A Shortcut to Crafting Fictional Languages

Whether it’s Elvish, Klingon, or Dothraki, one big thing that people love about fantasy and science fiction settings is the array of fictional languages that exist in these settings. Tolkien was a linguist, so he was able to use his vast education on the subject to craft the languages in Middle Earth. Professional linguists also crafted the Klingon language from the Star Trek series, but I would argue that you don’t need to be a professional linguist to craft a fictional language for your world.

Here are seven steps to building a fictional language with relative ease.

Start By Picking a Base Language from Real Life:

If you don’t know all the rules of how languages work, it can be difficult to come up with new words and craft things like grammar and sentence structure. So, start by picking a real life language that, in some way, reflects the culture you are trying to portray in your world. If your fantasy novel has an empire that rules most of the known world, then perhaps a good base language is Latin or Mandarin Chinese. Bear in mind, you won’t actually be using this language as the fictional one, but you will be using it as the basis of what you’re looking to build. It helps if this is a language that you already know something about, but it’s not entirely necessary.

Google Translate Is Your Friend:

When writing a scene where certain characters are speaking in a fictional language, write out the bit of dialogue in English first. Once you’ve gotten down what you want your characters to say, copy what you’ve written and paste it into Google Translate, and translate it into the base language you’ve chosen.

Translate the Individual Words:

Once you’ve translated the whole phrase into the base language, open Google Translate again in another window and translate each word back into English individually. In learning what the individual words mean, you’ll learn a little something about grammar and sentence structure in that other tongue. If you keep this in mind, you can prevent your fictional language from simply having the same grammatical structure as English.

Alter the Words One at a Time:

Once you know what each word means, open a Word document, and start putting them one by one into the document. This Word document will serve as your dictionary, which you will build as you write. Obviously, you don’t want to leave the words as they are, unless you’re fine with your fictional language being identical to a real-life one. So, once you’ve got the dictionary built, go through and change just a few letters in each word. Change the consonants to alternative consonants and the vowels to alternative vowels.

You usually only have to make a few small changes in order to craft new words. For example, when crafting a language using Latin as the base, I needed a word that meant “we” or “us.” The Latin word for that was “nos,” so I changed it to “noth.” In another case, when crafting a language that used Hebrew as the base, I needed a word for “human.” I found that one of the Hebrew words for man is “Ysh,” so I changed the word to “Yash,” and had my word for human. For shorter and less well-known foreign words, you need only change one or two letters, but for longer words or for more well-known foreign words, you’ll need to change more letters.

Consider How You Want the Language to Feel:

Fictional languages are meant to invoke certain emotions. The Klingon language, for example, is meant to sound threatening. To accomplish this, it uses a lot of hard consonants, a lot of “K” sounds, and even the vowels tend to be guttural, and the sorts of sounds that could be made in the back of the throat. On the other hand, Parseltongue is meant to be the language of snakes, so it focuses on “S” and “Th” sounds. Consider what letters you want to make more common in your fictional language to give it the intended feel.

Consider Cultural Implications:

A culture’s language can reveal things about that culture, and it’s important to keep that in mind. One example is the Hawaiian word "aloha." In Hawaiian culture, "aloha" is more than just a greeting or a farewell; it more literally means “love,” “compassion,” “affection,” “peace,” and “mercy.” Similarly, the Hebrew word “Shalom” is used as a greeting but means “Peace.” In German the word for friend is “Freund,” while the German word for joy is “Freude.” These come from the same root words, showing how friends and joy are closely linked in the German mindset. The Rastafarian dialect uses the phrase “I and I” rather than “You and I” or “He and I” because it emphasizes the oneness of all humanity.

So, as you build your language, consider what the meaning of certain words might imply about the culture. In my Third Genesis series, I needed a Fiendish word for the Archons, who are the fiends’ traditional enemies. I had the word for enemy, “Mal,” and the word for sky, “Shah,” so, because archons can usually fly, I created the word “Mal’shah,” literally meaning “Sky Enemy” as the Fiendish word for archons. Similarly, when inventing a language for a culture of robots, I had to consider whether they had a word for “love.” So, as you build your language, consider what words might well have double meanings, or what words you can make minor changes to in order to invent a word with a similar meaning. In a militaristic culture, perhaps the term “friend” and the term “ally” are similar. Little touches like this will make the language seem more “real” and the world feel more lived-in.

Build as You Go:

You might be tempted to build the entire fictional language from the ground up before writing your story. I actually advise against this when you’re using this method for your language building. For one thing, the English language has hundreds of thousands of words. A study conducted by researchers at Ghent University in Belgium estimated that the average English-speaking adult knows around 42,000 words. Honestly, that is simply too many to build ahead of time.

So, write your story, and when you come to a place where characters speak a fictional tongue, stop and translate the specific phrases they are speaking into your fictional language, and build your dictionary over time. Then, as you write more, consult that which you’ve already written to craft conversations in that tongue. If you do it this way, you can even include the dictionary of the fictional language at the back of your book, and dedicated readers can go back and translate the phrases if they want.

With these seven steps, you should be ready to craft a fictional language for your fantasy or science fiction story. Admittedly, linguists will likely be able to point out certain flaws in the language, but most of your readers will not be linguists. Now, go forth and write!