Conlangery Shorts 35: You Need a Conlang

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George wants to talk to writers, filmmakers, and creatives about how conlangs can benefit worldbuilding, and how you can go about getting one made.

Links:

• Language Creation Society Resources Page
• LCS Jobs Board

Original Script

In this episode, I want to talk to authors, directors, and other creatives who are creating fictional worlds and cultures where a conlang might be really helpful for their work. I am going to talk to you about how creating a conlang or hiring a conlanger to create a conlang can help you add depth to your world and characters. I’ll also talk a little bit about the other things that have been done to represent languages and where they do and do not work.

Before we get there, Conlangery is entirely supported by our patrons on Patreon. If you go to patreon.com/conlangery, you can get early episodes and even get access to my scripts for these shorts as I am writing them. I know that not everyone can pitch in, but I really appreciate anyone who does.

Alright, so let me start by stating the case for what purpose a conlang serves in a story. Many stories in speculative fiction involve fictional people, aliens, spirits, or other beings that are capable of language. Often these people or creatures have rich worldbuilding in their fictional culture and histories. Having them speak a real language that connects to the culture is very valuable to the work because it adds another layer to that worldbuilding. A well constructed conlang will enhance the culture and give you ways to introduce information about how these people think and what their history is, and the names and dialogue generated adds something that will make your people feel real.

Conlanging is in part a research and worldbuilding exercise, and in part its own separate artform. In film, you likely have a team working on costumes who spend hours researching period appropriate attire or cultures similar to the ones on screen, though they also are ultimately creating something of their own design. The same would be true of conlangers. We will research languages to learn what fits into your story, and use what we know to develop a unique work of art that ties into the rest of the worldbuilding.

Before I discuss more about the business of adding a conlang to your work, let’s talk briefly about what the alternatives to using a conlang are, because there are a few. First of all, there’s straight gibberish. Artistically, this is the worst option outside of a parody. Weiss and Benioff considered using just gibberish for Dothraki, but decided to hire a conlanger instead, because gibberish simply wasn’t cutting it. Doing this would be disrespectful to your readers or viewers, because if you do not have a system to your language and meaning assigned to the words, people will figure it out. If done poorly enough, even casual listening will tell you that these are English speaking actors making it up on the spot.

Something similar could be said of sound effect languages, like Shriiwook in Star Wars. That’s essentially gibberish dressed up with sound design. Some voice modulation can be a fun gimmick, but without meaningful words behind it, it remains just a gimmick. Similarly, altered speech in your target audience’s language, like the manipulated English or Japanese in Animal Crossing, is just a gimmick. It may be useful for comedy or where you don’t really want a fully realized culture and language, but it’s definitely not a replacement for a conlang.

An alternative that a lot of people bring up is simply using real world languages to represent languages in your world. Some people even suggest that this might “help” minority languages by “raising awareness”. Here is why I think that idea generally does not work out.

When the Star Wars sequels were starting, there was a Tumblr post going around saying something along the lines of “Let Poe speak Spanish.” The idea in the post was that since Oscar Isaac is Hispanic (born in Guatemala), it would be somehow cool for him to use Spanish to represent an in-universe native language. I never responded to that post, but every time I saw it, it went through my head that the reason that it would never happen shows the reason that what Star Wars does do with real-world languages is problematic.

You see, the audience will recognize Spanish. Particularly the core American audience will be very familiar with it. Many will be able to speak it and understand it. And so, the audience will be smacked right out of the movie wondering why this dude in a galaxy far, far away is speaking Spanish. Spanish is one of the first languages that will get subtitles and dubs, and what the heck are you going to do when the Spanish-speaking audience is not hearing a different language when English speakers are?

When Star Wars does use a real-world language, they find one that is obscure to the audience specifically because they don’t want you to recognize it. They have a human-sized bug man speaking bastardized Quechua because the core audience probably never heard of it, or if they did in passing wouldn’t recognize it. They had a weird big-eared, fish-faced guy speak a mix of Haya and Kikuyu because the audience wouldn’t recognize it. This isn’t really helping “awareness” of the language, or giving the speakers of these languages anything but maybe a chance to laugh at mangled dialogue. Instead, it’s taking their language and passing it off as the language of weird aliens, which is not a great way to treat the humans who speak these languages.

There are some people who will counter that we use English to represent one language all the time with no one complaining, and we do. But the function of English, or more broadly, of characters speaking the same language as the audience, is to help the audience understand the story and to indicate which characters we are meant to identify with more. The culture that speaks English is usually the culture that the protagonist comes from. Now, not every movie even does that. The Passion of the Christ is entirely in ancient languages that no one speaks natively, and it worked. People went out and paid money to see a movie that everyone would need subtitles to understand. I have not seen anyone try to make an all-conlang movie, aside from some Esperanto films, but that could be an interesting experiment for you.

I’d say there is one exception where using a real world language works, and it is when the actual real world culture has a connection to your fictional creatures. The Australian series Cleverman features creatures called Hairies, which come from the mythology of several Aboriginal groups, that resemble humans except for their thicker body hair, harder fingernails, and greater strength. The Hairies in the series speak the Australian language Kumbainggar, which is also the language of the Aboriginal group featured in the series — the Gumbayngirr. It helps that Aboriginal people are making that series.

Note that I’m talking about an actual connection to a real world ethnic group, not something “inspired” by a real culture but in a secondary world. I think there is an argument to be had as to whether “coded” cultures can be given the language of the culture they are coded as. I’m not going to wade too far into that, I will say that, to me, using real-world languages in a fantasy world gets odd as the cultures involved diverge from their inspirations. At some point the coincidence gets to be very noticeable.

So what do you get from a conlang? If you construct a language or hire someone to construct it for you, the first and most important thing you are going to get is a language that fits into your world. The language will say something about the people who speak it, their culture and history and life. When my erstwhile and maybe occasionally future co-host William Annis created Usandu for the game Grey Goo, he created a numeral system that suited creatures with four hands with three fingers each. He also created a second source language for vocabulary in order to reflect a history of cultural mixing. The Elvish language family of J.R.R Tolkien are perhaps among the best known conlangs out there, and in the branches of that family you can trace the genealogies of the Elves themselves. A conlang that is built for your world will be informed by your world and serve as a reflection of it.

A conlang will also enhance your storytelling by giving you tools to signal to the reader. Building consistent languages for fictional cultures can be another way of informing readers or viewers about your characters. For instance, your conlangs can be used to generate names for characters that will be consistent across a culture. Once readers become familiar with the patterns of that language, the name will be a signal you can use to indicate where a character comes from. If you make several closely related languages, that can be used to signal that certain characters come from related, but still different cultures. Generating names like this is valuable enough that we often talk about creating “naming languages” that won’t generate full sentences, but can be used for names or isolated words.

Beyond just names, though, a conlang will be a source for those “untranslated” words for cultural concepts that matter to the story. A full conlang can be used to present some dialog to make readers feel like they are in another place. In a movie or TV show, where subtitles are an option, you might get away with a whole lot of conlang dialog, giving an indication that these people speak something different to each other, or that some characters shouldn’t be able to understand what’s being said.

Finally, it’s really good for audience engagement. Any property that has a conlang and gains any level of popularity will gain a small but highly engaged fanbase that’s interested in the language itself. By themselves, they probably won’t generate a whole lot of sales, but their energy can feed other fans as they become experts in the language and start offering to translate things. There is an entire fan-run Klingon school and organization, called the Klingon Language Institute, which certifies Klingon speakers and has produced Klingon translations of the Bible and Hamlet, and they aren’t just making things up for themselves — they frequently talk to creator Marc Okrand for advice. Frankly, it can just be fun to see fans of a work engage with a language like this, even if it’s just a small slice of the audience.

If you’re very brave, you might build some of the engagement into the work. Some of the dialogue in Land of the Lost was geared toward teaching kids watching the show a little bit of Victoria Fromkin’s Pakuni language. It can also end up as part of side products, such as Living Language Dothraki, written by David Peterson, who created Dothraki for the HBO series Game of Thrones.

The real benefits really are artistic though. A real meaningful language gives depth to your cultures and your characters in a way that other worldbuilding decisions can’t. A language can signal history, values, and relationships with other cultures in any number of ways. It will also push you to deepen your worldbuilding. In order to make a good conlang, you really need to ask yourself a lot of questions about the world? Who is in charge? Who was in charge 500 years ago? How do your speakers view other cultures? What other cultures have your speakers come into contact with? You may find that the language feeds into the worldbuilding, demanding backstories for things you might not have thought needed that context. My last episode gives an example of that, as I invented a whole history for a type of dance in order to develop an etymology for it.

Having the language also will allow you to develop cultural objects that simply wouldn’t have the same impact if they were created in English.  A full conlang can create music and poetry, or sections of in-world text. Margaret Randsdell-Green and Eric Barker are inventing entire musical traditions for Maragaret’s world, which would not be possible without her work creating languages for the cultures there.

So here comes the big question: Once you’ve decided you need a conlang, how are you going to get one? There are two simple options here, you can create a language yourself, or you can hire someone.

Creating a language for yourself can be very rewarding, just like any creative project, but do be warned that there’s a significant learning curve, and it takes a lot of time to get a decent language finished, especially as you’re learning how. There are a lot of resources out there that can help, including introductory books like The Art of Language Invention and The Language Construction Kit and communities of friendly conlangers on reddit, Facebook, Discord, etc. I’ll link to some of those in the show notes.

If however, you would like to focus on other aspects of your writing and worldbuilding and outsource the conlanging portion to someone else, I would suggest going through the Language Creation Society’s Jobs Board. They will help you to write a job posting and set a fair price for the work that you want done. The way the market is now, I can promise you, you’ll get some applications very quickly.

If you’re hiring a conlanger, I want to talk a little bit about fair pricing. Conlanging is an artform that takes a lot of time, and just as you would want to pay a cover artist or an illustrator or a map-maker for their time and skill, a conlanger you hire really should be fairly compensated.

This is going to be beneficial on both ends. For the conlanger, it’s of course a better deal, but for you, you are more likely to get a satisfactory product. Just as in any other field, if you are paying a low salary, the people you attract are likely to have less experience and be less motivated.

The LCS Jobs board lists some minimum prices, but I would caution you to treat those as rock bottom, and start significantly higher when offering a job. Rolling up a conlang can take months, and rolling up a good conlang requires time, skill, and motivation. If you have good resources, such as from a movie or TV budget, I might suggest double or triple those amounts to ensure a good product. That way, you will be sure to attract more experienced and skilled candidates and ensure higher quality.

Authors I can understand having a bit less cash, but given the time it takes to develop a novel, you can probably allow a lot more time to get things done. Most conlangers do it as a hobby, and doing it professionally is usually just an occasional side gig, so having flexibility to finish at their own pace will be valuable. You can also carefully consider how much dialogue you’re going to want in your work — since you can get away with a translation convention a lot more easily in a book than in a film or TV format.

Ultimatley, the thing I will leave you with is, if you are creating a new culture, whether that culture is for fictional humans or aliens or monsters or what have you — for any beings that can use language — whether it be oral or signed, too — I want you to consider using a conlang, especially for soemthing that’s in a secondary world or something that is foreign to our world. It will help your story, it will help your worldbuilding, and it will be a valuable tool in your storytelling.

Thank you and happy conlanging!