Tag: Languages

Saturday Setups: Language Building – An Introduction

Featured Ariel Paiement

Introduction

In a post on language factors, we already went over some basics about languages and building them for specific areas as well as basics on how to do it in general. In this post and upcoming ones, we’re taking a look at this more closely. This is a process that is entirely optional, and people do varying degrees of it. Some go all out while others opt out entirely. Neither is wrong. A language you’ve created isn’t necessary to lend credibility to your work in most cases, but it can be very helpful. The goal of this section is to equip you with tools you’ll need to build languages if you choose to do so. I can’t cover everything, but I’ll try to cover what you need to get started. We’ll begin with an introduction to building languages and why you might decide to do so.

Why Create a Language?

First and foremost, creating a language should be done for fun. It isn’t required, even for high or epic fantasies, to make a good story. In fact, it’s easy to end up taking away from the story with this type of world building if you’re not careful. Because of this, the predominant reason to create a language is because you want to for the sake of experimenting, having fun with it, and being able to say you’ve created your very own language. If playing with sounds, coming up with new writing systems, and dabbling in creating grammar or structure rules sounds fun to you, then this area of world-building is for you. If you already know you’ll hate it, move on. It isn’t worth driving yourself nuts. For those on the fence, I encourage you to give it a try. You never know; you may love it. At the very least, you can say you tried it.

Besides fun, another reason to build a language of your own is because you want a naming system (or just the names) for people, places, and things that sound suitably unique but also have some sense of cohesiveness and weight behind them. This could mean you just want names that sound like they could come from the same regional location or it could mean you want names that go as far as having root words from a language that gives the names an actual meaning, much like our names on Earth have meanings behind them. Those two different sides of the spectrum obviously require differing levels of involvement from you in terms of language building, but they’re both valid needs. 

Finally, language is so entwined with culture that many times your culture ends up changing with the language. If you’re writing something heavily invested in culture, language–spoken and written–plays a big part in it. You may only choose to add in some exotic names and maybe some insults or curse words to lend to the illusion of depth you create, or you may choose to go all out and create the language that you need to include songs in that language, like Tolkien does with Elvish in Lord of the Rings. How far you go depends on your interest in it and on what your readers are expecting. You can go overboard with this, so it’s important to always have balance. Don’t overwhelm readers with a lot of text in fantasy languages you’ve created. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have some terms or names that are pulled from the language creation work you did.

Where to Start

If you’re feeling like this is complicated at this point (or have felt so since you saw the topic of this post), I’m not going to lie to you. It is complicated. But it isn’t impossible, and there are ways you can make life easier on yourself. Let’s just look at the starting point I’ve used for this in the past since a starting point helps to make things seem a little less chaotic.

Usually, I start with the alphabet. I take the time to think about all the sounds available to me in my language and alphabet (English in my case), and I weed through those root sounds. I may take out a vowel or a consonant here and there to lessen the number of letters I have to deal with. I have also, in the past, chosen to incorporate the diphthongs (vowel combinations like ae) found in Latin or other languages. When you’re adding sounds to your alphabet or syllabary that your native tongue doesn’t have, you can look at the sounds of other languages. This is a tremendous help, and it can give a lot more depth to your language, especially if you’re doing this for the first time. Even Tolkien, a well-accomplished linguist in his own right, borrowed from other languages to create the dialects of Elvish. 

Starting with your alphabet or syllabary gives you the building blocks for words. It makes it easier to determine what sounds can and can’t be involved, and you’re making a call on what the language will sound like at the very basic level. If it’s going to be soft and lilting, it’ll be because of the sounds you kept, added, or threw out in this stage. If it will be harsh and guttural, it’ll be because of what you kept, threw out, or added at this point. Everything in a language pivots upon two things: its grammar and its vocalization/sounds. Grammar is more complex, so start with what’s simple and build up from there.

Conclusion

Hopefully you have a better understanding now of why you might want to create a language and the uses it can serve in your novel. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, take a deep breath. This isn’t as bad as it seems, and I hope to show you that it can be a ton of fun for creative minds in future posts. You can set up the language in whatever way you choose. Look at the languages we have here on Earth. There’s tons of variation there, right? Well, for your fictional languages, you can use systems just as varied, and you also have the freedom to mash together concepts, sounds, and techniques from other languages around you in real life. If you let go of the stress of thinking everything has to be perfect and just start with your sounds and the premise that this is meant to be a lot of fun for you, you’re going to be fine. You can take it as fast or slow as you need to, and you can choose how much you feel like doing. No author is required to build a complete language, nor are they required to do any language building at all. It really is entirely up to you, so have fun with it and don’t stress! Just like all other areas of world building, this is your chance to do things your way and to have fun while doing it. Take advantage of it!

Saturday Setups: Building Societies – Language Factors

Ariel Paiement

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.