Constructed Languages Within SF & Fantasy Worlds?

[Palanan]

Probably most of us are familiar with Dothraki, Sindarin, and Klingon, but those are languages designed in the real world to be native in their respective fictional settings, and in those settings they presumably developed naturally in one way or another.

What I’m interested in are examples of conlangs which were constructed by fictional characters within their own worlds, for any of the reasons that people have designed conlangs in the real world. I’m interested in these in-world conlangs as they appear in novels, movies, comics—wherever the world-building includes one or more languages which were intentionally designed by the inhabitants of the setting. Is there anything out there that fits these criteria?

[Tyndmyr]

Marain from Banks' Culture novels is definitely this.

It's a quasi binary language, with 3x3 grids forming 9-bit "letters", and is an attempt to determine culture via language. For instance, it almost wholly avoids words for ownership, property, it doesn't default to gendered terms, etc.

While the language isn't directly used to the extent of some of your examples, the inherently quasi-digital nature of it lends itself well to digitization and encryption, which is quite a major part of these works.

[DavidSh]

There is the Speedtalk in Heinlein's novella "Gulf", created for a secret society of superhumans to communicate more efficiently and to (somehow) think better.

On the other side of things, I think the Black Speech in Lord of the Rings was created by Sauron to be used by his servants, who mostly weren't up to the task.

[Berserk Mecha]

I think New Speak from 1984 might count. The whole point is that it's a gross simplification of the English language created by a fascist state for the use of the masses. It's meant to be incredibly simple with a very limited vocabulary to the point where speakers cannot get complex concepts across to each other.

[Seppl]

There are quite a few in Dune (the novels). Hunting and battle languages, designed for soldiers to convey precise military instructions, while being incomprehensible to the enemy. A language designed to add complex emotional modifiers to terms, used by diplomats. Secret languages designed to hide a whole conversation in innocent gestures, whistling, or mumbling. Probably more, that I forgot about, the author seems to have had an interest in societies and their languages.

We never get to read any conversations in those languages, though (except one passage in an obscure, dead language, called "French"), as the author only modeled the history and cultural background of these languages, not the languages themselves.

[Clertar]

Not a complete language, but the Adem hand-talk in A Wise Man's Fear is a very intresting example of that.

[Timeras]

Babylon 5 has Interlac, created for communication between members of different species.

[pendell]

Ar Tonelicos' Hymnos (https://artonelico.fandom.com/wiki/Hymmnos_Language) is a work of art, a blend of several different modern languages to produce the language which -- in their world -- is used to write and activate computer programs. It is well-suited to describing emotion.

There are a number of hymnos songs on the soundtrack , such as EXEC CHRONICLE_KEY (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1GtMiKXE_E). Video has both hymnos and English subtitles. There are many others available.

In-game, this song puts the BBEG into suspended animation for as long as it is sung. Misha, the singer, is one of a line of clones whose job is to ensure this song is forever sung, so that the world of Ar Ciel may know peace.

Wouldn't it be terrible if she, or her descendent-clones, stop singing for some reason? :wink:


Joe Devers' Lone Wolf single-player game books from the 80s and 90s had Giak (https://www.lw-oasis.org/oasis-archive/study/lexicon/english-giak.html), both an alphabet and a language.

Before he died, Mr. Devers made his works publicly available (https://www.projectaon.org/).

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Gnoman]

Clanspeak in the Battletech universe isn't a full language, but still kind of fits, quiaff?

[Timeras]

Clanspeak in the Battletech universe isn't a full language, but still kind of fits, quiaff?

Neg. The clans speak more or less normal english, just with a number of additional words they developed over the centuries.

Also, watch your language. If you keep using contractions, people might think you are a freebirth.

[Palanan]

Thanks for the responses so far, these are very helpful.

Interesting that no one has mentioned Láadan. Without googling, has anyone heard of this before?

[DavidSh]

Interesting that no one has mentioned Láadan. Without googling, has anyone heard of this before?

That's a language specifically for women, isn't it? So, I don't know anything about it.

[Waddacku]

Baronh from the Crest/Banner of the Stars series is in-setting a reconstructed ancient Japanese "without foreign influence" created by a colony of revolutionaries, which later developed further under actual use.

[Trafalgar]

Mi'm surprised na wang mentioned belta lang fong da expanse.

[Vogie]

If you're into this, the most recent episode of the Imaginary Worlds podcast, "When all is Said in Dune", is all about this, and includes interviews with the girl who does pop concerts in Klingon and the married duo who turned the couple of words of Fremen from the Dune books into an entire language for the most recent movies.

There are also Beltalowda, the creole language of the Belter in the Expanse, and Trigedasleng, which is what the earth-born people speak in The 100.

My favorite conlang that isn't a conlang is Tamarian from Star Trek. If you aren't familiar, it's first introduced in a TNG episode where the crew runs into people whose language they don't understand, even with the universal translators. Or, more importantly, they can understand what the aliens are saying, but it sounds like utter nonsense. It isn't technically a conlang, because it's more of a way of communicating that is separate from language, if that makes sense. The Enterprise crew eventually discovers that the Tamarian language is 100% completely references to stories, scenes and people from their cultural experience. Tamarian phrases always give a focus followed by a context as a way to craft that reference - so "I miss my significant other" could be said as "Juliet, on her balcony". It's certainly an understandable phrase, but unless you know about that scene from Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, it's utter nonsense. "Kronk, arriving first" as a way of using that scene in the last third of The Emperor's New Groove to say "That doesn't make any sense".

What is fascinating to me is that it's incredibly similar to how we communicate today. Those of us who are internet natives have an auxiliary language of memes, gifs, quotes, and references with which we can communicate emotion or emphasis. The phrase "distracted boyfriend" prior to 2017 meant strictly what it said on the tin, but once that meme went viral, the phrase changed in meaning. If I'm describing a scene and state that one person had a "surprised Pikachu face", that gives a similar but much more specific feeling than saying "they were taken aback" or even something like "they were like 'Whaat?'".

[runeghost]

There is the Speedtalk in Heinlein's novella "Gulf", created for a secret society of superhumans to communicate more efficiently and to (somehow) think better.

On the other side of things, I think the Black Speech in Lord of the Rings was created by Sauron to be used by his servants, who mostly weren't up to the task.

Possibly it was his servants, or possibly it was just that Sauron wasn't any good at language creation. He came up with Black Speech long after falling to evil, and one of Tolkien's core ideas is that evil cannot truly create, only mock and imitate.

[Vogie]

Possibly it was his servants, or possibly it was just that Sauron wasn't any good at language creation. He came up with Black Speech long after falling to evil, and one of Tolkien's core ideas is that evil cannot truly create, only mock and imitate.

Since it's called Black Speech, it may have been created by Melkor/Morgoth (meaning "Black Foe of the World"), the being that preceded Sauron as the first Dark Lord.

[pendell]

Well, Sauron created the Black Speech. Sauron, remember, was a student of Aule, the forger, before he fell to evil, and he's always been better at arts and crafts than Morgoth was. Morgoth was more pure chaos, whose chiefest joy was to corrupt, destroy, pollute rather than build anything of his own. Sauron, to his minor credit, actually DID try to make things.

As explained in the appendices, the original Black Speech can be thought of as "high" black speech and was spoken only by himself and his immediate servants in the tower of Barad-dur. The language was also used by orcs and others, but their dialect mutated into various vulgar forms of the language, related to the original Black Speech the way modern French is related to Cicero's Latin. One of Merry and Pippin's guards in The Two Towers lapses into this vulgar form of the Speech to cuss out Saruman.

Even so, the conlang seems to have failed of its purpose; the original language was still not widely practiced, while the various low dialects mutated so much as to be unintelligible to each other; which is why the orcs in "The Uruk-Hai" all speak Westron, or Common, amongst each other, as it is more suitable to their purposes and they all speak it well enough to coordinate their efforts.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Rodin]

Not a complete language, but the Adem hand-talk in A Wise Man's Fear is a very intresting example of that.

The Maidens of the Spear in the Wheel of Time series also have a sign-language they developed specifically so they can talk amongst themselves in public without the men around them understanding.

The Honorverse has a couple of examples where sign language is used to communicate with alien species. The Medusans have three arms and scent emitters and use both heavily in their speech because they cannot make facial expressions, so the humans talking to them have to come up with a holographic "third arm" they can use to form a pidgin language which lets them communicate. The translator who came up with the idea later comes up with another pidgin sign language that the tele-empathic treecats can use to communicate with their mindblind human partners. The latter is adapted from ASL, but has to be changed significantly to account for treecats not having the same number of fingers (and four arms, although I think only two are used to sign with for the sake of the humans trying to keep up).