From Klingon to Elvish: the art of constructed languages

I’ve had some great TV binging recently – my boyfriend and I had a couple of nights intense viewing of The ABC Murders and the new Watership Down. Of course the trick here, as any modern couple knows, is to wait until all the episodes have aired and then watch them all at once while lying to each other that you’ll stop after this one and save the rest for tomorrow. I dreamed about rabbits with Poirot moustaches for days.

But what really stuck in my mind from my belated festive viewing sessions, was the rabbit language in Watership Down. Known by the rabbits as Lapine, although the show featured only the odd word here and there, there was something about this language that felt real and usable. But why was that?

For an answer I started looking into ‘conlangs’ – that’s short for ‘constructed languages’ – and found a vibrant and passionate community of creators and even speakers. Fighting for position as the world’s most famous literary conlangs, of course, are Star Trek’s Klingon and Tolkien’s Elvish. Both share some qualities: they are somewhat rare in that they are extensive enough and well-constructed enough that they’re actually usable – and they also sound real. You hear them spoken on-screen and you believe that this race of people could really be out there, talking to each other just like you and me.

Bringing constructed languages to life

So how do you give life to a fabricated language? I’ve come up with four top requirements for any budding conlanger:

• Make it sound natural for its speakers: something I love about Lapine is the onomatopoeic qualities it has. The rabbits have named many things according to the sounds they make or the experiences they have with them. You can just imagine a rabbit hearing the rumble of car’s engine for the first time and immediately christening it a ‘hrududu’!
• Give your words an internal consistency. With natural languages it is easy enough to tell apart French and German, for example. Constructed languages should be no different. Your conlang should have its own recognisable traits: what letters are used most commonly? What are some regularly appearing letter orders? A language where an author has just come up with a series of random words that sound totally different feels inauthentic and doesn’t ring true.
• How does it sound? Try to come up with rules of pronunciation, say it out and test how it feels. The people speaking your language may guide this process – creatures without flexible humanoid lips may struggle to make some of the sounds we do.
• Give it grammar rules to follow – feminine and masculine, what changes when pluralising or due to tense? Adams’ Lapine has very clear rules in this department: when something becomes plural, its final letter is replaced with ‘il’ so ‘yona’ (hedgehog) becomes ‘yonil’.

Conlangs can be great to play around with, whether you’re developing one for a book or just for fun. My own first experience with them was when a friend and I tried creating one so we could talk in code at school. We got about as far as ‘flib-libble’ which meant ‘a party with snacks’ (presumably a ‘flib’ was a drinks-only gathering) and then pretty much gave up. We were very cool teenagers, obviously.

Have you ever tried creating your own language? Let me know in the comments – I’d love to see a message in your language!

Visit my blog page to catch up with my other posts so far!