Do You Speak Artlangs?

To make the setting more realistic and give the weight of a fictional reality, the creators of games, films, and books resort to the help of fictional languages.

Some are full of familiar constructions; others are like full gibberish. Some are carefully worked out while in the arsenal of others there are no more than three phrases. Some are easily forgotten, others become part of the culture of the fandom and step on the path of linguistic evolution.

Let’s get acquainted…

Almost everyone knows about the Klingon language, developed by James Doohan and Marc Okrand for the Star Trek universe. It was based on the dialects of the Natives of North America and Sanskrit, which affected the complexities of pronunciation, the hallmarks of which are stiffness, jerkiness, and hoarseness. And there are a lot of guttural cords in it, which create an emphasized alienation of Klingon from any other languages.

In order to understand the grammar, syntax and intricate writing of humanoids from the distant planet of Khonosh, you should refer to the materials of the Klingon Institute, which has carried this geek-knowledge to the masses for a quarter of a century.

By the way, in addition to Klingon, several more fictional languages ​​of different detail level are used in the framework of Star Trek: Bajoran, Ferengi, Klingon, Orion, Rihannsu and Vulcan and others.

Let’s move to Bocce, interplanetary version of Esperanto, developed by George Lucas for the popular franchise Star Wars. It is commonly used by pilots, members of space crews and maintenance personnel. Bocce is the way to come to an agreement between different races and civilizations but is not intended for general use. Also, this language has no well-developed grammar system.

Examples of other artificial languages of this franchise: Durese, Yuuzhan Vong, Binary, Huttian. It is noteworthy that many extraterrestrial dialects that appear in Star Wars are in fact quite real, but little-known languages, such as Qhichwa or Haya.

Parseltongue is one of the fictional languages ​​of the Harry Potter series, similar to the hiss for the ignorant, but is a full-fledged way of communication for the ones who know how to use it. Within the book universe, one can’t be taught to understand this language, this knowledge is a rare innate gift — only Harry, Lord Voldemort and Salazar Slytherin, the founder of the Hogwarts faculty of the same name, could speak parseltongue among all the heroes of the series about the boy who survived. But in real life, everything is in your hands because the Internet is full of teaching materials.

Parseltongue, by the way, is pretty simple: almost all sentences are constructed according to the “subject + object + verb” scheme. Pronounce the serpentine phrases on the exhale only, and remember the hissing!

The Dothraki language, developed by David J. Peterson for TV adaptation of George Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) based on Russian, Estonian, Turkish, Swahili, and Inuktitut, as well as several nouns and names from the pages of the book series. There is only the spoken Dothraki language (it already includes over two and a half thousand words, and their number is constantly growing), since it belongs to nomadic tribes, who do not have written language at all.

Sindarin is the language of the elves of Western Middle-earth can be called a truly unique dialect because Tolkien himself spent on its development and improvement more than thirty years. The result absorbed the features of Welsh, Old Norse, Old English, and Icelandic. In addition to Sindarin, Tolkien made up several more elven languages, such as Nandorin, Proto-Elven, Avarin. Common Eldarin, Telerin, Ilkorin, Quenya. And there are other less detailed languages ​​within the series: Rohan, Haradrim, languages ​​of Easterling, Dwarfs (Khuzdul), Orcs and Black Speech created by Sauron.

According to the mythology of the Fifth Element, the Divine language was spoken by the Universe itself before the beginning of time and by the main heroine of the film, Leeloo. The development of words was done by Luc Besson and Milla Jovovich and in order to practice this language they corresponded about the work process using it. Fans of the film composed a dictionary, some even wrote poetry in the Divine which was formed, by the by, on the basis of European languages.

Aborigines of Pandora from Avatar speak Na’vi, which development was started by James Cameron who made up a couple of dozen words. Then a small vocabulary with Polynesian features was expanded by the linguist Paul Frommer.

Na’vi is a synthesis of the linguistic elements of terrestrial dialects, but their combination is unique. By sounding, the language of avatars is similar to the Australian speech; Frommer himself hears German echoes in it.

At the time of filming the first Avatar, Na’vi got detailed syntax, morphology and the first thousand words. But there were few who understood it, even the creators themselves.

A little more time has passed: several hundred words have appeared along with the elaborated grammar, and now Na’vi is available to any Avatar fan, since the Internet is full of teaching resources. By the way, it is easy to learn it, because the language is designed to be speakable without problems (for each actor could easily pronounce one or another phrase).

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess also has a unique jargon. The author wanted to give something special to the culture of his characters, that’s how Nadsat was born. Shortly before writing the book, Burgess went to the USSR, where he heard the slang of the stilyagi whose base was the native language of the British guest of the Soviets.

Nadsat (the name of which came from the Russian suffix which means “-teen”) became a mirror image of this slang, as Burgess took the words, distorted them in his own way, and put them into his book, mixing with the London substandard language “cockney”. Thus, we got bitva (a fight), clop (to clap), devotchka (a girl), koshka (a cat), millicent (a policeman), poogly (timid), shlapa (a hat), von (a stinch), zvook (a sound), skolliwoll (school), appy polly loggy (an apology), pretty polly (money), eggiweg (an egg) and other slova (words).

Have you heard about interactive toy-animals by Hasbro? These fuzzy bums on Furbish, based on German and Japanese. The first toy appeared on the shelves in 1998, its vocabulary has over forty words only, but with the advent of new models of Furby, the language, consisting of a mixture of simple syllables and all kinds of sounds, continued to develop. Someone may consider Furbish ridiculous and primitive, but it perfectly develops speech of kids to which the toy is aimed.

Characters of the once popular game The Sims communicated in their language under the name Simlish. The creators of Sims believed that a fictional speech, unlike a real one, would not distract users from the game processes. Initially Simlish absorbed the features of Navajo, Ukrainian, Latin and Tagalog languages, but the abracadabra that we hear in the game itself is the fruit of actors’ improvisation.

Are you impressed? Then note that this is only a small part of fictional dialects and languages! Now you can easily encode the message or organize secret negotiations in the presence of strangers. Just choose a language and the the chosen ones into the secrets of fiction linguistics. In addition, the day when the thefandome.com will have a keyboard with all the fiction-alphabets is not so far away! By the way, Klingon keyboard is already available.