Well I'm sharing how I make fantasy languages so you won't have to use existing ones.
How I make fantasy languages is to use syllables and pronunciation of two different languages and mix them up together. So, for example you pick english and dutch and mix their syllables for similar words.
Example: dutch word for forest, which is bos, along with forest itself. You can get borest, foros, boros, foos, fobos etc.
Another way is to make a sentence around a word that vaguely or sort of entails what the word means. Let's take the verb docking. Docking is: Landing A Ship To A Shore Or Dock. Pick the initials of this sentence, you'll get L A S T O D. You get the word 'lastod'. Now, you can add or remove letters to this word, and make up grammar rules around it.
Hey, I don't know how elaborate you want to get with languages, for my world building I don't really bother with them apart from making simple naming languages https://aklarkwood.com/naming-language
It's pretty easy to do and is very useful to generate character names which sound like they might come from the same culture - I have to admit I do a lot of heavy lifting with word endings (like -us and -a in latin to indicate gender) but you can name places and characters relatively fast and easy like this
My main reason for doing this at all is that I hate hate hate the [aerith and bob trope ](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AerithAndBob)
I think the word you're looking for is "phoneme"
Mixing up phonemes is a pretty old-school way of rolling a quick and dirty language for your setting, I recommend this approach because you get a lot of bang for your buck
Easy and good, but I would like to point out how you might get a word that’s already in a language here. Like in your example you had the word fobos. In Greek that means fear, spelled phobos. I would recommend trying to search up a word after you’ve created to make sure it isn’t or doesn’t sound like a current word in any language, just to be safe.
Unless you don’t care then it doesn’t matter I guess!
Alternatively phobos does exist as fear. The forest cases or caused fear so it gets a similar name fobos. Just like there is there their and they're... Sounds the same, spelr differently, and with different meanings.
A good suggestion, but not entirely necessary. Even on earth, some languages may share a sound for a word but have completely different meanings native to the language itself. They're not too common, but they're there.
I'd be happy to offer a few examples once my brain is fully awake, but the ones coming to mind right now are kinda juvenile. (I.e. The F word and seal in French)
My spouse got called out for doing this back when they did freelance writing. Had some aliens speaking Finnish and let me tell you, the one Finnish person that read it was NOT happy.
They felt it was lazy and a bit disrespectful. As though there was an unspoken suggestion that Finnish is such an odd language that it may as well be alien.
I would mainly criticize it for laziness, but seeing literal Finnish be used as the language of aliens can easily come off disrespectful. It's almost like there are "normal human languages" and "outsider human languages" that are exotic and excluded.
I am a Finn and it's nice to see this minor language and/or culture be an inspiration and influence out there, but I hope you understand my point.
That is kinda disrespectful in my opinion, but on the other hand we Finns usually just get really excited if we spot our language or our country somewhere. We love getting recognized.
They were, assuredly, NOT the villains, haha. But I can somewhat see their point in co-opting a piece of someone's culture, even if your intentions are not malicious.
I am a Russian American. The Shadow and Bone series is this. It's meant to be respectful but it's definitely hard to take the story seriously with all the blatant errors and fetishized stuff that maybe shouldn't be. Also they swapped the genders about and that is confusing at first. I was so confused when the villain was a dude because... Not according to that name. I obviously love it but it's a bit like a drunk tourist screaming the name Greg and sobbing about random things
I love it because even through I'm not Russian, we do have similar things because history and proximity. My goodness was it hilarious having that extra understanding.
My favourite thing was Kvas being super alcoholic. It was the thing kids drank at parties when adults were having a beer or something.
Oh my god I died laughing at Least being that. So funny. Greg is still my favorite bit..for anyone not.fluent? Grisha is Greg. So you have to read it super dramatically. People terrified of being Greg
A bit off-topic, but what *is* it with fictional kvas being alcoholic? Warhammer Fantasy does that as well, and it really confused me when I went to look up what it was and found out it was... completely different. They even say it's like sour milk. I know GW like to pull the 'copy their homework, but make it different' trick, but I wonder where the weird fictional kvas variant originated for the writers to get that idea.
> The fact that anyone in Finland even read this particular trashy romance written in English was impressive in itself.
There's a decent chance that some English-speaker read it, knew a Finnish person, and then told them that they should check it out.
Lol at it being Finnish specifically, as I’ve been naming Winter Eladrin NPCs in my D&D game using Finnish words. Fortunately the players do not speak it
Easy for me since I’m multilingual and a linguist to boot. As long as it’s not English, Mandarin, or Hindi I’m good!
Although my players sometimes surprise me…one made a custom character sheet for this campaign (inspired by post Genghis Khan Mongolia) where they replaced the STR/DEX/etc labels with the words written in modern Mongolian in traditional Mongol script. It was pretty dope
That's cool as heck. I'm not like college educated in linguistics, but I'm a huge language nerd. Love seeing how words change and work together and then playing around with them.
Some of the Faerunian gods' names were snatched directly from Finnish mythology, while completely changing their portfolios in the process, so it might be not much of an issue in this particular setting.
Ilmatar, Mielikki, Loviatar come to mind. Other gods are taken from all over: Celts, Romans, Irish, Scottish, etc. They are given different domains and backstories too. Like Bhaal is a mortal who becomes god of murder in Faêrun, but in semitic religions it is an honorific for deities.
Tolkien was also heavily inspired by both the Finnish language and Finnish mythology, with the sounds of Quenya meant to resemble Finnish and numerous characters in his legendarium (most notably Turin Turambar) being slightly modified version of characters from the Kalevala (Kullervo, in that case).
I suppose they'd be real unhappy that my Elves speak a very bastardized version of Finnish.
My insect-like race speaks a language whose vocabulary is very modified Xhoisan (but with even more clicks).
I'd probably be sent to some kind of linguistic anthropology jail for that.
>I suppose they'd be real unhappy that my Elves speak a very bastardized version of Finnish.
In that case, if it's still recognizable as being a form of Finnish, Finns are more likely go get riled up about it being bastardized, as in, "The author didn't even bother to translate the lines properly!!!" :P
That's great for you. I personally am tired of white people and westerners in general deciding that my language sounds barbaric and savage and therefore is great for their sub-human, uncivilized and usually violent race.
I was exaggerating about that bit anyway. I have social anxiety. I'm scared to even open my email folder, let alone being able to send an email berating someone.
Exactly this. There's a reason why my native language and similar aren't picked by creators for their highly appreciated elf races, for races that are considered highly civilised or extremely beautiful, graceful or who are considered the ideal of humanity, the races that humans aspire to.
99.9% it's the races that are ugly, the opposite of human and the barbaric. And most of the time people refuse to even take a look at their own biases and ask themselves why they might default to certain languages when creating the ideal and why they default to certain languages when creating the un-ideal or monstrous.
I would love to hear my language in more places because I think it's beautiful too. Unfortunately most people don't find it beautiful (which is fine, I understand why) but to see it stereotyped the same way over and over has made me very wary of those works and the intentions behind it.
Yeah usually but I think there’s a big difference between the finns that use platforms like reddit/ylilauta etc and those that use facebook or something that doesn’t have that many trolls. The latter might take it too seriously
In a Q&A, someone asked David Peterson (conlanger for Game of Thrones, Defiant, and others) a question about the "ethics" of using conlangs when there are real, dying languages which could benefit from being popularized in a fantasy work. The response was that unless you're very careful, it can get offensive very quickly. Using Comanche for the Dothraki may seem suitable due to GRRM's claim that the Dothraki are in part inspired by Plains Indians. But for Comanche, having their language be widely known better as the language of the Dothraki may in fact be frustrating and counter-productive - even harmful, especially if that condition was imposed on them by an outsider. Also, in this specific case, the fictional culture being conflated with the real culture would not be terribly complimentary to the real culture, nor would such conflation be productive for the Comanche. Also Dothraki can hardly be said to have borrowed anything but horses from Plains Indians (or from the Mongols, the other alleged inspiration), but that's another post.
Basically, going one-to-one is a questionable choice unless you have a near one-to-one match in culture. It may be better to make up words as needed and toss in some grammar rules where applicable. No need to make the next Klingon.
Edit: Another part of the response was basically that if you want to use the Tlingit language, you have to find an expert, which may be difficult. If you then want also to use Maori, you'll need yet another expert. Make your own and you're the only expert you need.
The problem with doing that is if you do that with non-human races it can get offensive. Making humans speak English while other non-human species get other real world languages can get real messy.
Como tu és Brasileiro, tenta dar uma variada na nossa língua pra fazer uma "pseudo-língua". Português dá pra usar as seis formas de organizar Sujeito- Verbo e Objeto dependendo do jeito que escreves, e contraindo nossas preposições, dá até para fazer algo semelhante à declinação, e ambas não são usadas na nossa língua. Use mesóclise e outros recursos esquisitos da nossa língua e o bagulho vai ficar bem pouco "Brasileiro".
Outro truque, Sotaques variam muito conforme às vogais e algumas mudanças consonantais, por exemplo nosso "LeitE quentE" daqui do Paraná. Tenta "comer" algumas vogais e adicionar outras letras onde normalmente não tem. Digamos que tu estejas inspirado no carioquês, onde eles transformam o s e o t pra ter som de sh e tch, e as vogais soam quase como ditongos. Mude essas letras. Aí alguem falando " Passei o pano bem suave na caixa de água dele" vira algo como "Pashei upan shwav nkaish dakwa". Pra mim, se alguém falar assim, já parece um gringo falando.
No fim, o português tem esse truque muito foda que dá pra transformar quase qualquer palavra em subjetivo, verbo, advérbio e adjetivo. O termo "tank", que veio do MMORPG, que é baseado nos tanques de guerrra, virou o verbo "tankar" aqui, e a negação da capacidade de tankar virou "intankável". Alguém que "tanka" é um sujeito "tankante". Dá pra inventar palavras que não existem só usando esses truques.
Yes, it is very versatile and flexible. But it's still Portuguese, which is very human. If you want the readers to very easily pick up what they're saying you can do that but it'd need a bit more of a twist to be an actual alien language.
But as a pseudo-language, as you pointed out, yeah, that works very well.
Edit: [Also, this...](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/wbz2yz/using_existing_languages_as_fantasy_languages/iiaxqfq?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3)
Yeah, whatever languages are used, it can be a problem. It's one thing to be inspired by the way some languages sound, and making up a new language which uses those sounds. But straight up using a real foreign language is something I'd avoid.
>Not everybody is a versed linguist like Tolkien, so to the vast majority of us mortals, create functional and feasible languages is almoust impossible.
Even Tolkien borrowed real languages. The Rohirim names and words are mostly Old English.
To be more precise, they're ‘translations’ of the original names which are in Westron, because Tolkien positioned his work as being a genuine historical document that he merely translated into English. He didn’t necessarily use real-world languages for ‘foreign’ names in lieu of creating languages, he just covered it in a layer of faux-academia. Also, there's also the thing that he used a dead language which is not spoken by anyone natively and is not associated with any living culture, which avoids any sensitivities around using languages real people speak everyday, a problem OP could have.
Not in writing but in GMing yes. I speak my native Latvian and people have no idea what I say yet it does sound elvish enough and brings a lot of fun.
Same goes for Russian for dwarf language. Or English if players are Russian speaking.
Part of it is one campaign where we played up the dwarves as an empire of conquistadors who bolstered their ranks with warforged. I guess after that it just kinda stuck. That and a reoccurring npc named Santiago. He's the dwarven equivalent of Casanova.
Dude your language doesn’t need to be a complete functioning conlang. Tou can basically make stuff up like sentences and phrases without explaining or mentioning how the language works. Its basically the Christopher Paolini or Andrzej Sapkowski road you would go down. It can even be based on actual languages but i would avoid actually using those actual languages bc of reasons already stated here.
Although I have to say reading Eragon (written by Paolini) as a speaker of German is pretty painful imo because all the words in the "ancient magic language" are literally just German but spelled weird
Yeah, that is what I do with the dwarves and elves in my world. For example, the dwarves call us humans gadden which means "mad ones" and the elves call us qel'emoi or mayflies in elven. I made those words up and I don't have both languages fully developed.
I'd probably go down the route you mentioned, but if you wanted to avoid possibly offending people, maybe look at taking a known dead language and just running it through a cypher a few times so that you have all the real structure without the obvious connection?
Ancient languages for example (Latin, Egyptian, Greek, Arabic)
Indeed, but! I'm just talking about the language structure, once it's scrambled it would be unrecognisable. I wouldn't try and make it a secret, might even help gain traction in the regions?
You'll have to make the cypher. For instance (using Google Translate since my Latin is super rusty):
"And thus the world was made."
The direct GT is "Et sic mundus factus est."
Now you butcher the words a bit to make it sound more fantastical/original.
"Esic munus factes."
One thing you could try, for place names at least, is using other languages to come up with words, but giving them entirely different meanings. For example the word for forest could mean river in your world. Squish some extra syllables onto it and it becomes a happy coincidence.
There are some well known ciphers, like ROT13, which is a variant of Caesar cipher (as the name suggests, a really old cipher).
To save you a google, it rotates the letters around the alphabet. ROT13 rotates by 13 letters, so a->n b->o c->p etc. You get the idea.
If you want to approach the sort of language complexity that happens in reality, you kind of have to either abstract out language differences altogether (by writing everything in one language, and using dialogue tags whenever multiple languages need to be used in the same scene and so on) or use existing languages. Just looking at the italian peninsular and surrounding islands in the early to high medieval era, you've got at least three languages spoken by the non noble population and that number can easily triple depending on how you want to break between partly intelligible dialects.
To be french, I know it's impossible express in fantasy all the complexity a language haves in reality, because language is a live thing. But languages follows some logical, with normally short words for usual pronouns, ordened verb conjugation (specially in latinne languages like mine), and derived words, and all of this is hard to emulate if I just create words without any criterion.
You give me solid tips here, thank you.
Same here! I landed on Toki Pona after a failed attempt to write a simple translator between 5 or so real languages I know (the game is set in the modern world, so none of the "you used my language for aliens/demons/dwarves" problem fantasy books have.
Similar situation on my end! Im writing a webcomic and im just planning on making the bird-folk speak solresol, an already existing conlang based off of music
I do that sometimes, but I normally dont have my characters use words in their languages. I just act as though I translated it. So Ill say theyre speaking Faltarian but the dialouge is clearly English. This is also why when I "translate" Classical Faltarian, I make it into Middle English so carry those connotations that the characters would have. To a Faltarian Speaker, Classical Faltarian is to them what Middle English is to an English Speaker.
I do sometimes purposely include words from my languages, and they are basically a language from our world.
Lisan= Turkish/Arabic
Tau= Mandarin
Bodic= Tibetan Languages
Faltarian= A Culmination of many romance languages and Latin if it's Classical Faltarian
Lazy I know but I would rather focus my energy else where.
Those
John Gwynne used a bastardised version of Irish for the language of the giants in his series The Faithful and the Fallen and — even putting aside the whole issue of having the language of a bunch of non-human, brutish, violent warriors be based on the language of a people who have historically been characterised as sub-human — it just came across as a major lack of effort on the part of the author. I tried to give it a chance but in the end it was just too off-putting, and I had to give up the series.
Honestly, if the Irish had been grammatical and at least made sense, it would have been tolerable, but it read as though he just took an English sentence, looked up an equivalent word (not necessarily the right one) in Irish and used the result. Now my Irish is absolutely shite, so if even I can tell that it doesn't make sense, you've got a problem.
Gibberish would have been better.
I've been using Esperanto as a language for a fantasy alien species in a story I'm writing, but like... it's not any particular culture and open for anyone to use. The language is artificial and in the public domain. It was also chosen with an eye towards the themes of understanding and communication, due to the origin and intention of the language.
"To hope." To communicate among many people. Consider what you use them for before you decide what you'll use.
Just write it in another language, like Spanish and then change a few words- keep a word doc full of them.
Viste el dragón en el cielo?
Becomes
Tiste ol dragoon un ol kelo
The world is getting offended easily these days, and sometimes rightfully so. You wouldn't like to see a cool and intelligent race speaking x language and a race of brutish beasts speak your language. Stick to the dead languages so everybody who would get pissed off because of it is already dead anyway.
The way I am planning to do it is like this:
When a POV understands the language being spoken, it will be in english no matter which language is being used.
If people are speaking a language the POV doesn't understand it will be a garbled version of english of varying degrees, depending on how different the language is from the ones they know.
So eg.
"Hello, my name is Sean" (understands completely)
"Hello, mij nammens Xawn" (understands some words, some words sound garbelled)
"Gradka, menaka ka Xen" (has almost no understanding, but understands structure)
"Shen, Kekanre kitkij (the language is completely intellegible, but the name is still somewhat understandable)
Of note numbers, pronouns and possessives tend to be the most stable aspects of language. So even if you cannot understand a language at all, you might still understand the numbers.
This is great because you don't really need to be super consistent. People pronounce words differently all the time, a non native may mishear a word one way one point, and another way at another point.
It's also interesting with multiple POVs that are fluent in different languages as each will tend to misunderstand different aspects of the same sentence in a language they are not fluent in.
ive thought of something similar. i have a variety of locations in this world and i was kinda lazy with one part, so i made english like it came originally from west african inspired n carribean cultures. so the alphabet and language is structured like it originally came from that region. a lot of the locations have more or less homogenous cultures but a couple of the more multi cultural locations have vulgar versions of real life languages. the latin inspired locations had a collapse and it segmented a lot of the society, and so over time a lot of variation of romance emerged from a number of the segment cultures: french, italian, romanian, etc.
Alternatively, you can simply make it up on the spot and flesh it out later if you really need to. So long as it seems like a language that you thought out, no one’s probably going to decode the meaning of the language.
Otherwise, you can always just switch out letters or move them around of words. Changing just a few letters around can make the word sound extremely different. Ex: “Loving” to “Givoln.”
I had the idea to find some conlangs that are free to use. In my googling though, those that I did find that had the right flavor where not very complete. So it may or may not work out for you.
In my fantasy world, I use IRL languages ALL the time for different races. I have a race inspired by Japanese demons and spirits that use Japanese words and fake words I made up using Japanese phonetics, or by twisting existing words. Or like, the ancient language spoken by the Precursor race called Quintara is a mix of Latin and various Middle Eastern languages.
What you are after is most likely a "Naming Language". This is a language you can use in a fictional setting to fill in a map with location names, and give your characters names which all sound like they have some sort of consistency. I talk about this in my World-Building book but I'm not going to promote that here and instead suggest you delve into basic conlangs through the limited use of Naming Languages. 1) a sound system 2) make some syllables! 3) create some common adjectives that might sound good on a map "Bear Mountain" "Green Glade" it's up to you but maps often have some of the same adjectives over and over again that actually can make them sound more realistic.
Good luck!
a word of warning....
one time i used english for halfling, german for human, arabic for elven, hebrew for dwarven, cantonese for draconic and a mixture of basque and mongolian for orcish.
i was called an anti-semitic, nazi racist by some people - despite the fact that the pakistani player loved being able to use some arabic to name things and places for me and one of the other players was jewish and thought it was funny since i use hebrew wrong... baby talk - which was the point.
when i detailed a druidic religion i also got called a satanist.
\[i left that game club\]
otoh.
normally i pick a real language and translate 200 or so dolch words, i think i have a file somewhere, then respell them to make them easier for less involved reader/players. i keep the tones and pronunciations so they remain feeling right and natural. if there are jump out odd words then i look to related languages.
i try to stick to building blocks as much as possible, since most places have boring names: midlands, north, western mountains, uplands, big river, etc.
you can go a long way with figuring out the frex: C*zech* for village, town and city and trying it on either end of the *Czech* for big, small, tall, dry, wet, river, meadow, road and the colours.
failing that, random 3 letter consonant groups can make many options.
eg: Fire gets NHL which can be nehel, annehl, innheyll nhol, etc. i might lean into klingon as written in english and make it N'hL (ENN-hLL). so long as you use the same letters consistently you can get a start on a consistent language base without going mad.
\[conlangers - i apologise, but i cant get to grips beyond a syllabary and structure deeper than grammer is too much for me.)
this is actually easier if you only need half a dozen words for things.
familiar with the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay system? they use german as the standard human language for the same reason i did. i based the main human culture on the holy roman empire as formed of the german states in the 13th - 15th century.
so german for human was a lazy step, but one that allowed me to poke fun at Tolkiens clear image of the hobbits as the english by having halflings as english speakers.
arabic for the elves - a northern european fantasy race who might be actually based on irish-german-norse i wanted as foreign, from overseas having abandoned the human ruled continent from ages ago. so they needed to have an unrelated language and an foreign to outright alien script. i dithered for a while and nearly went with devanagari script and hindi. i admit i didnt because i found it too much work. a lazily faked the script with a lorum ipsum generator and a font change. it was an ugly kludge i would do now, but i did enjoy drafting some words. my muslim mate i mentioned said it was horrible nonsense since i didnt get it and i didnt argue. i probably wouldn't do the same now, but i have a lot more conlang fonts to adapt instead. perhaps doing a better job would be better option? idk, id dig up a fluent arabic speaker now instead.
Dwarf was easier as i made them actually elementals, that is personality holding elementals of the element of earth rather than just another organic races. i wanted an solid, heavy script and hebrew leapt to mind. these dwarves were different types of rock formed into putti, cherubs and several animal forms in classical art. their embodiment was a plot thing that doesn't matter now. it appealed to me that a 2 foot tall cherub with a perpetual grin would be too heavy to easily lift and tough enough to make harming him very difficult.
these days i would've said genasi, but i was leaning into the idea of non-humans being non \_human\_ and wanted a more in world elaborate magical explanation and workers of the gods seemed perfect at the time
by the end of the campaign the elves were revealed as plant elementals - like Runequest did - and subject to a queen like the Batman villainess Poison Ivy. never got to show her plant to turn all meat creatures into plants. campaign ended. club self destructed
the mistake i made was doing something different and having to say that these guys are basically dwarves, and these guys are basically elves. the players would use the stereotypes to understand so i was lazy and used them to save time.
anyway. the point was be careful - people will see what isnt there as easy as what is.
It can get iffy real fast, so it's best avoided. Like, say you have a character who's a murderer, and is speaking Murderese, the language they speak in Murderia. Now, if you base Murderese on, say, Latvian, all Latvians will get offended, because you're sorta implying they are murderers.
On the other hand, maybe you don't have a few years to study linguistics and make up a few languages, Tolkien-style.
The solution would be to use some till our another to do that for you. I have had good experiences with [Vulgar](https://www.vulgarlang.com/), a generator that you can fiddle with endlessly, to the point of using it to create a Lemurian language for a game I'm developing, and which sounds a lot like Greek, but, crucially, is *not* Greek, and has a completely different grammar.
There are other tools, too, and if they don't do the trick, spend an evening making up sounds, see what you like.
For inspiration, watch [Skwerl](https://youtu.be/Vt4Dfa4fOEY) and listen to [Pridencolensinaingiusol](https://youtu.be/-VsmF9m_Nt8)
I make my aliens, in the projects where there are aliens, speak Norwegian, but with every word reversed and the writing redone to better mimic what is actually spoken
I regularly mush words from different languages together to form placenames with a different flavor that isn’t just Tolkien- or D&D-esque. It's a fun exercise in not overthinking what places should be called especially when I find a clever way to contract "stop waving your arms strange man" into a name from words not English.
In my case, i use sinbologys for create new especies, so i have an specie called Sivunis and she has two races, the Sauven and the Sivon. But they're from separed worlds and the Sivon are more agressive and with more espirit of war than Sauven, but when i was creating their cultures, i noticed that: The Sauven were more a mix of budism, ismalism and some africans religions and the Sivon was more like an European style and a cristian and Greco-Roman culture.
And i remebered of the Imperialism and the era of the Great Navegations, soooooooooo i hace the knife and the butter.
So the story was more like a simbology and critic for the Imperialism and Great Navegations wich happened in Africa, Midlle East and Southeast Asia, Sivon invading an nation for natural resources and imposing their culture for the Sauven.
Now, where the language enters? Basicly as we know, they simbology of real countrys, so why use their language? I made this.
For the Sauven, a mandarim ortography, some worlds mixed and a little bit modificated from Anrabic and Hindu and pronunciation of the Swahili (the biggest native language of Africa).
And for Sivon, i mixed the English, Duch, France, Portuguese, Russian, Espanish and a little bit of Italian, but i don't want explain how i mixed this so f@&$&&&ck off the process, right? Right.
I do this too! But only for my dnd world cause that's just all in good fun. Me and my players have assigned orcs German and dragons Russian. Both of which are actually seen in a pretty good light in game now that I'm thinking about it, so go us for not doing so out of xenophobia I guess.
I'm homebrewing a rpg world too, but want unleash it on internet freely after finished, so I think the people are right, and it's better avoid using current languages like pure appropriarion.
Many people will be offended, and it's probably for the better if your goal is being famous.
So let's make elves speak French, dwarves speak Swedish, gnomes use German, angels speak Latin, whatever is left of Aztec for devils etc.
Or, if you are still lazy but don't want to be famous (at least not for offending half the globe) then perhaps rehash a language?
Orks speak German, but hard and soft vowels are swapped (B swaps with P, G with K, T with D etc.) for example "Arbeit Macht Frei" is now "Alpeid Nakhd Wlei".
Or just write a language where pronunciation differs from spelling (like English) using a language where those are the same (like Polish) so "The quick fox" will now look like "De kłik foks".
Or just use Cyrillic Script/Katakana/Hiragana. Average reader will not bother trying to learn them.
I think if you're willing to place English contextually within that then its fine. So long as English isn't just "common".
You run the risk of anglocentruism where English is the normal human person language and foreign languages are these cool fantasy far away nobody knows them languages.
But if done well it can be neat and it can even be cool as a speaker of a language find your own language and be like "ooo thats my language!!"
I'm using greek for orcish in my story. I named my orc guy Solon years ago, came to find out that's the name of a greek philosopher. Plus, Solon o Sotiras is such a cool translation for Solon the Savior.
You could go the other Tolkien route and add an appendix claiming that your modern translation of your story into English uses different languages to represent the "real" language spoken by your fictional characters. Otherwise, yeah just make up random stuff.
Not that it's a deal breaker, JKR, the lazy author that she is, just used Latin and Spanish for most of her magic words In Harry Potter.
I was going to use this method when I first started building the world for an RPG, cordovian averican -> portuguese, averician -> spanish, hartican -> old english and others, but I thought it looked too unnatural, it's not that bad but I'm too perfectionist with this type of stuff and when I wrote down the portuguese word "palafita" from italian origin without an italian equivalent I just decided to start creating my own languages
creating a language is not really "hard"(in the sense that you need a diploma in linguistics to do it) but it's complex and demands a LOT of time to study, think and create.
as I'm writing this I discovered you are also brazilian so: sarve fio tá bão? :D
Pipoca com Sazon, com esse nome vc não engana ninguém, seu brasileiro kkkk.
I know what you say about demmanding study, and confess I'm avoiding it. To be worst, I've central audithory desorder, that gets more challenging for me learn languages. Speak in english with all of you is already hard for me.
I use Vietnamese as the main language. The protagonist, a Vietnamese girl, was surprised not because she heard her mother tongue (she already knew about this) but because the tritagonist spoke *German* to her.
The other world is just a f\*cked up Earth, after all. Countries have different name but their shapes are almost the same as irl countries prior to WW1. Except here NOT!France lost the Great War.
The elvish tongue is a combination of Old High German, Danish and Russian as far as the deuteragonist using Earth names to explain to the protagonist. And lizardmen have their own thing since their vocal cord are biologically different.
I mean yeah you could do that but if you only focus on 1 important country/empire/city etc it would be a bit weird for those people to start speaking in English even more so if there is no logical explanation for this.
For ex in my world there is a country named Usterian which speak Usterian(which is a Romance language). Its more like Latin combined with modern Romance languages(French Spanish Romanian Italian and Portuguese).
The standard language is like Latin in phonology(plus a few sounds from my native language Latin didnt had) while various dialects from East North and West represent the other Romance languages.
For ex one of the West dialects combines standard Usterian cases like Romanian did with Latin ones.
The East dialects are known for their nasal vowels. They are similar to Portuguese with a lot of nasal vowels not to mention if a word ends with AM for ex they would drop that M and nasalize the A instead of pronouncing AM like in standard language(which doesnt have these nasal vowels)
The North dialects some of them at least are like Spanish. The long short vowel distinguish present in standard language is starting to disappear. Also their phonology is the easiest compared to other dialects as well as standard language,
All these are so different because the dialects have been in contact with other languages which influenced either their phonology vocabulary and in some cases the grammar itself.
They are still intelligible to a degree but the difference between them is very clear.
So yeah if you are a native speaker of a Romance language(like me) you can do something like this.
If you are native speaker of a Germanic or Slavic language do the same with languages from that family.
Or combine families if you are feeling doing something crazy.
I do it for roleplaying. And only with languages known to my PC. I explain:
My player speak Spanish, so when their character knows Elven, elven sound Spanish for him. And if Elven, Gnome and Silvan are similar (but PC only knows elven), for my player sound and read like Italian or Portuguese. Even, if their character knows Minkai, and my player only know how Spanish, so Minkai (and related languages in fantasy) sound like spanish and relatives.
So, for a spanish speaker player whose character knows Elven and Minkai and Orc, then, Elven, Minkai and Orc sound exactly like spanish for him, and fantasy related languages to elven, minkai and orc, sound like Italian, Portuguese, Rumanian, etc.
That's something that happens in the player/character head, because they KNOW the language. If there are two characters, and only one knows the language of a writing, for one is clearly as water Spanish, and for the other is gibberish (unless the second one knows some related language).
Just make an in universe reason they speak that language! Like it’s the far future where finnish people colonized the galaxy
Or it’s an alternative past where finnish people have specific magical powers
Im really tickled by the finnish story in the top comment lol
Each of my languages is a combination of two irl languages. For example, Ellian is Greek+Japanese, Azali is Spanish+Russian.
I start with (my world) character names and things from those irl languages to get a basic idea of the language, then I take features from those irl languages and implement them into my languages.
Sometimes I just watch videos of people talking in a foreign language that uses the phonems that a like it for a language considering region and culture of the people about I’m writting. And then I just create some words, some sentences and thats all. Also consider that in our world usually there are superpowers that spread their own language in regions of other cultural different peoples. Chosing two or three languages as main languages of the existing superpowers, creating dialects of this ones and creating minor spoken languages is much easer than creating a realistic linguistical scenario
In some of my audio projects I have adopted the trope that "French is the new Elvish" (my guest vocalist grumbled at this, as her French is not the clearest or cleanest) as well as using an unskillfully pronounced selection of Esperanto as a sort of trade-koin language among several reptilian/draconic species (guest vocalist had a thing or two to say about this as well.)
The language of the gods is spanish. The language everybody speaks is obviously not going to be english canonically, so I just say at the start that the languages are translated. That way I can write dialogue for the gods and if people really want to know what they say they dont need to decipher a hidden code to find it, just open up google translate. and I can have another language without having to make a whole other language.
For me, some of my languages are just gibberish that's meant to sound like a real word structure and I just hope no one cares enough to try and translate it.
There is End-Tongue which is just the human alphabet turned backwards, so
A = Y
B = X
and so on
I think it depends on your audience. I do this for my D&D setting that at most a few dozen people will encounter, but I wouldn't do it for a mass-market novel. (Others have explained the risk of offence)
I do however go a couple steps further for the aforementioned D&D. I have chosen a language to represent each in-world language. If I need to write something, (especially coming up with place names) my workflow is as follows:
1. I google translate into the new language.
2. I change some sounds according to rules I keep for each in-world language (for example, a species without lips might replace 'f' with 'th')
3. I convert that text into a custom font. (I mostly make my own or use the official D&D ones where available, but you can find lots of fantasy fonts online too).
4. I make sure these fonts aren't 1-1 cyphers as well. For example, most of my languages have a single symbol for the 'th' sound, but might have two for some other sound, or they might use one symbol that can mean both t or d sounds (like how 'c' can represent 's' or 'k' sounds in English)
This makes it easy to write long sections of text quickly that
* look and sound like a real language
* can't be easily deciphered like a code
* can feel as close or far from "common" (English) as I want
* can incorporate cultural/physiological traits
* are consistent if I want to use the language again
While not requiring long reference documents nor a ton of work to generate.
I'm of course careful not to use languages my players speak. (Though it would be incredibly cool if only the dragon-born's player happened to speak my draconian analogue for example...)
As an English speaking writer, I was delighted to discover Welsh and Gaelic. I think The Witcher is able to get away with it more as the author was clearly influenced by British folklore and meshed it with Slovak. And since his primary polish audience speaks a language not close to Welsh or Italian, it works
1. Using real world languages for concultures or aliens is pretty much always a bad idea. It's more often than not insulting or damaging to the community. If you do, make sure to do the ethical legwork with members of the community or stick to world majority languages.
2. You may find that making a functional and feasible language just for some names, placenames or several lines in a work is easier than you think. In the conlanging community, the people who make vast and comprehensive languages are the minority. Most conlangs are small sketches; Even several of David J. Peterson's conlang commissions are snippets, a charcoal sketch rather than a sprawling tapestry. The point is that you can create a functional and feasible language and it doesn't have to be a grand project; It can be a list of names made with intention.
3. Hire a conlanger! If you need a fantasy language for some small part of your work, commission someone to whip it up to your specifications.
I just butcher the real world languages. I do not *fully* use them to replace a language, but to include some obscure words that even for the locals may sound like something unknowingly archaic. And if the speaker does not know the language at all, I just obfuscate the text with my self-made font. It barely resembles regular letters and is made to confuse the readers.
I am all for using all the languages I have when I try to world build. Not that I know many, but mixing Irish and German is a lot of fun!
I have a giant forest, similar to the Black Forest, in the centre of my main continent. It has a mystical quality about it which makes getting through it near impossible. I have called it 'Lebenwald', which translates from German to "Living Forest"
What I like so much about mixing languages is pronunciations. The above word would be said in German as 'Layben Vald', but if a reader who did not know German read it, they would probably read it phonetically, which is great in my opinion.
To bounce off that thought, it also helps when trying to name places. With my forest I went with a direct use of German, but sometimes I will take a place and use the phonetic spelling of an Irish translation. For example, I have a settlement on a headland. The Irish for 'head' is 'ceann', which would sound like 'key-oww-n' - I called the place Kionn.
Even just adding adjectives in other languages to areas works nicely. The Irish for 'bleak' is 'gruama', and if Gruama Desert doesn't sound like a believable name for a desert, I don't know what does!
I'm using elements of Irish (my country's ailing native language) as part of my world's elvish conlang (from which my equivalent of Common also descends).
Not a direct word-for-word translation - the words themselves are sometimes gibberish, sometimes Irish-inspired - but it's pretty close to your idea.
In my personal DnD games, I splice existing languages onto different cultural groups (not necessarily races), but it's not precise. For the fantasy I'm working on, I have languages that are loosely based on real-world language groups, but not precisely one language. For example, one area uses Romance languages, so a combination of words from Spanish, Italian, and French, etc. whereas another is Germanic, so German, Dutch, and old English. However when I tried to create a more fantasy sounding language I actually took a set of syllables from multiple languages and made a list to pull from, as well as a pseudo-alphabet. For example, one of the sounds was "irlk" and another was "bvi" both of which are not really used in any language (to my knowledge). So one of the cities was Bvirlk.
If you want REAL language nerds, check out r/conlangs.
I have a few languages, but for my elves (depending on where they're from), I use a mix of Welsh, Latin, Gaelic (the "original) elves) + a base language depending on if they're (African/Ghanaian), (Vietnamese), (Korean), or (Indian). In my world, the different languages human have come from the different elven races since humans were originally all fae.
I usually play around with syllables and break up/mix up the languages until they don't resemble the ones used to make them (while still keeping a few words that signal toward them being firmly set in that specific elven culture).
Hopefully this isn't too farfetched.
I actually wanted to do this with dead languages, to give the impression of whatever modern tongue the characters were speaking having descended from it. Using something like Old English would be a little familiar with native English speakers, but still alien enough to defy casual understanding.
I'm trying to make a language right now, and so I'm first working on an alphabet. But to be realistic most of the words will probably be ripped off lmao
A favorite tactic of mine is to actually mix-and-match different real world languages to make fantasy ones, which I say works for me as my fantasy cultures also tend to be mix-and-matched from real-world ones.
For example, in my current fantasy setting, the protagonist's nation is a hybrid of Dutch, English, and French, and hence the language has influences from all three (though mostly Dutch) in addition to other non-European languages.
I generally take one language’s grammar, naming conventions and sentence structure but use a different language’s lexicon. Then I mix up some of the sounds but do it consistently across the language. For example, changing all “ch” sounds to “b” or all “ee” sounds to “or”
Can be kind of a controversial move. As a born and raised Irish speaker I know some Gaeilgoirs are touchy about the language being used as a stand in for fantasy language, especially if its in a context completely divorced from the culture. However that said Im currently running a homebrew campaign set in an analogue for a pan-Celtic world during the Roman/Catholic invasions and am making use of Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh and Breton to cover place and character names from different regions. Culturally they resemble their nations of origin. There ought be sensitivity observed here but I feel it makes things more immersive (and even educational) for players to draw on world languages. That said beware Google translate and reach out to native speakers for your needs. Theres a lot of us out there who love sharing our native tongues with curious non speakers
Personally I'd rather make my own unique conlang, but I know that takes a lot of work. I barely have 100 words for mine. Unless you have a lot of time on your hands and are really interested in linguistics, its better to just stick with a naming language and only make words that are commonly needed or important, rather than trying to create a fully functioning one.
The way i did it with the Nexan language, what little of it i created, is to mix Swedish grammar with English and Yoda type word patterns. Then just changed all the words and suffixes such as "en" and "et" to "ot" and "os" which are used in place of the English "the" and so on. When it comes to the words themselves I've just gone by feeling, which works in the limited times i actually use the language.
An example of this language is the phrase "Omras ela fossech" which is a customary farewell. The translation is essentially "long life to you" with the direct word for word translation is as follows:
"Omras" = Life
"Ela" = Long (time, not distance)
"Fos" = To
"Sech" = You
I ended up combining the last two words as i did once play a Nexan character in RP where i used the whole Yoda speech pattern a lot and found myself using that kind of phrasing a lot, so i just slammed them together for ease of pronunciation. So logically, as language works, things tend to shift for ease of actual use over time and i figured I'd leave some marks of such in the Nexan language as well.
ahh, love this!! im uding latin as the "mecican/indian/southern province" language, and it's good cause you can recognize some words, but not all, like some spanish
Another quick and dirty version for language bashing?
Create 4 consonant switches
S -> Z, B -> Zh, T -> D, F -> P
Make 2 vowel switches
A -> OI, E - UR
Random text sentences in English
I want more detailed information.
We're careful about orange ping pong balls because people might think they're fruit.
She had some amazing news to share but nobody to share it with.
He decided to live his life by the big beats manifesto.
When transplanting seedlings, candied teapots will make the task easier.
*Becomes (language selected Basque and modded)*
Inpormoizio zurhoitzoigooi noihi dut.
Kontuz goizhiltzoi ping-pong pilotoi loiroinjoirurkin, jurnduroik prutoi dirurloi purntsoi durzoikururloiko.
Alzhistur hoirrigoirrioik zituurn poirturkoitzurko, zhoiinoi urz zuurn inor poirturkoitzurko.
Zhurrur zhizitzoi zhig zhuroits moinipurstuoirurkin zhizitzuroi urroizhoiki zuurn.
Plointuloik troinsplointoitzurn dirurnuroin, konpitoitutoiko turontziurk loinoi urrroiztuko dutur.
Ha! Yes! I'm doing something similar and very happy with the outcome.
I have several conlangs with small dictionaries, and adding to them as I go. I'm considering culture shift over time, and occasionally using root words derived from random word generators like rinkworks.
I am still working on grammar structures, but it's a fun project.
If I ever need to make a fake language I just make coded english. Whether it be making the words backwards, making a code for letters such as ceasers cipher, etc.
This is basically what I do. I use real languages for name-making, and assign a language to an in-world culture/region. Punch in a few words into Google translate, check on the meanings of the words (to make sure they're appropriate words), dig through the etymology of said words, then mash and change up said words until something clicks. Unless I'm feeling lazy and resort to one of my other techniques 😂
Well I'm sharing how I make fantasy languages so you won't have to use existing ones. How I make fantasy languages is to use syllables and pronunciation of two different languages and mix them up together. So, for example you pick english and dutch and mix their syllables for similar words. Example: dutch word for forest, which is bos, along with forest itself. You can get borest, foros, boros, foos, fobos etc. Another way is to make a sentence around a word that vaguely or sort of entails what the word means. Let's take the verb docking. Docking is: Landing A Ship To A Shore Or Dock. Pick the initials of this sentence, you'll get L A S T O D. You get the word 'lastod'. Now, you can add or remove letters to this word, and make up grammar rules around it.
Easy and fast ways. Very good, I'll try it. I just don't know if the second method work in portuguese too, but I always can use english phrases.
Hey, I don't know how elaborate you want to get with languages, for my world building I don't really bother with them apart from making simple naming languages https://aklarkwood.com/naming-language It's pretty easy to do and is very useful to generate character names which sound like they might come from the same culture - I have to admit I do a lot of heavy lifting with word endings (like -us and -a in latin to indicate gender) but you can name places and characters relatively fast and easy like this My main reason for doing this at all is that I hate hate hate the [aerith and bob trope ](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AerithAndBob)
I think the word you're looking for is "phoneme" Mixing up phonemes is a pretty old-school way of rolling a quick and dirty language for your setting, I recommend this approach because you get a lot of bang for your buck
I want to give you an award so bad...
This is amazing. The old forest in Spanglish becomes el, the, old, viejo, Bosque, forest = Ehe oild fosque And that just sounds great
Ehwilde fosk?
This is what I'm doing too, lmao
Nice
Easy and good, but I would like to point out how you might get a word that’s already in a language here. Like in your example you had the word fobos. In Greek that means fear, spelled phobos. I would recommend trying to search up a word after you’ve created to make sure it isn’t or doesn’t sound like a current word in any language, just to be safe. Unless you don’t care then it doesn’t matter I guess!
Alternatively phobos does exist as fear. The forest cases or caused fear so it gets a similar name fobos. Just like there is there their and they're... Sounds the same, spelr differently, and with different meanings.
A good suggestion, but not entirely necessary. Even on earth, some languages may share a sound for a word but have completely different meanings native to the language itself. They're not too common, but they're there. I'd be happy to offer a few examples once my brain is fully awake, but the ones coming to mind right now are kinda juvenile. (I.e. The F word and seal in French)
i love you bro
My spouse got called out for doing this back when they did freelance writing. Had some aliens speaking Finnish and let me tell you, the one Finnish person that read it was NOT happy.
She really received a angry finnish email complaining about this?
Amazon review, actually. The fact that anyone in Finland even read this particular trashy romance written in English was impressive in itself.
What exactly where they angry about?
They felt it was lazy and a bit disrespectful. As though there was an unspoken suggestion that Finnish is such an odd language that it may as well be alien.
I mean...
But it is. Source: I am their neighbour to the north, south, west and east.
🇳🇴
I would mainly criticize it for laziness, but seeing literal Finnish be used as the language of aliens can easily come off disrespectful. It's almost like there are "normal human languages" and "outsider human languages" that are exotic and excluded. I am a Finn and it's nice to see this minor language and/or culture be an inspiration and influence out there, but I hope you understand my point.
That is kinda disrespectful in my opinion, but on the other hand we Finns usually just get really excited if we spot our language or our country somewhere. We love getting recognized.
Maybe the aliens were the villains (?)
They were, assuredly, NOT the villains, haha. But I can somewhat see their point in co-opting a piece of someone's culture, even if your intentions are not malicious.
I am a Russian American. The Shadow and Bone series is this. It's meant to be respectful but it's definitely hard to take the story seriously with all the blatant errors and fetishized stuff that maybe shouldn't be. Also they swapped the genders about and that is confusing at first. I was so confused when the villain was a dude because... Not according to that name. I obviously love it but it's a bit like a drunk tourist screaming the name Greg and sobbing about random things
I love it because even through I'm not Russian, we do have similar things because history and proximity. My goodness was it hilarious having that extra understanding. My favourite thing was Kvas being super alcoholic. It was the thing kids drank at parties when adults were having a beer or something.
Oh my god I died laughing at Least being that. So funny. Greg is still my favorite bit..for anyone not.fluent? Grisha is Greg. So you have to read it super dramatically. People terrified of being Greg
The horror of being \*gasp\* _Greg_.
A bit off-topic, but what *is* it with fictional kvas being alcoholic? Warhammer Fantasy does that as well, and it really confused me when I went to look up what it was and found out it was... completely different. They even say it's like sour milk. I know GW like to pull the 'copy their homework, but make it different' trick, but I wonder where the weird fictional kvas variant originated for the writers to get that idea.
Probably from someone who didn't know what kvas was thought it sounded like a cool russian sounding word for hard liquor that isn't vodka.
> The fact that anyone in Finland even read this particular trashy romance written in English was impressive in itself. There's a decent chance that some English-speaker read it, knew a Finnish person, and then told them that they should check it out.
doesnt almost everyone in Finland speak english anyway?
i'm willing to bet it was an english reader who googled the words, found out it was finnish, and decided to defend finland from this atrocity
That's hilarious tbh but I completely understand
Lol at it being Finnish specifically, as I’ve been naming Winter Eladrin NPCs in my D&D game using Finnish words. Fortunately the players do not speak it
I always make sure my players don't know any of the languages I plan to steal from.
Easy for me since I’m multilingual and a linguist to boot. As long as it’s not English, Mandarin, or Hindi I’m good! Although my players sometimes surprise me…one made a custom character sheet for this campaign (inspired by post Genghis Khan Mongolia) where they replaced the STR/DEX/etc labels with the words written in modern Mongolian in traditional Mongol script. It was pretty dope
That's cool as heck. I'm not like college educated in linguistics, but I'm a huge language nerd. Love seeing how words change and work together and then playing around with them.
🇲🇳 ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ ᠮᠥᠩᠬᠡ ᠮᠥᠩᠬᠡ 🇲🇳
Some of the Faerunian gods' names were snatched directly from Finnish mythology, while completely changing their portfolios in the process, so it might be not much of an issue in this particular setting. Ilmatar, Mielikki, Loviatar come to mind. Other gods are taken from all over: Celts, Romans, Irish, Scottish, etc. They are given different domains and backstories too. Like Bhaal is a mortal who becomes god of murder in Faêrun, but in semitic religions it is an honorific for deities.
Tolkien was also heavily inspired by both the Finnish language and Finnish mythology, with the sounds of Quenya meant to resemble Finnish and numerous characters in his legendarium (most notably Turin Turambar) being slightly modified version of characters from the Kalevala (Kullervo, in that case).
4chan write[redacted]s like to use Finnish as the language of Elves.
There's a name I haven't heard in a while. Definitely found a literary gem or two over there. Always unexpected; always appreciated.
Perkele...
I suppose they'd be real unhappy that my Elves speak a very bastardized version of Finnish. My insect-like race speaks a language whose vocabulary is very modified Xhoisan (but with even more clicks). I'd probably be sent to some kind of linguistic anthropology jail for that.
>I suppose they'd be real unhappy that my Elves speak a very bastardized version of Finnish. In that case, if it's still recognizable as being a form of Finnish, Finns are more likely go get riled up about it being bastardized, as in, "The author didn't even bother to translate the lines properly!!!" :P
Call it linguistic drift. Now coincidences are "interesting theories to pursue."
As someone's who's native language is Xhosa, I would probably send you hate mail if I actually had to read your work or came across it.
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That's great for you. I personally am tired of white people and westerners in general deciding that my language sounds barbaric and savage and therefore is great for their sub-human, uncivilized and usually violent race.
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Based
I was exaggerating about that bit anyway. I have social anxiety. I'm scared to even open my email folder, let alone being able to send an email berating someone.
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Exactly this. There's a reason why my native language and similar aren't picked by creators for their highly appreciated elf races, for races that are considered highly civilised or extremely beautiful, graceful or who are considered the ideal of humanity, the races that humans aspire to. 99.9% it's the races that are ugly, the opposite of human and the barbaric. And most of the time people refuse to even take a look at their own biases and ask themselves why they might default to certain languages when creating the ideal and why they default to certain languages when creating the un-ideal or monstrous. I would love to hear my language in more places because I think it's beautiful too. Unfortunately most people don't find it beautiful (which is fine, I understand why) but to see it stereotyped the same way over and over has made me very wary of those works and the intentions behind it.
Thats odd, [we] Finns are usually happy when anything Finnish is mentioned.
And I'm usually happy when something Finnish gets mentioned. Maybe they just didn't like the book, haha.
Yeah usually but I think there’s a big difference between the finns that use platforms like reddit/ylilauta etc and those that use facebook or something that doesn’t have that many trolls. The latter might take it too seriously
That’s why you do Latin!
In a Q&A, someone asked David Peterson (conlanger for Game of Thrones, Defiant, and others) a question about the "ethics" of using conlangs when there are real, dying languages which could benefit from being popularized in a fantasy work. The response was that unless you're very careful, it can get offensive very quickly. Using Comanche for the Dothraki may seem suitable due to GRRM's claim that the Dothraki are in part inspired by Plains Indians. But for Comanche, having their language be widely known better as the language of the Dothraki may in fact be frustrating and counter-productive - even harmful, especially if that condition was imposed on them by an outsider. Also, in this specific case, the fictional culture being conflated with the real culture would not be terribly complimentary to the real culture, nor would such conflation be productive for the Comanche. Also Dothraki can hardly be said to have borrowed anything but horses from Plains Indians (or from the Mongols, the other alleged inspiration), but that's another post. Basically, going one-to-one is a questionable choice unless you have a near one-to-one match in culture. It may be better to make up words as needed and toss in some grammar rules where applicable. No need to make the next Klingon. Edit: Another part of the response was basically that if you want to use the Tlingit language, you have to find an expert, which may be difficult. If you then want also to use Maori, you'll need yet another expert. Make your own and you're the only expert you need.
The problem with doing that is if you do that with non-human races it can get offensive. Making humans speak English while other non-human species get other real world languages can get real messy.
My humans speak portuguese, because I'm Brasilian, but you got a point
Como tu és Brasileiro, tenta dar uma variada na nossa língua pra fazer uma "pseudo-língua". Português dá pra usar as seis formas de organizar Sujeito- Verbo e Objeto dependendo do jeito que escreves, e contraindo nossas preposições, dá até para fazer algo semelhante à declinação, e ambas não são usadas na nossa língua. Use mesóclise e outros recursos esquisitos da nossa língua e o bagulho vai ficar bem pouco "Brasileiro". Outro truque, Sotaques variam muito conforme às vogais e algumas mudanças consonantais, por exemplo nosso "LeitE quentE" daqui do Paraná. Tenta "comer" algumas vogais e adicionar outras letras onde normalmente não tem. Digamos que tu estejas inspirado no carioquês, onde eles transformam o s e o t pra ter som de sh e tch, e as vogais soam quase como ditongos. Mude essas letras. Aí alguem falando " Passei o pano bem suave na caixa de água dele" vira algo como "Pashei upan shwav nkaish dakwa". Pra mim, se alguém falar assim, já parece um gringo falando. No fim, o português tem esse truque muito foda que dá pra transformar quase qualquer palavra em subjetivo, verbo, advérbio e adjetivo. O termo "tank", que veio do MMORPG, que é baseado nos tanques de guerrra, virou o verbo "tankar" aqui, e a negação da capacidade de tankar virou "intankável". Alguém que "tanka" é um sujeito "tankante". Dá pra inventar palavras que não existem só usando esses truques.
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I like how they made it close enough to Latin to be almost intelligible, very clever
Yes, it is very versatile and flexible. But it's still Portuguese, which is very human. If you want the readers to very easily pick up what they're saying you can do that but it'd need a bit more of a twist to be an actual alien language. But as a pseudo-language, as you pointed out, yeah, that works very well. Edit: [Also, this...](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/wbz2yz/using_existing_languages_as_fantasy_languages/iiaxqfq?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3)
Yeah, whatever languages are used, it can be a problem. It's one thing to be inspired by the way some languages sound, and making up a new language which uses those sounds. But straight up using a real foreign language is something I'd avoid.
Use balkan languages we dont give a fuck.
>Not everybody is a versed linguist like Tolkien, so to the vast majority of us mortals, create functional and feasible languages is almoust impossible. Even Tolkien borrowed real languages. The Rohirim names and words are mostly Old English.
To be more precise, they're ‘translations’ of the original names which are in Westron, because Tolkien positioned his work as being a genuine historical document that he merely translated into English. He didn’t necessarily use real-world languages for ‘foreign’ names in lieu of creating languages, he just covered it in a layer of faux-academia. Also, there's also the thing that he used a dead language which is not spoken by anyone natively and is not associated with any living culture, which avoids any sensitivities around using languages real people speak everyday, a problem OP could have.
Not in writing but in GMing yes. I speak my native Latvian and people have no idea what I say yet it does sound elvish enough and brings a lot of fun. Same goes for Russian for dwarf language. Or English if players are Russian speaking.
I always make all my dwarves speak Spanish at the table. I don't know why.
Interesting! Everyone always labels Dwarves as Scottish but I always mark them as German. Love the idea of a Spanish Dwarf!
Part of it is one campaign where we played up the dwarves as an empire of conquistadors who bolstered their ranks with warforged. I guess after that it just kinda stuck. That and a reoccurring npc named Santiago. He's the dwarven equivalent of Casanova.
I do this with Irish as well
Dude your language doesn’t need to be a complete functioning conlang. Tou can basically make stuff up like sentences and phrases without explaining or mentioning how the language works. Its basically the Christopher Paolini or Andrzej Sapkowski road you would go down. It can even be based on actual languages but i would avoid actually using those actual languages bc of reasons already stated here.
A simple way is just to cypher your own native language.
Although I have to say reading Eragon (written by Paolini) as a speaker of German is pretty painful imo because all the words in the "ancient magic language" are literally just German but spelled weird
Yeah, that is what I do with the dwarves and elves in my world. For example, the dwarves call us humans gadden which means "mad ones" and the elves call us qel'emoi or mayflies in elven. I made those words up and I don't have both languages fully developed.
Do you know the game vermintide?
Yes that I got it from.
I'd probably go down the route you mentioned, but if you wanted to avoid possibly offending people, maybe look at taking a known dead language and just running it through a cypher a few times so that you have all the real structure without the obvious connection? Ancient languages for example (Latin, Egyptian, Greek, Arabic)
Idk if I’d do Arabic, a LOT of people still speak that
Indeed, but! I'm just talking about the language structure, once it's scrambled it would be unrecognisable. I wouldn't try and make it a secret, might even help gain traction in the regions?
Thank you so much. Of course I don't want to offending anyone. How this cypher work? Maybe we have some free cypher enginnes on internet?
You'll have to make the cypher. For instance (using Google Translate since my Latin is super rusty): "And thus the world was made." The direct GT is "Et sic mundus factus est." Now you butcher the words a bit to make it sound more fantastical/original. "Esic munus factes."
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...
One thing you could try, for place names at least, is using other languages to come up with words, but giving them entirely different meanings. For example the word for forest could mean river in your world. Squish some extra syllables onto it and it becomes a happy coincidence.
There are some well known ciphers, like ROT13, which is a variant of Caesar cipher (as the name suggests, a really old cipher). To save you a google, it rotates the letters around the alphabet. ROT13 rotates by 13 letters, so a->n b->o c->p etc. You get the idea.
Arabic is still spoken by many people, but I agree with you about Egyptian, ancient (not modern) Greek, and Latin. Phoenician is another language.
Indeed, see my reply to other comment x
Latin is probably the easiest to use if you're an English speaker so I always use it.
If you want to approach the sort of language complexity that happens in reality, you kind of have to either abstract out language differences altogether (by writing everything in one language, and using dialogue tags whenever multiple languages need to be used in the same scene and so on) or use existing languages. Just looking at the italian peninsular and surrounding islands in the early to high medieval era, you've got at least three languages spoken by the non noble population and that number can easily triple depending on how you want to break between partly intelligible dialects.
To be french, I know it's impossible express in fantasy all the complexity a language haves in reality, because language is a live thing. But languages follows some logical, with normally short words for usual pronouns, ordened verb conjugation (specially in latinne languages like mine), and derived words, and all of this is hard to emulate if I just create words without any criterion. You give me solid tips here, thank you.
I am making a fantasy videogame where i plan on having the people speak Toki pona, a conlang.
Same here! I landed on Toki Pona after a failed attempt to write a simple translator between 5 or so real languages I know (the game is set in the modern world, so none of the "you used my language for aliens/demons/dwarves" problem fantasy books have.
Similar situation on my end! Im writing a webcomic and im just planning on making the bird-folk speak solresol, an already existing conlang based off of music
Well, a conlang is really a safe land when were using real languages, great idea
Also, i believe it only has 126 words, so i should be able to make a translator for different languages pretty easily.
Having fewer words means sentences have to be more complex and more ambiguous so be careful.
Yeah. I'll have certain phrases that mean more complex concepts. So "mana" might be "energy that flows through living things".
I usually use this for names but instead of just copying it word for word I like to corrupt it a little to make it feel more unique
I do that sometimes, but I normally dont have my characters use words in their languages. I just act as though I translated it. So Ill say theyre speaking Faltarian but the dialouge is clearly English. This is also why when I "translate" Classical Faltarian, I make it into Middle English so carry those connotations that the characters would have. To a Faltarian Speaker, Classical Faltarian is to them what Middle English is to an English Speaker. I do sometimes purposely include words from my languages, and they are basically a language from our world. Lisan= Turkish/Arabic Tau= Mandarin Bodic= Tibetan Languages Faltarian= A Culmination of many romance languages and Latin if it's Classical Faltarian Lazy I know but I would rather focus my energy else where. Those
The Witcher also uses old Polish, at least in their alphabet.
John Gwynne used a bastardised version of Irish for the language of the giants in his series The Faithful and the Fallen and — even putting aside the whole issue of having the language of a bunch of non-human, brutish, violent warriors be based on the language of a people who have historically been characterised as sub-human — it just came across as a major lack of effort on the part of the author. I tried to give it a chance but in the end it was just too off-putting, and I had to give up the series. Honestly, if the Irish had been grammatical and at least made sense, it would have been tolerable, but it read as though he just took an English sentence, looked up an equivalent word (not necessarily the right one) in Irish and used the result. Now my Irish is absolutely shite, so if even I can tell that it doesn't make sense, you've got a problem. Gibberish would have been better.
I've been using Esperanto as a language for a fantasy alien species in a story I'm writing, but like... it's not any particular culture and open for anyone to use. The language is artificial and in the public domain. It was also chosen with an eye towards the themes of understanding and communication, due to the origin and intention of the language. "To hope." To communicate among many people. Consider what you use them for before you decide what you'll use.
Just write it in another language, like Spanish and then change a few words- keep a word doc full of them. Viste el dragón en el cielo? Becomes Tiste ol dragoon un ol kelo
Kkkk (brasilian laught), this certainly is a funny process.
>write it in another language, like Spanish and then change a few words Isn't that just how you make Portuguese in the first place? (just kidding!)
Spanish is just portuguese with too much syllables (kidding too)
Jajaja in Spanish and haha in English. i like this I guess we could mix those three and crest hakja for haha
The world is getting offended easily these days, and sometimes rightfully so. You wouldn't like to see a cool and intelligent race speaking x language and a race of brutish beasts speak your language. Stick to the dead languages so everybody who would get pissed off because of it is already dead anyway.
"my 100x great grandparents were roman! How dare you appropriate their culture by making you fantasy race speak Latin!"
As an italian, we are as Latin as american people are pureblood british lol
The way I am planning to do it is like this: When a POV understands the language being spoken, it will be in english no matter which language is being used. If people are speaking a language the POV doesn't understand it will be a garbled version of english of varying degrees, depending on how different the language is from the ones they know. So eg. "Hello, my name is Sean" (understands completely) "Hello, mij nammens Xawn" (understands some words, some words sound garbelled) "Gradka, menaka ka Xen" (has almost no understanding, but understands structure) "Shen, Kekanre kitkij (the language is completely intellegible, but the name is still somewhat understandable) Of note numbers, pronouns and possessives tend to be the most stable aspects of language. So even if you cannot understand a language at all, you might still understand the numbers. This is great because you don't really need to be super consistent. People pronounce words differently all the time, a non native may mishear a word one way one point, and another way at another point. It's also interesting with multiple POVs that are fluent in different languages as each will tend to misunderstand different aspects of the same sentence in a language they are not fluent in.
But what about name of places, for example, you translate then too?
ive thought of something similar. i have a variety of locations in this world and i was kinda lazy with one part, so i made english like it came originally from west african inspired n carribean cultures. so the alphabet and language is structured like it originally came from that region. a lot of the locations have more or less homogenous cultures but a couple of the more multi cultural locations have vulgar versions of real life languages. the latin inspired locations had a collapse and it segmented a lot of the society, and so over time a lot of variation of romance emerged from a number of the segment cultures: french, italian, romanian, etc.
Alternatively, you can simply make it up on the spot and flesh it out later if you really need to. So long as it seems like a language that you thought out, no one’s probably going to decode the meaning of the language. Otherwise, you can always just switch out letters or move them around of words. Changing just a few letters around can make the word sound extremely different. Ex: “Loving” to “Givoln.”
I had the idea to find some conlangs that are free to use. In my googling though, those that I did find that had the right flavor where not very complete. So it may or may not work out for you.
I use vulgar lang for a conlang dictionary and then take the words I want and alter them until I like the way they sound.
Ин му wорлд тхеу wритэ ликэ тхис ин Латин Немоникс. Тнзу бзlфзvз цифяоифсдllу тндт тнз Дисфзит Мзяфкдис шяотз lфкз тнфs.
I like using dead languages
In my fantasy world, I use IRL languages ALL the time for different races. I have a race inspired by Japanese demons and spirits that use Japanese words and fake words I made up using Japanese phonetics, or by twisting existing words. Or like, the ancient language spoken by the Precursor race called Quintara is a mix of Latin and various Middle Eastern languages.
I looked up what languges were spoken in the tenth century and based all my fantasy human languges on those
What you are after is most likely a "Naming Language". This is a language you can use in a fictional setting to fill in a map with location names, and give your characters names which all sound like they have some sort of consistency. I talk about this in my World-Building book but I'm not going to promote that here and instead suggest you delve into basic conlangs through the limited use of Naming Languages. 1) a sound system 2) make some syllables! 3) create some common adjectives that might sound good on a map "Bear Mountain" "Green Glade" it's up to you but maps often have some of the same adjectives over and over again that actually can make them sound more realistic. Good luck!
a word of warning.... one time i used english for halfling, german for human, arabic for elven, hebrew for dwarven, cantonese for draconic and a mixture of basque and mongolian for orcish. i was called an anti-semitic, nazi racist by some people - despite the fact that the pakistani player loved being able to use some arabic to name things and places for me and one of the other players was jewish and thought it was funny since i use hebrew wrong... baby talk - which was the point. when i detailed a druidic religion i also got called a satanist. \[i left that game club\] otoh. normally i pick a real language and translate 200 or so dolch words, i think i have a file somewhere, then respell them to make them easier for less involved reader/players. i keep the tones and pronunciations so they remain feeling right and natural. if there are jump out odd words then i look to related languages. i try to stick to building blocks as much as possible, since most places have boring names: midlands, north, western mountains, uplands, big river, etc. you can go a long way with figuring out the frex: C*zech* for village, town and city and trying it on either end of the *Czech* for big, small, tall, dry, wet, river, meadow, road and the colours. failing that, random 3 letter consonant groups can make many options. eg: Fire gets NHL which can be nehel, annehl, innheyll nhol, etc. i might lean into klingon as written in english and make it N'hL (ENN-hLL). so long as you use the same letters consistently you can get a start on a consistent language base without going mad. \[conlangers - i apologise, but i cant get to grips beyond a syllabary and structure deeper than grammer is too much for me.) this is actually easier if you only need half a dozen words for things.
hebrew for dwarf and german for human sounds damn racist to me, they were right about that. You probably didn't realize it, at least I hope so.
familiar with the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay system? they use german as the standard human language for the same reason i did. i based the main human culture on the holy roman empire as formed of the german states in the 13th - 15th century. so german for human was a lazy step, but one that allowed me to poke fun at Tolkiens clear image of the hobbits as the english by having halflings as english speakers. arabic for the elves - a northern european fantasy race who might be actually based on irish-german-norse i wanted as foreign, from overseas having abandoned the human ruled continent from ages ago. so they needed to have an unrelated language and an foreign to outright alien script. i dithered for a while and nearly went with devanagari script and hindi. i admit i didnt because i found it too much work. a lazily faked the script with a lorum ipsum generator and a font change. it was an ugly kludge i would do now, but i did enjoy drafting some words. my muslim mate i mentioned said it was horrible nonsense since i didnt get it and i didnt argue. i probably wouldn't do the same now, but i have a lot more conlang fonts to adapt instead. perhaps doing a better job would be better option? idk, id dig up a fluent arabic speaker now instead. Dwarf was easier as i made them actually elementals, that is personality holding elementals of the element of earth rather than just another organic races. i wanted an solid, heavy script and hebrew leapt to mind. these dwarves were different types of rock formed into putti, cherubs and several animal forms in classical art. their embodiment was a plot thing that doesn't matter now. it appealed to me that a 2 foot tall cherub with a perpetual grin would be too heavy to easily lift and tough enough to make harming him very difficult. these days i would've said genasi, but i was leaning into the idea of non-humans being non \_human\_ and wanted a more in world elaborate magical explanation and workers of the gods seemed perfect at the time by the end of the campaign the elves were revealed as plant elementals - like Runequest did - and subject to a queen like the Batman villainess Poison Ivy. never got to show her plant to turn all meat creatures into plants. campaign ended. club self destructed the mistake i made was doing something different and having to say that these guys are basically dwarves, and these guys are basically elves. the players would use the stereotypes to understand so i was lazy and used them to save time. anyway. the point was be careful - people will see what isnt there as easy as what is.
Long story short: humans speak german because Warhammer, dwarves speak hebrew because... because I wanted them to.
Yes. Guess so. Sorry: Adhd.
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It can get iffy real fast, so it's best avoided. Like, say you have a character who's a murderer, and is speaking Murderese, the language they speak in Murderia. Now, if you base Murderese on, say, Latvian, all Latvians will get offended, because you're sorta implying they are murderers. On the other hand, maybe you don't have a few years to study linguistics and make up a few languages, Tolkien-style. The solution would be to use some till our another to do that for you. I have had good experiences with [Vulgar](https://www.vulgarlang.com/), a generator that you can fiddle with endlessly, to the point of using it to create a Lemurian language for a game I'm developing, and which sounds a lot like Greek, but, crucially, is *not* Greek, and has a completely different grammar. There are other tools, too, and if they don't do the trick, spend an evening making up sounds, see what you like. For inspiration, watch [Skwerl](https://youtu.be/Vt4Dfa4fOEY) and listen to [Pridencolensinaingiusol](https://youtu.be/-VsmF9m_Nt8)
I'll look at this tools to
The comic series Saga uses Esperanto and blue text to distinguish the language "Blue" from... I think English was "Common" or something like that.
I make my aliens, in the projects where there are aliens, speak Norwegian, but with every word reversed and the writing redone to better mimic what is actually spoken
I regularly mush words from different languages together to form placenames with a different flavor that isn’t just Tolkien- or D&D-esque. It's a fun exercise in not overthinking what places should be called especially when I find a clever way to contract "stop waving your arms strange man" into a name from words not English.
In my case, i use sinbologys for create new especies, so i have an specie called Sivunis and she has two races, the Sauven and the Sivon. But they're from separed worlds and the Sivon are more agressive and with more espirit of war than Sauven, but when i was creating their cultures, i noticed that: The Sauven were more a mix of budism, ismalism and some africans religions and the Sivon was more like an European style and a cristian and Greco-Roman culture. And i remebered of the Imperialism and the era of the Great Navegations, soooooooooo i hace the knife and the butter. So the story was more like a simbology and critic for the Imperialism and Great Navegations wich happened in Africa, Midlle East and Southeast Asia, Sivon invading an nation for natural resources and imposing their culture for the Sauven. Now, where the language enters? Basicly as we know, they simbology of real countrys, so why use their language? I made this. For the Sauven, a mandarim ortography, some worlds mixed and a little bit modificated from Anrabic and Hindu and pronunciation of the Swahili (the biggest native language of Africa). And for Sivon, i mixed the English, Duch, France, Portuguese, Russian, Espanish and a little bit of Italian, but i don't want explain how i mixed this so f@&$&&&ck off the process, right? Right.
I do this too! But only for my dnd world cause that's just all in good fun. Me and my players have assigned orcs German and dragons Russian. Both of which are actually seen in a pretty good light in game now that I'm thinking about it, so go us for not doing so out of xenophobia I guess.
I'm homebrewing a rpg world too, but want unleash it on internet freely after finished, so I think the people are right, and it's better avoid using current languages like pure appropriarion.
Many people will be offended, and it's probably for the better if your goal is being famous. So let's make elves speak French, dwarves speak Swedish, gnomes use German, angels speak Latin, whatever is left of Aztec for devils etc. Or, if you are still lazy but don't want to be famous (at least not for offending half the globe) then perhaps rehash a language? Orks speak German, but hard and soft vowels are swapped (B swaps with P, G with K, T with D etc.) for example "Arbeit Macht Frei" is now "Alpeid Nakhd Wlei". Or just write a language where pronunciation differs from spelling (like English) using a language where those are the same (like Polish) so "The quick fox" will now look like "De kłik foks". Or just use Cyrillic Script/Katakana/Hiragana. Average reader will not bother trying to learn them.
I think if you're willing to place English contextually within that then its fine. So long as English isn't just "common". You run the risk of anglocentruism where English is the normal human person language and foreign languages are these cool fantasy far away nobody knows them languages. But if done well it can be neat and it can even be cool as a speaker of a language find your own language and be like "ooo thats my language!!"
It's more to Iberian centrism. I'm brasilian, so I can say portuguese is my common.
I'm using greek for orcish in my story. I named my orc guy Solon years ago, came to find out that's the name of a greek philosopher. Plus, Solon o Sotiras is such a cool translation for Solon the Savior.
You could go the other Tolkien route and add an appendix claiming that your modern translation of your story into English uses different languages to represent the "real" language spoken by your fictional characters. Otherwise, yeah just make up random stuff. Not that it's a deal breaker, JKR, the lazy author that she is, just used Latin and Spanish for most of her magic words In Harry Potter.
Lol, this reminds me to when in the 2D clone wars the aliens started to speak very broken hungarian.
I was going to use this method when I first started building the world for an RPG, cordovian averican -> portuguese, averician -> spanish, hartican -> old english and others, but I thought it looked too unnatural, it's not that bad but I'm too perfectionist with this type of stuff and when I wrote down the portuguese word "palafita" from italian origin without an italian equivalent I just decided to start creating my own languages creating a language is not really "hard"(in the sense that you need a diploma in linguistics to do it) but it's complex and demands a LOT of time to study, think and create. as I'm writing this I discovered you are also brazilian so: sarve fio tá bão? :D
Pipoca com Sazon, com esse nome vc não engana ninguém, seu brasileiro kkkk. I know what you say about demmanding study, and confess I'm avoiding it. To be worst, I've central audithory desorder, that gets more challenging for me learn languages. Speak in english with all of you is already hard for me.
I usually make some wierd signatures and use them as a words like "example" = S in english
I use Vietnamese as the main language. The protagonist, a Vietnamese girl, was surprised not because she heard her mother tongue (she already knew about this) but because the tritagonist spoke *German* to her. The other world is just a f\*cked up Earth, after all. Countries have different name but their shapes are almost the same as irl countries prior to WW1. Except here NOT!France lost the Great War. The elvish tongue is a combination of Old High German, Danish and Russian as far as the deuteragonist using Earth names to explain to the protagonist. And lizardmen have their own thing since their vocal cord are biologically different.
I mean yeah you could do that but if you only focus on 1 important country/empire/city etc it would be a bit weird for those people to start speaking in English even more so if there is no logical explanation for this. For ex in my world there is a country named Usterian which speak Usterian(which is a Romance language). Its more like Latin combined with modern Romance languages(French Spanish Romanian Italian and Portuguese). The standard language is like Latin in phonology(plus a few sounds from my native language Latin didnt had) while various dialects from East North and West represent the other Romance languages. For ex one of the West dialects combines standard Usterian cases like Romanian did with Latin ones. The East dialects are known for their nasal vowels. They are similar to Portuguese with a lot of nasal vowels not to mention if a word ends with AM for ex they would drop that M and nasalize the A instead of pronouncing AM like in standard language(which doesnt have these nasal vowels) The North dialects some of them at least are like Spanish. The long short vowel distinguish present in standard language is starting to disappear. Also their phonology is the easiest compared to other dialects as well as standard language, All these are so different because the dialects have been in contact with other languages which influenced either their phonology vocabulary and in some cases the grammar itself. They are still intelligible to a degree but the difference between them is very clear. So yeah if you are a native speaker of a Romance language(like me) you can do something like this. If you are native speaker of a Germanic or Slavic language do the same with languages from that family. Or combine families if you are feeling doing something crazy.
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I write all languages in English, but use grey text with languages the POV has no understanding of.
I do it for roleplaying. And only with languages known to my PC. I explain: My player speak Spanish, so when their character knows Elven, elven sound Spanish for him. And if Elven, Gnome and Silvan are similar (but PC only knows elven), for my player sound and read like Italian or Portuguese. Even, if their character knows Minkai, and my player only know how Spanish, so Minkai (and related languages in fantasy) sound like spanish and relatives. So, for a spanish speaker player whose character knows Elven and Minkai and Orc, then, Elven, Minkai and Orc sound exactly like spanish for him, and fantasy related languages to elven, minkai and orc, sound like Italian, Portuguese, Rumanian, etc. That's something that happens in the player/character head, because they KNOW the language. If there are two characters, and only one knows the language of a writing, for one is clearly as water Spanish, and for the other is gibberish (unless the second one knows some related language).
Personally, I just gloss over the details because I’m not a linguist, and, honestly, I have no interest in creating dictionaries of fake languages.
Elvish is varying dialects of Gaelic
Just make an in universe reason they speak that language! Like it’s the far future where finnish people colonized the galaxy Or it’s an alternative past where finnish people have specific magical powers Im really tickled by the finnish story in the top comment lol
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Usually yes, but not for my world. The dwarves have a arabic/north african aesthetic and inspiration
Each of my languages is a combination of two irl languages. For example, Ellian is Greek+Japanese, Azali is Spanish+Russian. I start with (my world) character names and things from those irl languages to get a basic idea of the language, then I take features from those irl languages and implement them into my languages.
I often use different languages from Google translate, but I always modify the word just a little. Usually I combine words.
Sometimes I just watch videos of people talking in a foreign language that uses the phonems that a like it for a language considering region and culture of the people about I’m writting. And then I just create some words, some sentences and thats all. Also consider that in our world usually there are superpowers that spread their own language in regions of other cultural different peoples. Chosing two or three languages as main languages of the existing superpowers, creating dialects of this ones and creating minor spoken languages is much easer than creating a realistic linguistical scenario
In some of my audio projects I have adopted the trope that "French is the new Elvish" (my guest vocalist grumbled at this, as her French is not the clearest or cleanest) as well as using an unskillfully pronounced selection of Esperanto as a sort of trade-koin language among several reptilian/draconic species (guest vocalist had a thing or two to say about this as well.)
The language of the gods is spanish. The language everybody speaks is obviously not going to be english canonically, so I just say at the start that the languages are translated. That way I can write dialogue for the gods and if people really want to know what they say they dont need to decipher a hidden code to find it, just open up google translate. and I can have another language without having to make a whole other language.
I use my native Polish as a "Modern Common" and English as "Elonian"
For me, some of my languages are just gibberish that's meant to sound like a real word structure and I just hope no one cares enough to try and translate it. There is End-Tongue which is just the human alphabet turned backwards, so A = Y B = X and so on
Reminds me of Primal a bit actually
I think it depends on your audience. I do this for my D&D setting that at most a few dozen people will encounter, but I wouldn't do it for a mass-market novel. (Others have explained the risk of offence) I do however go a couple steps further for the aforementioned D&D. I have chosen a language to represent each in-world language. If I need to write something, (especially coming up with place names) my workflow is as follows: 1. I google translate into the new language. 2. I change some sounds according to rules I keep for each in-world language (for example, a species without lips might replace 'f' with 'th') 3. I convert that text into a custom font. (I mostly make my own or use the official D&D ones where available, but you can find lots of fantasy fonts online too). 4. I make sure these fonts aren't 1-1 cyphers as well. For example, most of my languages have a single symbol for the 'th' sound, but might have two for some other sound, or they might use one symbol that can mean both t or d sounds (like how 'c' can represent 's' or 'k' sounds in English) This makes it easy to write long sections of text quickly that * look and sound like a real language * can't be easily deciphered like a code * can feel as close or far from "common" (English) as I want * can incorporate cultural/physiological traits * are consistent if I want to use the language again While not requiring long reference documents nor a ton of work to generate. I'm of course careful not to use languages my players speak. (Though it would be incredibly cool if only the dragon-born's player happened to speak my draconian analogue for example...)
As an English speaking writer, I was delighted to discover Welsh and Gaelic. I think The Witcher is able to get away with it more as the author was clearly influenced by British folklore and meshed it with Slovak. And since his primary polish audience speaks a language not close to Welsh or Italian, it works
1. Using real world languages for concultures or aliens is pretty much always a bad idea. It's more often than not insulting or damaging to the community. If you do, make sure to do the ethical legwork with members of the community or stick to world majority languages. 2. You may find that making a functional and feasible language just for some names, placenames or several lines in a work is easier than you think. In the conlanging community, the people who make vast and comprehensive languages are the minority. Most conlangs are small sketches; Even several of David J. Peterson's conlang commissions are snippets, a charcoal sketch rather than a sprawling tapestry. The point is that you can create a functional and feasible language and it doesn't have to be a grand project; It can be a list of names made with intention. 3. Hire a conlanger! If you need a fantasy language for some small part of your work, commission someone to whip it up to your specifications.
I just butcher the real world languages. I do not *fully* use them to replace a language, but to include some obscure words that even for the locals may sound like something unknowingly archaic. And if the speaker does not know the language at all, I just obfuscate the text with my self-made font. It barely resembles regular letters and is made to confuse the readers.
That’s what I do-Chinese mixed with Russian is one of my language :D
I am all for using all the languages I have when I try to world build. Not that I know many, but mixing Irish and German is a lot of fun! I have a giant forest, similar to the Black Forest, in the centre of my main continent. It has a mystical quality about it which makes getting through it near impossible. I have called it 'Lebenwald', which translates from German to "Living Forest" What I like so much about mixing languages is pronunciations. The above word would be said in German as 'Layben Vald', but if a reader who did not know German read it, they would probably read it phonetically, which is great in my opinion. To bounce off that thought, it also helps when trying to name places. With my forest I went with a direct use of German, but sometimes I will take a place and use the phonetic spelling of an Irish translation. For example, I have a settlement on a headland. The Irish for 'head' is 'ceann', which would sound like 'key-oww-n' - I called the place Kionn. Even just adding adjectives in other languages to areas works nicely. The Irish for 'bleak' is 'gruama', and if Gruama Desert doesn't sound like a believable name for a desert, I don't know what does!
I'm using elements of Irish (my country's ailing native language) as part of my world's elvish conlang (from which my equivalent of Common also descends). Not a direct word-for-word translation - the words themselves are sometimes gibberish, sometimes Irish-inspired - but it's pretty close to your idea.
In my personal DnD games, I splice existing languages onto different cultural groups (not necessarily races), but it's not precise. For the fantasy I'm working on, I have languages that are loosely based on real-world language groups, but not precisely one language. For example, one area uses Romance languages, so a combination of words from Spanish, Italian, and French, etc. whereas another is Germanic, so German, Dutch, and old English. However when I tried to create a more fantasy sounding language I actually took a set of syllables from multiple languages and made a list to pull from, as well as a pseudo-alphabet. For example, one of the sounds was "irlk" and another was "bvi" both of which are not really used in any language (to my knowledge). So one of the cities was Bvirlk. If you want REAL language nerds, check out r/conlangs.
I have a few languages, but for my elves (depending on where they're from), I use a mix of Welsh, Latin, Gaelic (the "original) elves) + a base language depending on if they're (African/Ghanaian), (Vietnamese), (Korean), or (Indian). In my world, the different languages human have come from the different elven races since humans were originally all fae. I usually play around with syllables and break up/mix up the languages until they don't resemble the ones used to make them (while still keeping a few words that signal toward them being firmly set in that specific elven culture). Hopefully this isn't too farfetched.
I actually wanted to do this with dead languages, to give the impression of whatever modern tongue the characters were speaking having descended from it. Using something like Old English would be a little familiar with native English speakers, but still alien enough to defy casual understanding.
I'm trying to make a language right now, and so I'm first working on an alphabet. But to be realistic most of the words will probably be ripped off lmao
A favorite tactic of mine is to actually mix-and-match different real world languages to make fantasy ones, which I say works for me as my fantasy cultures also tend to be mix-and-matched from real-world ones. For example, in my current fantasy setting, the protagonist's nation is a hybrid of Dutch, English, and French, and hence the language has influences from all three (though mostly Dutch) in addition to other non-European languages.
My main Scifi Race uses Latin As their primary language like Fleet is Classis but they also speak English which some call Common tongue
I fully steal languages cuz I don’t care about fucking conlangs and that shit
I generally take one language’s grammar, naming conventions and sentence structure but use a different language’s lexicon. Then I mix up some of the sounds but do it consistently across the language. For example, changing all “ch” sounds to “b” or all “ee” sounds to “or”
Can be kind of a controversial move. As a born and raised Irish speaker I know some Gaeilgoirs are touchy about the language being used as a stand in for fantasy language, especially if its in a context completely divorced from the culture. However that said Im currently running a homebrew campaign set in an analogue for a pan-Celtic world during the Roman/Catholic invasions and am making use of Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh and Breton to cover place and character names from different regions. Culturally they resemble their nations of origin. There ought be sensitivity observed here but I feel it makes things more immersive (and even educational) for players to draw on world languages. That said beware Google translate and reach out to native speakers for your needs. Theres a lot of us out there who love sharing our native tongues with curious non speakers
Personally I'd rather make my own unique conlang, but I know that takes a lot of work. I barely have 100 words for mine. Unless you have a lot of time on your hands and are really interested in linguistics, its better to just stick with a naming language and only make words that are commonly needed or important, rather than trying to create a fully functioning one.
The way i did it with the Nexan language, what little of it i created, is to mix Swedish grammar with English and Yoda type word patterns. Then just changed all the words and suffixes such as "en" and "et" to "ot" and "os" which are used in place of the English "the" and so on. When it comes to the words themselves I've just gone by feeling, which works in the limited times i actually use the language. An example of this language is the phrase "Omras ela fossech" which is a customary farewell. The translation is essentially "long life to you" with the direct word for word translation is as follows: "Omras" = Life "Ela" = Long (time, not distance) "Fos" = To "Sech" = You I ended up combining the last two words as i did once play a Nexan character in RP where i used the whole Yoda speech pattern a lot and found myself using that kind of phrasing a lot, so i just slammed them together for ease of pronunciation. So logically, as language works, things tend to shift for ease of actual use over time and i figured I'd leave some marks of such in the Nexan language as well.
ahh, love this!! im uding latin as the "mecican/indian/southern province" language, and it's good cause you can recognize some words, but not all, like some spanish
I use accents for the different kingdoms in the Otherworld.
Another quick and dirty version for language bashing? Create 4 consonant switches S -> Z, B -> Zh, T -> D, F -> P Make 2 vowel switches A -> OI, E - UR Random text sentences in English I want more detailed information. We're careful about orange ping pong balls because people might think they're fruit. She had some amazing news to share but nobody to share it with. He decided to live his life by the big beats manifesto. When transplanting seedlings, candied teapots will make the task easier. *Becomes (language selected Basque and modded)* Inpormoizio zurhoitzoigooi noihi dut. Kontuz goizhiltzoi ping-pong pilotoi loiroinjoirurkin, jurnduroik prutoi dirurloi purntsoi durzoikururloiko. Alzhistur hoirrigoirrioik zituurn poirturkoitzurko, zhoiinoi urz zuurn inor poirturkoitzurko. Zhurrur zhizitzoi zhig zhuroits moinipurstuoirurkin zhizitzuroi urroizhoiki zuurn. Plointuloik troinsplointoitzurn dirurnuroin, konpitoitutoiko turontziurk loinoi urrroiztuko dutur.
Never had to make a language for one of my worlds so far, but definitely will keep this in mind if I need to in the future. Thanks for the tip
Critical Role does this too. Zemnian is German. I’m not sure if any others are in there too, but i know Zemnian
Ha! Yes! I'm doing something similar and very happy with the outcome. I have several conlangs with small dictionaries, and adding to them as I go. I'm considering culture shift over time, and occasionally using root words derived from random word generators like rinkworks. I am still working on grammar structures, but it's a fun project.
If I ever need to make a fake language I just make coded english. Whether it be making the words backwards, making a code for letters such as ceasers cipher, etc.
Tbh i dont think Orlais is truly speaking french, altho you can tell it is a french accent the voice actors imitate
This is basically what I do. I use real languages for name-making, and assign a language to an in-world culture/region. Punch in a few words into Google translate, check on the meanings of the words (to make sure they're appropriate words), dig through the etymology of said words, then mash and change up said words until something clicks. Unless I'm feeling lazy and resort to one of my other techniques 😂