Introduction
One factor in world-building that can take up a significant amount of time is language. Language has a huge impact on culture and society. It’s how we communicate with each other, after all. The amount of time you spend on this obviously depends. Some writers build entire languages to use in their series while others opt to simply invent names that have a feeling of cohesiveness. Wherever you fall on the spectrum, this post will help you get started.
Naming Schemes
One of the important things about language is that, often, names have some similar cadence to them. Languages that are a melting pot of lots of other languages, like English, may not mirror this, but it can be seen in languages like Japanese or Chinese.
Introduction
One factor in world-building that can take up a significant amount of time is language. Language has a huge impact on culture and society. It’s how we communicate with each other, after all. The amount of time you spend on this obviously depends. Some writers build entire languages to use in their series while others opt to simply invent names that have a feeling of cohesiveness. Wherever you fall on the spectrum, this post will help you get started.
Naming Schemes
One of the important things about language is that, often, names have some similar cadence to them. Languages that are a melting pot of lots of other languages, like English, may not mirror this, but it can be seen in languages like Japanese or Chinese.
You can use a variety of techniques to give names similar sounds. I’ll discuss three below.
Method #1
Use a set letter combination as a suffix on each name.
This method involves choosing a consistent suffix for a name. Depending on how complex you want it to be, you can use a different suffix for male and female names. Or, if you want to simplify it, you can use the same suffix for names regardless of gender.
Method #2
Use a set letter combination as a prefix on each name.
This one is a little less of a common method, but it can work if you choose it. It may be an easier method for creating a differentiation between male and female names.
Method #3
Use common sounds.
To give names a sense of cohesiveness, you can choose a few combinations of sounds, whether consonants or vowels, and use those combinations regularly in names from the same culture. For example, I like to use dh (pronounced th or as a hard d sound, depending on the dialect), bh (a vee sound), and Si (Shee) in a lot of my names, particularly ones using Wyrdhan, a language commonly spoken on Alcardia.
You can do a similar thing with your names for people or even places. I’ve used mine in names for people such as Dhiabhan, Rhubhian, and Alabhor or for place names such as Dhubarin (old name used for Dubarin in Banach’s day).
Method #4
Use a blend of them all.
This one is more complicated, but you can use a combination of them all. For example, you might use different prefixes to indicate the gender of the names, a suffix to indicate common languages, and a combination of different sounds to further add to the feeling of cohesiveness.
These are the main methods for naming, but there is also the choice to just name randomly. That isn’t discussed here because you can easily figure that one out, and the goal of this article is to help you to understand how you can use language to provide a sense of culture and differences in society. Naming randomly doesn’t have quite the same impact in those areas, so I haven’t covered it.
Building Languages
There’s a lot I could go over in this specific area. Building a language isn’t the easiest process, and it certainly requires a lot of thought. I’ll go over a few of the basic things to consider, but my recommendation is that, if you’d like to try your hand at building a language, you use Holly Lisle’s Build a Language ebook. I use it and her process is thorough, well-explained, and provides you with templates to use. I’ll provide the links and info for that at the end of this section.
Starting with the Basics
Usually, when building a language, I like to start by determining what sounds and sound combinations will be available. To make your life easier, I recommend deleting some of the sounds available to us from your language. For Wyrdhan, when I was working on creating it, I chose not to make Z an available letter. (Obviously, other languages might use it, or perhaps a dialect could introduce it, but the base language doesn’t have it.) I also added the consonant blends dh, dr, st, sh, sv, hs, bh, bv, wy, and kept ng.
You get the idea. Basically, figure out what sounds you want to add and what you want to get rid of before you do anything else. After you’ve done that, then you can move on.
After I do that, I like to figure out what I have for prefixes and suffixes. In my case, I chose to use suffixes for both my nouns and my verbs to indicate what the words do or the era they came from. This is, perhaps, more complex than I needed to make it, but I kind of pulled language-structure ideas from a variety of languages, including Japanese, English, Italian, and Dutch.
Which leads me to my next topic with the basics. You can use structures from languages we speak here on Earth to create your fantasy race’s language. It may make your life a bit easier in some cases to see how other languages handle things like nouns, verbs, sentence structure, tense, suffixes, and more. Modeling on real life helps us in so many other aspects of fiction, so why not here?
At this point, with the suffixes and prefixes nailed down, you have more than enough to start naming things with a semblance of organization and cohesiveness. You don’t need anything more than your sounds list, prefixes and suffixes, and a general idea of whatever other naming rules you may wish to have. However, this concept can be taken much further to include various cases, sentence parts, tenses, and conjugations of cases. How complex you make it is up to you.
Holly Lisle’s Build a Language Clinic
Holly Lisle has a variety of writing clinics available on Amazon as ebooks. I own several, and one of the ones I own is all about building a language. If you visit her site as well, you can provide them with proof of purchase on the ebook and gain access to the templates you need to go with it. This is the best way to go about it since the actual course can be pricey. I believe the course provides a little extra help for those who feel they can’t do it with just the instructions in the ebook, but I felt it wasn’t worth it.
The ebook lays things out as clearly as it can, though I can’t promise it’ll be entirely easy to understand since it can get down into the nitty gritty aspects of languages and building one. If you’re only interested in creating some nice names that feel like they could belong to the same language, use what I’ve provided here. You won’t find much else that’s new or helpful from her clinic. But if you want to really go the whole way and create your own language, pick up a copy of the ebook here. The website for claiming the templates is here, and I believe she explains how to claim the templates in the ebook. If not, you just go to the help desk and create a support ticket, then provide them with the information they request for it.
Conclusion
I know this a ton of information to process. Building a language can feel overwhelming. I know because that’s exactly how it felt to me. But really, it’s also a very rewarding challenge to take on. I enjoyed it once I took a breath, decided that everything didn’t have to be perfect, and just chose to love the process of creating something.
Now, I’m a bit of a language-learning nut case. My parents had me do two years of Latin in 5th and 6th grade, and I’ve been hooked on language-learning ever since. I speak none of them fluently or even well, but I spent about a year studying Spanish and Portuguese, a semester each on Italian and German, and am now studying Japanese. I’m even doing a little Romanian in preparation for my missions trip to Romania at the beginning of September.
So I’ve learned the language structures for quite a few different languages, and it helps tremendously. But that isn’t necessary to succeed at creating your own language. Google is an awesome way to find out more about languages and their structures if you want inspiration.
Above all, do what you feel is needed for your book. Anything more than that should be just for fun and pure enjoyment. It shouldn’t be something you stress about. It’s your language, so there really isn’t a right or wrong about it.
As usual, feel free to ask questions in the comments or leave your own tips and tricks if you like to build languages for your books. I’d love to see what others do in this area.
