Short version: Keep grammar and vocabulary consistent, and don’t overload your reader.
Longer version: As you write, you might find a need for a dialect or even full language for your fictional world or culture. Yes, you can throw random letters or even symbols at the page (and at the reader). The reader will flee from the barrage of unpronounceable verbiage, possibly never to return. There are rules of language, all languages, and you need to find some and stick with them. There are also “rules” for writing a new language and Thou Shalt Not Overwhelm The Reader is first among them.
In the Familiar Tales series, a few words from the Hunter clan’s dialect appeared. Only one of the three main characters regularly uses words from that language, so it was easy to work in things like Sufliit Fica, Suflit Talshu, Domana, Apporatsu/Apporatsi Doamni , Bunicot, Nepatisha, Nume Fiu, and one or two others. Me being me, with a background in Romance and Germanic languages, I tried to be consistent about gender and case endings. The words are a blend of modern Romanian, Latin, and a smattering of Slavic influence, but the grammar as shown in the stories is mostly Latinate.
Pronunciation is more or less like Romanian, with slightly longer vowel sounds when spoken. Consonants tend to be clipped, and there are glottal pauses and stops that don’t appear in the written language, as well as gutturals. That’s why Lelia thinks it is “half Latin, half German,” based on the rhythm and guttural sounds. For example, Arthur’s use name, Pisicagheara, has a glottal pause between the g and h, making it sound almost like two words, but not quite.* The hard G and voiced H are also an odd combination for English speakers to say quickly.
In the Familiar Generations stories, the main point-of-view character thinks and operates in the clan’s speech first and foremost, German second, English a distant third, and Latin fourth. This means having more words and phrases in the language, and more need for being consistent between books. For example, where to modifiers fit – before or after the noun? I settled on after, with the exception of sufliit fica and suflit talshu. Those had been locked in the earlier stories, and all languages tend to have odd bits that linger after grammar shifts and language drifts. Knight, knee, know, hang/hung, thrive/throve, help/holpen … Liturgical or other ritual terms also tend to be more archaic than everyday words.
If you are riffing off a known language, you have it both easier and harder. Easier in that readers might be a little more aware of what you are doing, and won’t have to work as hard to catch dialect, especially if you go lightly with usage. A lot of people know a little Spanish, perhaps Latin, maybe a nod or two of German, or Japanese (anime fans). Russian, Finnish, Zulu, those might need more work if you have a language based on one of those, especially if you decide to make it an agglutinating language, one where words get tacked onto other words to modify and clarify them. German does that to an extent, but other languages go farther. Much father. That’s where you might keep you readers in mind – a two-line word will probably be too much**.
Harder is that you need to keep grammar in mind, and know more of that language’s grammar. As old as the clan’s speech is, and as complex as it is, riffing off of Latin is easy (all isolated languages grow more complicated over time. Commonly used tongues get simplified as the sticky bits are ground off.) A few quirks translated into English get the sense across, such as “needs must” implying an intensification of “I must [verb].” Other usages will be based on the culture, such as the paired phrases: Doamna beatsu and Apporatsu-szent condu lamatsi. “Lady [of Night] bless you” and “Defender-saint direct blade-your,” or in better English, “St. Michael guide your blade.” They are the words spoken by one Hunting partner or Hunter to another as they part ways.
I’ve found it causes readers less stress if I have a few words or phrases in the language, then use grammar cues or just say, “he said in his own speech …” I’ve also written in accents once or twice, then dropped them after a few lines. Usually the PoV character makes some silent observation about “can barely understand” or “settled into the rhythm” to hint to the reader that the other party is still using the dialect. You can do a long piece, or even an entire book, in dialect, but it has to be worth the reader’s while.
Make sure your readers can tell that you are not using the base language but messing it up. Otherwise you will get a lot of unhappy communications, possibly bad reviews, and perhaps even walled books.
“But Alma,” you say. “I have an alien species. I need something entirely new.” Stay tuned for next week, when we look at a language built from scratch.
Image Credit: Image by Peter H from Pixabay
*Tay’s not far off in suggesting that “a seven-syllable use name’s a little much.” It means “claws of the cat,” with the implication of a concealed danger, which gives you a sense of just how flaming complex the language is.
**Unless you are channeling a teenager speaking in Blurt. “Ohmygoshlookatthat!Ican’tbelievehedidit!”
Mad Genius Club 
18 responses to “Creating a Language I: Starting from A Real Tongue”
Keith Laumer did a lot with invented languages. They featured prominently in all of the Retief stories. (Surely folks remember those.)
I remember Retief, but aside from keeping the bad guys’ exclamations and insults consist from one book to the next the conlang element didn’t make much of an impression on me. Without borrowing my parents books to check, I would have said the alien-of-the-week languages were formed on the “barrage of random letters” principle.
Some might, some might not, and he didn’t lean on them as much as some writers did/do. Anthony Burgess (Clockwork Orange) may be the semi-ultimate, since he was using a dialect of English rather than a completely new language.
Burgess is also the creator of the language (according to Wiki, using words from Cree and Inuit) for the Quest for Fire movie.
One thing I wonder is how far you can push things with slang?
It seems like an interesting way to show a character isn’t from around here to have them use slightly different slang than the main characters or reader, but also seems like a bunch of new info too.
I think it comes down to comprehensibility. Will the reader eventually “get it,” or will he be thrown out of the story? Unless you do something immersive, like Burgess, I’d argue that a lighter hand is better, unless you can promise the reader that it is all for a good reason and he will understand it soon, and carry through on that promise.
Interesting but often highly technical resource on conlangs: https://lingweenie.org/conlang/
Language is one thing holding up my preparatory work for my stalled novel project.
OK so I have a 22nd century starship that gets sucked through a spacetime warp and crashes someplace. What is English going to be like 100 years from now? Is there going to a shipboard jargon of words and phrases as well?
Then… the crew is stuck. Several generations later their descendants have regressed technologically to basically a late stone-age level augmented by some surviving artifacts they don’t understand anymore.
Now what is their language going to be like? They probably lost a lot of technical terms, but may have retained the shipboard jargon (even if the usage or meanings may have drifted)? Plus they may have new words for alien plants and animals in their new environment?
(It’s not going to help me that the descendants have split into two settlements segregated by sex, that only interact for mating purposes. The original reason for this split is not really understood anymore, but the hidden alien overlords had a hand in it.)
NOW: my 2020’s era male main character gets sucked through a spacetime warp and ends up in the same place, and encounters one of the female descendants (who was exiled into the wilderness). After they end up saving each other from a couple of dangerous situations, how are they going to manage to communicate at first?
The longer the characters are together, the more they will figure it out, and eventually apart from some of the jargon and new words I the writer can probably just fudge it, but I need to get past the first couple chapters they are together.
(Some chapters may be from the female’s POV, as she is the most important character after the male main character, so I can convey some of her viewpoint and culture to the reader without having to try to filter it through the male’s POV).
My own suggestion would be to not worry that much about what English overall was like at the time the ship was lost. Figure out the ship jargon at time of crash, mangle it to taste, and then only have short jargon derived phrases in direct dialogue as heard by the male lead, until one of them learns the other’s language.
So basically, the male lead would sort of understand some of the words, they sound like English, but the meanings have drifted or altered so he isn’t really comprehending much without gestures and cues from body language? Something like that?
Yes, I think so. You could maybe listen to readings of Chaucer or Beowulf to get an idea of what that might feel like.
You may take a look at how Lest Darkness Fall handled it.
As I recall he discussed the difficulty of it and how characters reacted to it, but largely didn’t worry about dialect.
I think the Dragon and the George books did something similar.
I personally have never managed to build a conlang that I actually used at any length: I had a short list of Jaiyan words and their meanings, mostly derived from real-world-adjacent names I gave the characters. The space opera had mangled Egyptian words for the planets and most of the character names, with a couple of “Northern” characters (read: lighter-skinned European looking) have Greek-ish names and one of similar ethnicity having a name (Roukazor) that was Magyar derived but not spelled Magyar style.
The steampunk novel has vaguely Central Europe people names and Germanic place names, but for prequel and world-building purposes, I’m working on a vaguely Scandinavian conlang for Thule, the long-lost, sort-of Icelandic Ys/Atlantis/Numenor counterpart of the setting. So far, I’ve accounted for the steampunk hero’s name (Maxim, but derived from “magsunt” meaning “great”) his two most famous ancestors, Arent and Elegast, and the word Thule itself, and separate male and female terms for the most important species of animals. Mostly I just sat there on google translate and cycled through the major Scandinavian languages until I found a word I liked and tweaked it. If I got desperate, I tried Latvian (not sure why), or the linguistic outliers of Europe: Finnish, Hungarian and Basque, in ascending order of desperateness. I think I used Irish for “King” because I just wasn’t liking the options I was getting on that one.
I don’t know if this counts more as culture than as language, but doesn’t it also help to remember how differently words can be defined, even between societies that speak the same language? For an example, when a modern American says ‘murder’ they usually mean something very different than what a medieval Icelander would.
Or closer to my point, what a modern member of an upper middle class suburb means by ‘murder’ differs widely from what it meant to the people of Skidmore Missouri when some of them shot local bully and hoodlum Ken Rex McElroy to death back in 1981. They regarded it as ‘illegal but necessary’ and after reading about the whole thing I have to agree with them.
Sounds like the individual in Georgia who was found with multiple rifle shots to the back, early 1990s. No one in the county knew a thing, and he was not missed by the rest of local society.
Going by comments I’ve read online in various places that covered the McElroy killing — YouTube has quite a few videos covering it of various degrees of accuracy and usefulness — it’s not nearly as rare as I thought for local communities, even in major cities, to permanently remove people like McElroy. And that’s just in the USA. I’ve heard stories from people in places like South Africa that got even nastier.
PS: If you can find the book or film ‘In Broad Daylight’, it does a decent job of covering the McElroy killing as well as his years-long reign of terror. The Time-Life book for ‘Unsolved Murders’ is pretty good too.
TX up until a decade or so had “he needed killin’” as a justification for homicide. It was a way to deal with that sort of situation where there was no actual law enforcement in isolated communities.
And, of course, it’s been a standard movie trope for decades, in any number of Westerns and Western-adjacents like “Roadhouse”. John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies wouldn’t exist without it.
Skidmore certainly didn’t have any law enforcement that mattered. All they had was a part-time marshal. And he quit his job after McElroy and his wife pointed a pair of shotguns at his face and told him to mind his own business or else.
Add in McElroy having a lawyer who was amazing at finding excuses for postponements of trials and hearings and it’s no wonder he beat 21 separate indictments before people finally had enough.