Let’s Talk Language

How much do you think about language in your fantasy or sci-fi stories? Does it matter at all?

Having an original language can create a more realistic world, regardless of what you’re writing. But at the same time, for most people, beating you over the head with that language is just going to take away from that story.

If you look at Tolkien’s work, you realize that, even though he started with the language, he actually doesn’t incorporate THAT much of it into his story. You don’t need to learn elvish or dwarvish to enjoy the books. But if you do like learning new languages, he certainly provides lots for you as well (especially in the appendixes).

But creating a language goes beyond just word substitution. It can influence the very nature of the culture that speaks it, which in turn will influence the story.

I mean, think about that for a moment. Imagine understanding a language that you made up so well that when you throw a character from that race into a story, you already have a baseline idea of how they will behave. That’s dedication to world building!

Well, it’s safe to say that I’m no Tolkien. I’ve been studying Japanese for three years on Duolingo and, while I’m fascinated by the language, I’m in no danger of becoming a polyglot, or a conlanger.

Conlanger? Ah, yes, that’s actually want I wanted to talk a little bit about today. Conlang stands for Constructed Language. And there is a large and vibrant community out there dedicated to creating new languages, for games, for books, for movies, or just for fun.

Creating a language. For fun. Tolkien would be proud, but boy is that not my hobby!

The thing is, however, I do want to incorporate some alien languages more into my Get Lost Saga. Up until now, I’ve been making up words as I go along, usually for the names of people, but I realized as time went on it would make more sense if I at least had something consistent going on.

But there was also a limit to how much I needed or wanted. I did not want something on the scale of Klingon for all the major races, nor was I capable or making such a dictionary myself. I can’t afford to hire someone to make one either, and didn’t just want a random word generator to spit things out.

Enter Vulgerlang. Vulgarlang is a website for people who don’t know how to create a language, and just need something created quick for a story or RPG. But it doesn’t just spit out random words. Rather, it follows various rules of language to create its vocabulary. It also lets you choose certain real language patterns to base yours on. If you want something that sounds vaguely Germanic or Japanese in tone or structure, it can do that.

Better still, you can input your own words into it ahead of time, along with definitions and whether they’re verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc… and it will add work that into its initial construction.

So all those alien names I had made up could now help create the language! If you’ve ever looked up baby names, you know how most names have a relatively simple meaning behind them (“Noah” means “rest” in case you were wondering). So I applied that to all the names so far for all the races, fed in some additional information, and voila! A basic language is born!

I’ve not got 8000 word dictionaries for 5 different races, tied to the grammatical rules of 5 different languages on earth just to give them some flavour. Each also has its own name generator so that I can create new names for people, ships, or planets using those same rules. Neat!

To be clear, I have no intention of dumping a bunch of made up alien words on readers in my future books. For a conlanger, what Vulgarlang spits out is, well, vulgar at best. It’s not a substitute for putting in the real work.

But what it will do is allow me to add little bits and pieces once in a while that will make my worlds seem just a tiny bit bigger and a little bit more real. And, more importantly, consistent.