Language is one of the most defining factors of cultures around the world because language is what allows us to communicate, convey our thoughts and emotions, and connect with other people. For the most part, in the early days of civilizations like Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, language was a defining factor of the development of such civilizations. A writing system alongside the spoken language was also developed, and allowed for the transcription of events, laws, religious texts, and more. Today, language is one of the most important tools a human can have, and it’s this very significance that makes it important to design a language for a fantasy world.
Designing a language can take on different levels of complexity, depending on your individual goals for the language. Firstly, you can go all the way and design an entire writing system alongside grammar and everything, which would then be called something more like conlanging. Or, you can just take a few basic things like a couple of words that have similar grammatical style to them and call it a language for the sake of world building being a bit more “fancy.”
Whatever you decide to do, I’ll walk you through the whole thing in this post.
Before we start, if you want a bit of a brief overview on world building, you can check out my ultimate beginner’s guide right now!
WHY DO YOU NEED A LANGUAGE IN THE FIRST PLACE?
Oftentimes, when we write in the fantasy or even the sci-fi genre to be fair, we explore different worlds and cultures from our own. In addition to this, if you’ve already worked on cool things like designing your country, your religion, and your culture, what’s left to tie these things together is how the people of that country, culture, and religion express themselves. This is when language comes into play.
When you’re working on world building, a language is a more advanced component because it’s much more complicated if you’re deciding to embark on a more in-depth approach to this aspect. However, it can also be one of the most unique and interesting aspects, especially if you decide to go for conlanging.
WHAT IS CONLANGING?
Conlanging is the process of making a fake language. This is an in-depth and complex process if you’re willing to go all-in. Conlanging involves learning from real-world languages, including things like grammar, writing systems, alphabets, conventions, spoken rules, and more. These languages can be combined or altered individually to curate a brand new language that goes in-line with these rules.
Typically, conlanging is considerably difficult especially if you’re getting super deep into the linguistic rules of individual language systems. Additionally, languages that are not familiar to you or utilize symbol-based scripts can be more difficult to work with.
Conlanging is something I don’t recommend for most people because it is very time-consuming and may be just a tad too much for writing a book. Now, that doesn’t mean that you cannot do it. For example, Tolkien started The Lord of the Rings to use the languages he had curated himself. However, Tolkien was also a linguist by trade and was an expert in languages, so he had an advantage going into it.
Due to the nature of difficulty of conlanging, I won’t go into that in this post. However, I will point you to a great resource if you’re interested in getting started with this practice. A subreddit called r/conlang is a great resource full of passionate conlangers who can give you tips and inspiration to get started.
If you want to get started, I do recommend that you research language families (i.e., romance languages, semitic languages, etc…_) and pick the one that you think you’d like to work with the most. Then, you can find videos on YouTube or books that talk about these languages and then you can keep going from there with your conlanging journey.
I have a short version of conlanging that I do, which is what I’ll call lite conlanging. Lite conlanging to me is basically taking a few rules and basic conventions from a language family and then just curating a name system and a few words that matter in conversational text here and there.
Since I speak Arabic personally, I tend to skew towards using the semitic base for my languages but I also speak English and French, so using Germanic and Romance roots is also very viable for my fake languages.
HOW TO DESIGN A LANGUAGE THE EASY WAY
Alright, let’s put aside conlanging for a second. How can you exactly design a language for a fantasy world in an easy way? Here is my step-by-step process for that:
STEP 1: DECIDE YOUR LANGUAGE ROOT
You still need to decide what root your language will use, even if you’re not planning on going too crazy with any conlanging. So, here are some popular roots that you can use:
- Germanic – Used in English and German
- Romance – Used in French and Italian
- Turkic – Used in Turkish and Kazakh
- Semitic – Used in Arabic and Hebrew
There are a lot more language families that you can look into, because I just listed a very small number of all the available language families out there. I recommend researching a few that sound interesting to you and then picking the one that you find clicks with you the most. I also recommend at least starting with a language family that you are already fluent in a language from. That way, it’s at least a bit easier to begin the process itself.
If you want to figure out where to find a list of language families, literally type “language families” into Google and you’ll instantly get a bunch of results on a huge variety of language families and their respective geographic regions.
STEP 2: DESIGN THE ALPHABET
If you’re creating a language based on Romance languages, then you’re already good with this because you can just use standard Latin letters. If you’re going for something more like Semitic, then you’ll have more work cut out for you because the script and direction of writing in these languages are totally different.
The alphabet can be the exact same as an existent language, but perhaps the way it’s pronounced in your language is different. For example, A in English is not pronounced the same way in French.
You can also just be really creative and start drawing lines and shapes until you get an alphabet that works for you. Keep in mind that creating one that is too complex may not be that fun in the long run when you actually go to use it.
Additionally, make sure you translate the letters in your new alphabet to the language that you’re using to write your book in. You’ll need to know how to transliterate your alphabet into your writing language so you can transcribe the words you may use in your story.
Last note in this section: Decide which direction the language is written in. For example, English is left to right. Arabic is right to left. Chinese goes up and down, right to left. This is a pretty cool thing if you ever show some graphics of your language in your story.
STEP 3: COME UP WITH COMMON WORDS AND PHRASES
The next step is to come up with some common words and phrases. Why did I skip the grammar part, you may wonder? That’s because it’s going to be simply too complex. You don’t need to go that in-depth if you’re not pure conlanging, so I recommend just creating common words and phrases that will allow you to add that bit of extra depth to your world building process.
For example, I have a WIP that I won’t name right now (it’s a surprise!) and there is a language that is based on two language families: Semitic and Indo-European. I had to take conventions, pronunciations, and naming schemes from both families to understand how to write a few common words and phrases that will actually be relevant to what I’m writing.
For example, greeting someone in English is different from Arabic. For example, we say “hello” in English, but many Arabic speakers will say “salam alaykoum” which means “peace upon you.” In French, you’d say “bonjour” which translates to “good day.”
In my fake language in this WIP I have currently, the language is based very heavily on their religious beliefs so they say something like “the light of God upon you” in their language.
You can be really creative with this point and change up greetings depending on religion and culture. If you want to learn more about designing a fantasy religion or a fantasy culture, you can check those posts out on my blog.
STEP 4: INTEGRATE YOUR WORDS AND PHRASES NATURALLY
Sometimes, it can be a bit weird in fantasy and sci-fi when authors just dump bizarre sounding words and phrases on readers without really much help. A lot of the time, they come up with really cool names, but it can get confusing quickly.
I recommend that you don’t overwhelm your reader with an insane amount of words. Pick words that have the most impact and go with that in your story. Sometimes, a lot is really a lot and it can be too much for some readers.
For example, in my current series, The Fallen Age Saga, the way characters in the alien race are named depends specifically on what tribe they hail from. “Rai” comes from the Arabic word for “shepherd” and is used by the mountain tribes of Shaytanurashi in Varkava. “Kal” comes from the Titan King Kal and is used by people from the mainland tribes of Varkava.
This doesn’t overwhelm the reader and has a hint of consistency. That’s why when you see a character named Azurai and a character named Roninkal, it makes sense to the reader because there was consistency in the way the names were curated. They can automatically assume which tribe Azurai is from and which tribe Roninkal is from.
You can integrate common phrases, words and greetings throughout your story to give your readers a sense of the fact that they are in a different world when reading your story. Utilizing these shows that you put effort without forcing you to create a whole fake language.
Now, for my new WIP, I did go a bit crazy with my fake language and started creating writing conventions, grammar rules and more. That’s because I just wanted to do that as a side project, but I don’t recommend your first story to be that crazy because you’ll find yourself discouraged from the onset. Unless you like challenges, then by all means, do what you think works best for you!
I hope that helped you get started on how to design a language for your fantasy world. Before you go, don’t forget to check out my military sci-fi/fantasy series, The Fallen Age Saga. You can buy the books over on Amazon right now!