Can you make up your own language?

[SeekerOfTruth007]

Let's say you are writing a fictional story with gremalkins or elves or something and need a new language for your other race of intelligent beings. Can you be creative to invent a totally new language for them?

One Method J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis used was to rotate consonants and vowels in different ways to generate fake words, then "massage" the results.

Let's say the evil Gremalkins are marching to war, and they sing a little chant, which translates to:

Pillage the village, pillage the town,

burn every city to the ground!

Now I want my Gremalkins to sing their song in their own language. I'm too lazy to invent new words, so I'll use Tolkien's method.

Quonneki saji wonneki, quonneki saji suvam

cysom jiwisa dovaq sin saji hosuyapof!

Now some of these "words" are pretty hard to imagine a correct pronunciation, but we can also add or subtract vowels now to make them seem more appropriate.

Then we can invent our own grammar and syntax, putting words in a reversed syntax order (Yoda) so that they rhyme and are harder to detect.

Wonneki ijas quonneki, suvam ijas quonneki,

nis ijas hosuyapof cysom jiwisa dovaq

Now fewer people would be likely to recognize how the words were generated, because they are not in the same syntactical order as the English language any longer. We can further distance it from English by adding conjugations of the style of French or Spanish, but in the Gremalkin's language, but that is beyond the scope of this post.

Anyway, the noun "fire" (Vosa) as in "light the fire" looks very different than the verb "fire" as in "fire the cannon" (Vosanut).

You can also reverse the spelling of some or all words to further disquise them.

So this is an easy way of generating a fictional "alien" language for use in a fictional story.

[purplepoppy]

Languages don't evolve on their own, they have a history often stretching back thousands of years and spanning continents. How often do you look up the etymology of a word and suddenly a light comes on in your head where you see connections. Or see a word written in a foreign language and automatically understand it.

If you invent an entirely new language you lose this. A language needs to carry elements of real ones that people will pick up on even if they don't understand it. It should feel just out of reach not totally alien. When LOTR was released in UK cinemas people said "the elves are speaking Welsh" of course they weren't but people picked up on the sounds Tolkien had borrowed and merged with other languages, they felt they understood it even if they didn't.

Personally I'd blend words that already exist so to jump in italian is salto or in Spanish saltar And to turn a verb into an order in welsh you add wch on the end so saltwch. Its a non existent word yet it works beautiful and would probably be instinctively understood across Europe.

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[SeekerOfTruth007]

A language of another species need not have any connection to a human language though.

[AviatorTom]

Wanga sini yam!

[SeekerOfTruth007]

There might be other rules you can add to a fictional language to make it appear more exotic, such as only using 4 or 5 letter words, limiting the number of words per sentence, and so on.

[AviatorTom]

@SeekerOfTruth007 In my language, words can only be one or two syllables, and only one vowel per word, repeated as many times as needed.

[Cubus]

You can. Esperanto is a made-up language.