Making New Languages as a World-Building Tactic
Originally created for Culturally Arts' blog.
What differentiates science fiction and fantasy from other genres is their need for world-building; whether it’s a new planet, a new country, or a new dimension, the reader is transported to a seemingly new world with its own ways of existence, so writers must ensure their worlds are believable. They start with the fundamentals of the world, such as its current and historical political climate, how it came to be, who lives there, and the laws of magic (if any). From there, writers can work on the characters’ everyday lives, such as their jobs and hobbies, and where they go (school, the bar). Some writers go so far as to add some pop culture, like famous poets or musicians.
And some writers add new languages.
It’s reasonable for writers to write their worlds in the language that they themselves speak. However, languages are passed on by human contact and daily communication from the older generation to the younger, so a writer’s fictional population might not know the language the writer speaks. If your population hasn’t had extended contact with a population that speaks a particular language, they won't be able to speak it. For example, the existence of English in a fictional world on a different planet or even in a country that is physically/politically separate from Britain would be unlikely, if not impossible.
Luckily there is a way around that: conlanging. Conlanging refers to the act of creating a new language, and while there are many purposes for conlanging—creating a universal language or capturing ideas that our natural languages (natlangs) can't—it is also a world-building tactic. Adding a new language makes their population seem more believable in that the audience might really feel like they're in a different world. But until Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings in the 1950s, and even more popularly since Roddenberry’s Star Trek in1970s, sci-fi and fantasy stories typically used gibberish (nonsensical, non-realistic language) rather than languages based on linguistics. And I don’t blame them—there is just so much to think about when making a new language.
Let’s start with sounds. The following charts list every sound that linguists have been able to encounter in human languages.
A human baby regardless of where it is born is capable of learning every single sound here (with some exceptions, such as those who are hard of hearing), so, while writers who aren’t linguists are likely restricted to the sounds that they know from their own language, your fictional language potentially has this entire inventory of sounds at its disposal—if its speakers are human.
Humans can make these sounds because of our anatomy and physiology and the physics of airflow: air flows out of our lungs (which have their own human structure), through our trachea and voice box (which have their own human structures), and into our human-mouth (or -nose), where its passage may be blocked or altered by our human-tongue, human-teeth, and/or human-lips.
But other species have different physiologies, structures, and, thus, sounds. As a fun experiment, start to say the word “go” out loud, but stop before any sound comes out. You might have noticed your body took a breath in and the back of your tongue moved up to touch the soft part of the roof of your mouth...but what if that part of our mouths was hard instead of soft? What if your population doesn’t have teeth? Or even air? Are they fish people with gills? What if their vocal chords are more like a bird’s, capable of making multiple sounds at once? A world might even contain life that looks nothing like life we see on Earth, so what would their bodies be capable of?
Conlanging doesn’t end at picking sounds. You have to then decide how syllables work and how sounds can pattern together. Certain sounds act differently when they're close to other sounds (for example, compare the sound ‘s’ makes in “cats” versus “dogs”). Languages don’t allow every sound to exist in every position in the syllable (for example, English has the /ŋ/ sound, made by the ‘ng’ in the word “going,” but that sound can only appear at the end of syllables). Which syllable is stressed (louder or longer than the rest)? Does it have pitch distinctions, like Mandarin?
And all this is assuming the language is verbal. On Earth, we have several varieties of sign languages, depending on location, that communicate via the hands, arms, and face; what would the bodies of your otherworldy beings look like, and how would that affect what body parts they use to communicate and the signs they can make?
And then once you have all that, you have to figure out how words (or signs) can pattern together, or its grammar. How does your language account for the difference between “you” and “I”; are they different words, like in English, or are they sounds added to the verb, like in Italian or Serbian? How do they distinguish past tense from present tense? Do adjectives come before or after the noun? And to add more to the pile, languages that deal with one part of grammar in one specific way will likely deal with another part of grammar in another specific way.
Phew, conlanging is complicated! No wonder writers opted for gibberish!
Enter J. R. R. Tolkein, the first person to make not just one but many full-fledged conlangs for fiction, namely his (1954 – 1956) The Lord of the Rings series.
Tolkein was not the first writer to include their own fictional language in their works; he was preceded by writers such as Sir Thomas More (Utopia in 1551), Francis Godwin (The Man in the Moone in 1638), and George Orwell (1984 in 1949). However, while these writers made partial conlangs that were focused mainly on vocabulary, Tolkein’s many conlangs took into consideration all aspects of language—all that I mentioned and loads more. In fact, he was so dedicated to conlanging that he made the languages first—he wrote the books just so he could have somewhere to put the languages!
While no one expects writers to care that much about conlanging, his creating full conlangs set the standard for modern sci-fi and fantasy writers to also use legitimate, realistic conlangs that follow the linguistic patterns of natlangs. Gone are the days of Star Wars (Lucas, G., Kershner, I., Marquand, R., et al., 1977–2019) where Jabba the Hutt and Chewbacca can speak in absolute gibberish and that would suffice, and now are the days of Game of Thrones (Beinoff, D., Weiss, D. B., Strauss, C., et al., 2011–2019) where professional conlangers (in this case, David J. Peterson) are hired to create realistic languages. People have started to pay more attention to languages in fiction works, so if your world doesn’t have a realistic conlang, it could decrease the credibility of your world-building.
That may sound heavy and pressuring for writers, but conlanging brings something else to the sci-fi convention: a new language for fans to learn. If a conlang is legitimate—and, if its sounds are human—it can be learned by any person willing to put in the time. If an adult becomes fluent enough, their language can even be passed onto a child to learn the same way any child learns any language: by hearing its parents. Children can literally grow up speaking a fictional language as their first language, like you or I first learned English or Spanish or Urdu or Cantonese.
These ideas are not only plausible but they're actually happening. Klingon, created by Marc Okrand, James Doohan, and Jon Povill for Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek franchise (1979–present) had great success for learning among fans. The conlang Esperanto, created by Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof in the 19th century, though originally intended to be a universal language rather than one for fiction, actually has native speakers!
If you're a sci-fi or fantasy writer trying to make your world as realistic as possible and are considering adding a new language, don't let all these things you have to consider freak you out—yes, conlanging is stressful and difficult, and you will have to really dive into the world of linguistics to know how to make one successfully, but it is also fun and rewarding. And if you'd rather stick with the writing instead of the linguistic-ing, worry not—as we've learned, there are people who are literally paid to create languages for writers, and I'm sure you two would work well together.
References
Conlanging
Everything I know about conlanging I learned from a conlanging course taught by Nathan Sanders in 2019, and the readings he assigned for it:
Okrent, A. (2010). In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language. Penguin Random House.
Peterson, D. J. (2015). The Art of Language Invention: From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves to Sand Worms, the Words Behind World-Building. Penguin Books.
Sanders, N. (2020). A primer on constructed languages. Language Invention in Linguistics Pedagogy, 6-26.
Media
Beinoff, D., Weiss, D. B., Strauss, C., et al. (Executive Producers). (2011 – 2019). Game of Thrones [TV series]. HBO Entertainment; Television 360; Grok! Television; Generator Entertainment; Startling Television; Bighead Littlehead.
Godwin, F. (1638). The Man in the Moone: Or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales. London: John Norton.
Lucas, G., Kershner, I., Marquand, R., et al. [Directors]. (1977 – 2019). Star Wars [Film series]. Lucasfilm.
More, Thomas. (1551). Utopia. More.
Orwell, G. (1949). 1984. Secker & Warburg.
Roddenberry, G. (1979 – present). Star Trek [Multi-media franchise].
Tolkein, J. R. R. (1954 – 1956). The Lord of the Rings [Book series]. Allen & Unwin.
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