over to work something into my own world, just to toss around here and there to add extra flavor and immersion... always to no avail. It always seems clunky with no flow.
Does anyone here make their own language for their story? If so how has it turned out? If not have you ever wanted to?

-Cold

 

[Jabrosky]

I am content to rip off real-world languages when it comes to nomenclature. I don't bother with con-langing. World-building is distracting enough without making up your own languages.

 

[pixallmighty]

I think that making languages - I mean, real, speakable ones, like elvish or klingon - must be exhausting. In my WIP, I would tend to mimic them by creating ensembles of sounds and phonemes in a certain way that they would be understood by the reader to be this or that language. For example, everyone would be able to distinguish German from Spanish from French, only because we know the phonemes that are mostly used in theses languages, without understanding what every word means.

 

[Ghost]

I try to make languages on occasion, but I'm one of those idiots who loses files to computer mishaps. I've got a solid vision for two languages and some basic concepts for about five others. The first few "languages" I did as a teenager were pretty awful, basically cyphers for English. The next set were okay, but each was overly influenced by one language. I don't have anything well-developed right now, but I'm getting back into it. That means more research.



Here are a couple of things I listed in this post that might help.

How to create a language
The Quick and Dirty Guide
(The next two are courtesy of the Wayback Machine)
Essays on Language Design
A Naming Language

There's also The Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder. If you prefer books, Rosenfelder has a book by the same title.

What parts are you having trouble with, specifically? Phonetics? Syntax? Making a language that feels natural or isn't too similar to the languages you know? Someone might be able to advise you if you know which areas you're dissatisfied with.

 

[Noma Galway]

I make up words and grammar when I have to for the story. My grammar is basic at best, my words are sparse, and the few conjugations I've worked out are horrid. But it's workable, and that's what I wanted in my WIP.

 

[Ravana]

<= is a linguist.

Best do-it-yourself route is definitely to rip off real-world languages. Hiring a pro is the most viable alternative.

I have some extended instructions for basics on how to create and/or modify a language in old threads here… somewhere. Maybe if I unlazify myself I'll try to locate them.

Note that for most people's purposes, there's no reason to "create" a language. Most people just want a few odd words here and there, and have no need to worry about the full-blown panoply of phonology, morphology and syntax (let alone still greater depth). Usually, as long as you keep track of what you have invented–i.e. what's within your text–and consult it each time you want a new utterance to make sure you aren't inappropriately using something you've used differently before, you're fine.

Anyone desiring more extensive instructions… I'm usually game. PM me.

 

[Ophiucha]

I minored in linguistics, and I enjoy conlanging though never seem to end up using it in my stories.

A few resources I use, in addition to the ones Ghost linked:

• Speech Accent Archive
• Wikipedia, as always. In particular, their pages on specific languages are informative.
• If you've got any programming knowledge, I am keen on this Lisp random word generator. Gives you enough control to generate words based on your phonology.
• Most frequently used words in the English language.

 

[e r i]

<= Is also a linguist-in-training

To what end to you want to use this language? Do you want to create full sentences, or just a system to create names and so on?

In my case, I have a few Naming Languages for my world, for the purposes of creating place names and character names (duh). Like Ravana mentions above, I have no need to go into sentence construction and so on, so my languages are pretty basic (but it still takes time to make them!). I created a sound inventory (a phoneme inventory), some really basic syllable structure stuff, and an ever growing word list consisting mostly of nouns and adjectives. I have some basic morphology (e.g. rules for suffixation) so I can actually create place names that are a bit more than just compounding words.

I created my phoneme inventory by pulling bits and bobs from existing languages. Believe it or not, wikipedia is a great resource for getting access to some quick and dirty phoneme inventories for major languages. I'm not sure how useful other people would find this building block approach to creating naming languages is, since it requires some basic knowledge of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and phonology. This is the approach I took because I knew that all I was after was a systematic way to create names, and it works well enough. But making an actual constructed language to create complex constructions would take a lot of time if you don't base the syntax and morphology off a language you're familiar with.

 

[thecoldembrace]

There is one language I would like to use, full sentence wise. It is known as Glassian after the people, a flowing, soft language of the desert dwellers. Every time I try and work on something to make it... it turns out blunt and not very pleasing both in sound and in writing. The Glassians themselves were once celestials before they fell to the world and became mortal, but they kept the flow and grace of their language, only slightly changing over time.

 

[chrispenycate]

I'm not particularly gifted in languages; I'm fluent in two (plus mathematics) and capable of getting by in another three, but they're all indoeuropeans (you don't want to meet me when I'm editing in Classical Arabic, Mandarin or Suomi) I used to know a couple of kids (seven and nine) who each spoke twelve languages comfortably, conversationally, with no particular effort.

So I'm not qualified to create a new language, but can hear the music, the rhythm of the different languages in my universes, and, as far as my competence extends, maintain this rhythm in the translated dialogue. I'm not very good at it yet.

 

[Ravana]

There is one language I would like to use, full sentence wise. It is known as Glassian after the people, a flowing, soft language of the desert dwellers. Every time I try and work on something to make it... it turns out blunt and not very pleasing both in sound and in writing. The Glassians themselves were once celestials before they fell to the world and became mortal, but they kept the flow and grace of their language, only slightly changing over time.

Here's the quick[sic]-and-dirty way to make something like this work:

(1) Take a real-world language which sounds something like you already want. Alternatively, take a language that works the way you want (in terms of morphology and/or syntax), regardless of how it sounds.

(2) Create an inventory of phonemes—sounds that exist in the language you're trying to create. Note that what you exclude is every bit as important as what you include.

(3) Where the real-world language uses a sound your fantasy language does not, replace it with a sound your language does use. The trick here is to do it systematically, not ad hoc: if your source language uses /t/ and you want to replace it with /s/, do it everywhere.

You may now use the lexicon, grammar and at least most of the morphology of your source language, without having to put thought into any of them.

That's the generic. On to your specific case. Everyone else can continue reading if they want an example of how the above can play out.

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What you want to start with, when applying the above, are groups of phonemes. It's a bit difficult to discuss this without sounding technical, but I'll try to keep it as clear as brevity permits (or as brief as clarity does ).

For vowels, pick whichever ones you like; you can leave these unchanged from the source language if you want, though that can cause the output to be a bit too recognizable. If you don't care if people can tell what you started with, just move on.

Consonants, for your purposes, can be grouped into three broad categories, two of which have one subcategory as well.

(1) Stops: sounds such as p, t, k, b, d and g; "stop" means that the airflow through the mouth is completely arrested when uttering one.

(2) Fricatives and affricates: can be treated the same for your purposes, unless you want to separate them. These are "hissing" or "buzzing" sounds. Fricatives include f, th (as in "thin"), s, sh, v, dh (the th in "this"), z, zh (the z in azure), and h. Affricates are fricatives with a brief stop followed by the fricative: ch and j are the only ones in English.

(3) Nasals, liquids and glides: all these can be treated together, unless you don't like nasality in your language. Nasals—air passed through the nose in addition to or instead of through the mouth—include m, n and ng. Liquids are l and r; glides are w and y.

I've simplified a bit; for starters, if you look at the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), you'll discover that terms such as "liquid" and "glide" are not used there. They're more intuitive than the technical terms you don't need for present purposes—and you may well still encounter them in beginning linguistics courses or texts anyway.

I've also simplified by restricting the list to sounds that appear in (standard American) English. Haven't even included all of those, for that matter. You may want to use additional sounds; if you do, you'll be stuck trying to figure out how to represent them without using non-standard characters. That's your problem… heh.

Now, the one sub-group, which applies to stops and fricatives/affricates: voicing. The sounds above can be re-ordered so that they form voiced and voiceless pairs: p/b, t/d, k/g, and so on through the list. They form pairs because they're identical as far as what your lips and tongue are doing; what's different is whether or not your vocal chords are vibrating when you say them. (The exception is h: English doesn't use a voiced version of this.) The nasal, etc. group is always voiced (again, in English), so no sub-group there… why I lumped them together.

What do you do with all this? Well… if you want to make the language sound less "harsh," don't use stops, or only use voiced ones. Possibly minimize or eliminate voiceless fricatives as well. Depends on what's "harsh" to your ears. So you may start with, say:

"Hızlı kahverengi tilki tembel köpeğin üstünden atlar."

and end up with:

"Yizhli gayverengi thilgi themvel gofeyin uzthunzhen athlar."

or even:

"Yizhli hayverengi dhilhi dhemvel hoveyin uzthunzhen athlar."

Note that in some cases, a sound I substituted for in one instance appears elsewhere: I replaced the starting h with y, but then replaced starting k with h. That's fine, as long as you do it systematically, and in order: don't do the k=h first, then change h to y everywhere. Well, not unless you want to, but it'll screw up the results somewhat. (I also ignored the non-English vowels in the source language, treating them as if they were all standard English orthography.) I also changed the th to dh in the second example, to suggest the voiced th of "this." If you find this confusing, don't bother.

To alter the "flow" further, break up consonant clusters, or add rules saying that all words need to begin or end with vowels. Or perhaps need to end in a vowel if the following word begins in a consonant. (I don't apply a word-ending rule in any of the examples here.) So you might end up with:

"Yizheli hayeverengi dhilehi dhemevel hoveyin uzethunzhen athelar."

All I did was add e wherever two consonants were adjacent… unless one of the consonants is a nasal, in which case I didn't break it up at all. You can write your rules like that. (I didn't make that one up, by the way: I stole it from Japanese.) Or perhaps you want to insert e where one of the consonants is a nasal, u where one is a liquid, and a in all other cases:

"Yizhuli hayaverengi dhiluhi dhemevel hoveyin uzathunezhen athular."

Note that I'm treating ng as a single sound here: the ng in "sing," rather than the ng in "single." If you hear it as two sounds, break it up.

If you break up every consonant cluster, you can run the risk of it sounding "too sing-song"; on the other hand, you may want it that way.

The key is creating a set of rules, then sticking to them. If you discover you don't like the way one rule is working out, go back and change it everywhere else your language appears—or else just decide that sometimes there are exceptions. Which, ultimately, is true for most rules in most languages anyway.

I can't promise that the above example is grammatical in the source language, by the way: I ran a sentence through Google Translate. If you're serious about doing your own language right, never, ever rely on machine translation. If all you want is something that looks right… then it shouldn't be a major problem.

Doing things this way is a lot easier than trying to assemble your own language from scratch—precisely because language is dominated by rules, and if you don't start with the rules, what you create won't sound like it goes together, won't seem like an actual language.

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From all which, I'm sure you can now see why my alternative recommendation is "hire a pro".…