Should You Create A Fictional Language For Your Fantasy World?

There are few activities you can do in real life that make you feel like a God more than creating a fictional language. Language is an integral part of world-building because it’s a critical part of our natural world, too. The inhabitants of your world use language to communicate, exchange thoughts and ideas, archive, and pass information from one another. The question of whether you want to create a new language for your fantasy world is one you must answer early in your world-building, maybe even before you begin creating fictional names for your story. Once you answer that question, you can move on to the steps of actually creating the language.

To Create a Fictional Language – Yes or No?

The very first decision to make when thinking about language is this: will you create a different language for your world or not?

I know it’s tempting to say ‘Yes, I want a new language,’ but once you read forward and understand the challenges it presents, you might reconsider. If you are creating your world for a book, how important is the fact that the characters speak a new language, and even more importantly, how necessary is it to create that new language?

To understand why the answer is not easy, think about a book we all (should) know: Alice in Wonderland. Let me ask you this: what is the spoken language in Wonderland? You’ll probably say: English, but is it? Would the story be different if it wasn’t English? What if it was Wonderlaneze? Since you are writing the book in English, the fact that a different language is spoken would be transparent.

Here’s another example: how many languages are spoken in the Lord of the Rings universe by J.R.R. Tolkien? The answer is about twenty. And Tolkien, a linguist himself, not only created all those languages, he developed them. He created phonology, grammar, vocabulary, standard rules, scripts, derivations, exceptions, etc. Now, unless you are a LOTR fanatic, and you are just a person who read the books and/or saw the movie: did you know that? Probably not. All you need to know is that there are some languages, but other than that, you don’t care because that would distract from the story.

Approaching Language Creation in Your Fiction

These are all things that come to mind when you think about introducing foreign, made-up languages into your fictional worlds. Here are the four basic scenarios I can envision:

• No mention of anything about language whatsoever
• Mention the existence of a different language, but provide no details
• Mention the different language, provide several words/phrases as needed
• Create a complete language, use it as needed

There are pros and cons to each of these, so let’s look at them in detail.

No New Language

That is obviously the most convenient choice because you do not need to tie yourself with the additional burden of creating a new fictional language. You will simply write the book in your language and let the characters speak in your language (or whatever language your book was translated into), and nobody has to worry about anything.

Most books fall into this first category, by and large. As a reader, you kind of know there must be a different language in the story, especially if the story takes place in a made-up world. Even if your story is a futuristic sci/fi tale based on our real Universe, the chance that a replica of a human language might show up somewhere else in the galaxy is close to zero. Just look at our world: countries just miles away speak entirely different languages.

So, as a reader, you know that must be the case, but nobody tells you about it, and you probably don’t care.

New Language, Little Details

Probably fewer books fall into the second category. Here, the author clarifies that there is a different language, but that language is not developed nor explained. It might be used as a means for a plot, as in XYZ speaks one language and therefore ABC, the eavesdropper, doesn’t understand it. It’s a valuable tool if used correctly.

This one works well when dealing with different races in a world, and you want to associate a fictional language with each race. This hack works well here: creating a universal language to go around the communications barriers. In a fantasy world, maybe this language is the “old language” or the “language of the Gods.” In a sci/fi world, perhaps a device can translate between languages on the spot.

In this way, you create the complexity of the real world by mentioning the languages, but you also offer a solution to how people communicate.

It gets even more straightforward if your plot takes place in a small geographic space, where you are limited to one language.

In this category, you not only let the reader assume there are multiple languages; you spell it out, but that’s about it.

New Language, Some Usage

In the third category, you have those authors who enjoy (and have the time) to dig deeper into language creation. This category is quite close to the previous one, but in here, you might have some characters say something in their language or perhaps present something written, like a lost scroll or some carvings in a cave.

You can use this to your advantage by weaving it into the plot. Maybe there is a race whose language is unknown to your POV character. Instead of saying:

He stared at them, unable to understand what they were saying.

You can say:

“Hubba-bubba lumpa-drumpa,” the stranger said, and Jin stared at him with wide eyes.

So, now you are introducing some unique words to your world, and you let the reader experience first-hand being unable to understand them.

But be careful: fiction is about the plot and characters. It’s not about your ability to make up words. You can go around with a few things like the one above but use them sparingly. Otherwise, you will wind up with a book that is hard to read and an annoyed reader. As much as you want, no reader will learn your new language right away, no matter how cool it is. So, use it for effect, don’t let it take over. Once your book becomes a bestseller, there will be some people who might develop the complete language for you, for free, for fun.

Complete New Fictional Language

Lastly, you have the master language creators. They spend the time to create an entirely new language for their world. But, to no one’s surprise, the books in the last category feel a lot like the books in the third category, and by now, it’s pretty clear why.

Tolkien worked on his languages for 63 years. He created about 20 different languages. That is a lifetime commitment. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it but be prepared for a very daunting task.

The decision you make about the languages in your fantasy world will influence the difficulty of writing, but, more importantly, the difficulty of reading. For beginning writers, I suggest choosing categories 1 or 2. Once you get better at creating worlds, you should move to category 3. I would never recommend anyone to spend the time to develop a whole fictional language unless this becomes your hobby.

Since the point of this was not to teach you how to create a new language, but rather to help you decide on your approach to using a new language in your fiction, I will provide you with some resources you can check, should you decide you want a new language:

• Mark Rosenfelder’s Language Construction Kit – A website loaded with articles and examples on language creation
• Mark has also authored two essential books:
  • Language Construction Kit
  • Advanced Language Construction

Fictional Language – Writing Systems

People are visual. We understand differences when we see things that look different. From this perspective, using a different writing system to signify a foreign language is an excellent way to make an immediate and profound impact. Of course, we are talking about the visual representation of the alphabet. The way it usually works is this: a language has specific phonology (the way it sounds). It has a particular visual representation (alphabet) and rules that explain how to read the alphabet to sound like the language.

Unless you have a frame of reference, it is usually hard to understand how to read an alphabet. For example, /?TH?r?/ makes no sense at first sight. It is, in fact, the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) representation of the word ‘thorough.’ So, the IPA standard is the frame of reference. If you learn it and apply it to any language, you can figure out how to “say” the sounds in that language.

Defining new alphabets is not easy, but I have to admit, it is fun as hell. To exemplify, here are just a few alphabets from various fictional languages that you may have heard of:

Script images and text copyright by http://www.omniglot.com/.

Cirth – “Cirth [?kir?] was invented by J.R.R. Tolkien for use in his novels. It is modeled on the Anglo-Saxon Runic alphabet and is used to write the language of the Dwarves (Khuzdul) in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in inscriptions in wood and stone. It is also used as an alternative alphabet for English.”

Dothraki – “Carlos and Patrícia Carrion invented the Dothraki alphabet as a way to write the Dothraki language, a constructed language created by David J. Peterson for the television series, Game of Thrones, and based on the invented words and phrases used in George R. R. Martin’s series of books entitled A Song of Ice and Fire.”

Klingon – “Klingon is the language spoken by Klingons, alien characters in the Star Trek films and TV series. In the 1984 film Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the director, Leonard Nimoy, and the writer-producer, Harve Bennett, wanted the Klingons to speak a real-sounding language rather than gibberish, so they commissioned the linguist Marc Okrand to create Klingon.”

Sarati – “Tolkien also created several different alphabets to write his languages – the Sarati alphabet only appears in a small number of inscriptions in the tales of Middle-earth.”

Browse for more fictional alphabets at Omniglot.

Final Words About Creating a Fictional Language

The critical thing you should take from this article is this: don’t make an effort to create a language just for having one. However, if you do, make sure it is unique, interesting, and doesn’t take the focus away from your story and your characters. As I mentioned above, everyone expects your fantasy world to have a different language, just like they expect magic, strange creatures, and things that are physically impossible in our world.

But most of all, the readers expect a good story and amazing characters. Language, just like the setting, will add to the story’s general look and feel, but it should never be the focus. That, of course, unless your story is specifically about language. If your story is the story of the alien Jean François Champollion, uncovering the secrets of a future world’s language in hopes of saving the planet, then, by all means, go crazy!

If you want to study more about fictional languages, Wikipedia has a pretty vast list of constructed languages, with background and description. Finally, don’t forget to check my guide on how to create fantasy names and world-building geography.

Now, before you go, I have…

3 Questions For You

Please share your answers in the comments below. Sharing knowledge helps us all improve and get better!