It All Starts With Language: Building New Worlds

It all starts with language. Language is how we communicate. It’s what makes us human. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to do anything more than simple, rudimentary cues to each other. No stories. Songs. Art. You wouldn’t have a name, and neither would the place you live. Beyond that, different languages shape our cultures and way of interpreting the world around us. So what better place to start building your new fantasy world than with its languages?

If The World Starts With Language, Where Do I Start?

Not everyone can be Tolkien and build their entire world as an excuse to create new languages and their evolutions over time. There are very few con-langs (constructed languages, as in languages that were created for something, such as Klingon or High Valyrian, rather than that naturally evolved on their own, such as Norwegian or Afrikaans) that will ever be as in-depth and well thought-out as Quenya.

But if you’re not creating an entire language and its relatives and a dozen other languages for different species and civilizations, what is it that you are doing?

You want to know how your characters think. What’s important to them? How do they identify the world around them? Let’s look at color.

English has 11 words for colors that are generally accepted as “any fluent speaker should know these.” Yeah, an artist can probably tell you a hundred more colors, but the average everyman should be able to list 11 “base” colors. Some languages have more, some have less. One indigenous Amazonian language, Tsimane’, only has 3 color words that are considered to be common knowledge.

People from an industrialized culture are more likely to have more color words than those from a non-industrialized culture. Why? Is it that the colors don’t naturally occur? No, it’s that color probably isn’t the most important identifier of something to their culture. So they don’t have a word for it.

But I Don’t Need To Think About Color All The Time. Why Else Is This Important?

Let’s look at the indigenous Australian language Kuuk Thaayorre for another reason why language matters so much and shapes the way we think. In Kuuk Thaayorre, there is no “right” or “left.” There is, however, a “north,” a “south,” an “east,” and a “west.” A native speaker might slip up when speaking English and talk about their north foot, or the cup to their east.

The Sami people in northern Scandinavia have almost 200 words for “snow.” Gee, I wonder why that must be so important to a culture that lives someplace where it’s snowing 11.5 months of the year.

Is your character from a culture that places great importance on farming? Maybe they’ll have dozens of words for different types of crops, where another culture that focuses more on hunting or gathering may not have most of those words. Perhaps your main character is from a small island nation that fishes extensively, where another character is from a landlocked nation where again farming is the main thing. Your main character might have names for dozens of types of fish that the other character can only identify as a “fish,” where the second character might be able to differentiate between wheat and sorghum and barley and ochre whereas the first character sees them all as grain.

Even if you’re not building an entire language from scratch—even if you’re not creating even just a few words—how your characters’ languages function will impact how they view and interact with the world around them.

It Starts With Language, But Where Does It Go From There?

Once you know what type of vocabulary will and won’t show up in your characters’ lives, your entire world will unfold itself. Every place around us is either named after a person or a thing.

Let’s make stuff up for a minute. Let’s say I’m naming a lake in the far north of my continent I’m building. I could go one way and call the lake something along the lines of Miller’s Lake. Seems like a guy named Miller discovered the lake. But what if I wanted to make it seem a little more natural? Let me call it… Lake Calm’ahei. Totally made up word. Just came up with it right now on the spot. So let’s pretend that in the indigenous language, “ahei” means “lake,” and “calm” means “cold.” It’s a cold lake to the north, so the indigenous people called it “cold lake.” But then settlers came upon it, asked what it was called, and decided to throw their own “lake” on their, confusing “Calm’ahei” as a name, rather than an identifier.

Think back to England, with the River Avon. Same exact shtick happened there in England. The Romans came there and asked the native Britons what the river over there was called, and the reply they got back was “river.” But seeing as they asked for a name and got an identifier instead, they interpreted that to mean that the river’s name was the indigenous language’s word for river. After all, “abona” in Common Brittonic means “river.”

Languages are funny things like that. We also have plenty of examples of things being doubly named. Chai tea. Naan bread. ATM machine. Okay, maybe not that last one, but it was just too tempting to include it.

Absolutely. Maybe we don’t want to create new made-up words for something. Maybe we just want to call our lake “Cold Lake.” But are we a culture that’s used to the cold or not? If we’re not, maybe “cold” is the best word we’ve got for it. But what if we’re from northern Canada, and we haven’t seen the snow melt in 37 years? Maybe we have twenty different words for “cold,” then, and we can be choosier about which one we use to name our lake.

I’ve Already Come Up With All My Names, Though.

Cool! So what other fun quirks can we come up with for your cultures based off their language? I can think of a fun one. In English, spelling bees are all the rage. When we have 44 distinct sounds, 20 of which belong to vowels alone, there’s a lot of different ways that things can be spelled- particularly when we have multiple consonants that can be pronounced the same way (think of how laugh and gaff rhyme). We also have silent letters galore.

In Spanish, though, their language is much more vocalic—its sounds revolving around vowels—than ours is. With their 5 vowels, each only has 1 sound. There also aren’t any silent vowels, and it’s very uncommon for consonants to be silent or to bunch themselves up in ways that changes their pronunciation (again- who the hell thought that “gh” should be everything from a hard “g” sound to an “f” sound to even silent?). As a result of the way the language is constructed, Spanish-speaking countries typically don’t have spelling bees. Why would you have a spelling bee when you can tell exactly how something is spelled from how it sounds?

Even if you don’t want to put a spelling bee in your fantasy story, there’s still plenty of other quirks you can add into a culture or how a character pronounces things based off of their language. Maybe a character from a Nordic stand-in culture has very rounded vowels. A character from a Middle Eastern stand-in has difficulty with her letter “p.” A French stand-in who always insists on adding a dozen extra letters to a word, only for all of them to be silent.

What If I Do Want To Build My Own Language, Though?

Well hey, props to you. That shit ain’t easy. Languages have a ton of rules and even more vocabulary. Most writers who do anything with con-langs in their work, outside of the whole “how language influences your entire world” bit I’ve been talking about for the last two hours, rarely do any more than just come up with a few words here and there as they need, to add a degree of authenticity to their story.

Think of how in A Song of Ice and Fire, Danaerys’s handmaidens will throw around a word or two in Dothraki now and then. In Star Trek, a character might say a phrase in Klingon. In the Wheel of Time show, we even got a whole scene in the Old Tongue- granted, this was extrapolated by a professional linguist based on the very short list of vocabularly that Robert Jordan came up with while writing his books, to add that extra layer of authenticity. After all, what better way to show an incredibly distant relation between two cultures than to have their names have a similarity, what with the Atha’an Miere and the Tu’atha’an.

If you do want to build an entire language yourself, that is totally awesome, you should go for it, just know that you probably will take an extra 10+ years to actually write your story because unless you’re already a professional linguist, learning all the specifics needed to fully realize an entire language is hard work.

What If I Don’t Want To Create A Language At All?

Hey, most people don’t, and that’s also just as valid. Just have an idea of how a character or culture’s native language will impact everything about their culture and communication and naming and even as we’ve seen things as simple as what direction they’re facing.

The vast, vast majority of writers don’t come up with any language at all, besides maybe one or two words here and there, max. You’re not cheating or taking a shortcut if that’s the route you take.

It all starts with language, but it doesn’t end there. Keep writing, and maybe another time we’ll talk some more about languages. Or maps. I’m a sucker for a good map.

Until next time,

-Nick




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Why Writer’s Block Isn’t Real: Breaking the Myth