This is part 2 of our overview on constructed languages in works of fiction. Check out The Rise of Fictional Languages if you haven’t already!
Now that we have established the continued and growing presence of fictional languages throughout our cultural landscape, let’s get a better understanding of how these languages come to life.
Brick by brick
Before any structural considerations, you need to understand the why and the who of your conlang. If it is built for anything non-human, that might influence the next steps.
What if the language is spoken by creatures that have a vocal system different from ours? That’s how you end up with Parseltongue from Harry Potter, which is admittedly spoken by a few humans but made to emulate the sounds of a snake, which has no lips, a different tongue and a different throat.
What if they have no sound-making organs at all? And before you ask, yes, sign languages can be absolutely valid - albeit rare - constructed languages.
No matter the circumstances or the methodology, an essential foundational step to crafting a language is to identify its building blocks to structure it properly. To name a few examples:
- Will it have its own writing system, or will you use the letters and phonetics of an existing alphabet like Tintin’s Syldavian or Watership Down’s Lapine language?
- What rules do you set for word order? “I ate a green apple yesterday”, or perhaps “Yesterday an apple green I ate”?
- What sounds will your language use? There are many sounds a human can produce, and only a fraction of them are used in English. What about silent letters?
- How will conjugation work to convey necessary context? What suffixes will you use to anchor a verb in time? Do your adjectives have gender and plural markers? Do you conjugate nouns through declensions?
- Do your nouns have an arbitrary grammatical gender or class? If so, you should probably check out Suffixes and Male Spoons: the Quirks of Gendered Languages, wink wink.
Reality is helpful sometimes
A common place to start is to take inspiration from existing languages of our world. It can be done for two reasons: to mimic a sound and cadence that fits the world-building around your language, or to suggest civilizational ties to the real world, in case of a futuristic earthly setting.
Chakobsa, the language of the Fremen in Dune (not to be confused with the real-life Circassian language of the same name), draws heavy inspiration from Arabic and Romani. The Villeneuve movie actually steers further away from Arabic than Herbert’s novel, a creative decision of David J. Peterson, the linguist in charge of constructing the fictional languages for the big screen. In a Q&A, he rationalized that Dune was set into a too distant future to realistically feature any recognizable remnant of Arabic itself.
Beowulf was written about a thousand years ago and modern English speakers cannot read it. And we're talking about twenty thousand years?! Not a single shred of the language should be recognizable.
Also used in Dune, it is possible to push even deeper into the realism of your language building with what is referred to as the historical method. The idea is to create a proto-conlang, an earlier version of your language that it derived from. The Latin to your Italian, if you will. Doing so allows you to then mimic the natural evolution of the language through centuries, even millennia of usage, following patterns that have been observed throughout history.
Of course, this process is as fancy as it is complex, and should probably be reserved for expanded fictional universes with deep civilizational lore.
“Yep, sounds like a mountain Ork”
The choice of sounds mentioned earlier can actually play a major role in immersion and world building.
This process has two main functions. Obviously, the first is the symbolism carried by which parts of the vocal system are being used more prominently. The constructed languages of barbaric warrior races and tribes are often harsh and guttural, as a way to enshrine their brutality into their speech through grating Rs and percussive Ks.
However, as with the historical method, there is also a world-building element these sounds can be associated with: the Acoustic Adaptation Hypothesis (AAH). Simply put, this theory states that the evolution of phonetics in communication would be influenced by how well each sound is transmitted in a given environment.
This hypothesis mainly applies to communication between animals, but it can absolutely be extrapolated to speech if one so chooses. The same way it is suggested that a mountain bird and a jungle bird evolve into favoring different sounds to be best heard in their natural habitat, it is possible to incorporate such reasoning into your conlang by exploring what sounds are heightened or dampened by the speakers’ homeland.
This theory has yet to be proven beyond reasonable doubt and established as a scientific fact, but it certainly is a fascinating way to create a bond between the language, the people and the land.
Here’s the shoe, build the foot
Depending on the IP the conlang is made for, not everyone has the luxury of building from scratch.
Sometimes, a linguist has to extrapolate from the author’s original vision for the language, with the main caveat that not all authors are linguists themselves. If the linguistic foundation laid by the original work is shoddy, or if its influences are a bit too obvious, there is an added challenge to build around that shaky foundation into a coherent result, especially when some of these imperfect phrases are important to the fanbase. Again with Dune, Herbert’s names and phrases in Fremen were too iconic to alter. For example, they refer to the prophet from their legends as Lisan al Gaib, which is eerily close to لسان الغيب (lisaan al-ghaib), actual Arabic for what roughly translates to “Voice of the Outsider”.
It could be worse, though. Imagine being given a scene in English and being tasked with retrofitting a language to replace the audio of that scene! Sounds crazy, right? Well that’s what happened with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Marc Okrand was called up by producers to come up with Klingon dialogue that they could re-dub over existing scenes that were filmed in English. Besides the obvious constraints of the situation, the most arduous aspect of the task was to come up with words and phrases that would require similar mouth movements but produce distinctly different sounds.
You’re not there… yet?
This overview went into extremely thorough and labor-intensive processes that are used by the best of the best to create some of the most iconic conlangs in the world. Naturally, if you are considering delving into language building for fun, don’t let all this intimidate you. There are many beginner-friendly online communities that provide all the necessary resources for you to have a great time, without any producers, writers or actors to bend over backwards for.