In the story and lore forum, I have just posted a topic asking for opinions and thoughts on the naming styles and conventions for my homebrew race. It made me think however, apart from a few words, I don't actually even have a language for those people, and so I am having to mix and match names, titles and stuff from historical eras. I do have a few words for them:
Mol means sheep. Molu meaning sheep-like, or small and weak, needing protection.
Azem meaning father, caretaker. Doesn't have to be a biological father. Azemu meaning father-like, or fatherly, as in like a father.
Nhaama means mother or caretaker, the female version of azem. They don't have to be a biological mother. Nhaamu meaning mother-like, or motherly, as in like a mother.
Kihlesa is the name of the race.
However, I have no idea if these words are linguistically correct, and having just a few words is a long way from having an actual language. Therein lies the problem. Language is key to understanding a people and their culture and just making up words on the spot, or mixing and matching real world words from different historical periods, does little to make my homebrew feel real, like they could exist in the real world. Neither does it help my players to understand the race, their mindsets, their societies or their culture.
So, how do you do it? How do you create a linguistically correct language for your D&D race?
The first advice I'd give is to just use a real world language, preferably one that your players don't speak. It will sound foreign, and will work well, just plug stuff into google translate, and the work is done for you. Inventing a language could be fun, but it won't really do much to advance your story.
That said, when you linguistically correct, I'm thinking you mean that the words sound like they belong together. And I'd say, if you're going to make something up, don't worry about it too much.
Most every language borrows words and phrases from other languages, so in that context, I'm not sure what linguistically correct would mean. English, in particular, is famous for having words and grammatical constructs derived from latin, greek, german, french, dutch, spanish, pretty much every language in Europe. And contemporary English goes even further afield, where Asian and African words have made their way into use. So, if these people you've invented have trade routes with other cultures, or have been conquered by them, or have conquered them, or border them or really in any way interact with other cultures, they are bound to import words from other languages which might sound a little funny.
And additionally, while you are absolutely correct that language is important to understanding a people, unless you are going to invent a whole language, it won't matter. The players won't have access to the full depth of the language, so they won't really be able to glean much from it. (George RR Martin, for all his world building, wrote something like a half dozen words of Dothraki. Most everything you hear on the show was invented for the show. And that culture in the books still feels completely distinct from the others.) But, you can probably get a lot from just a few phrases. (Again, in he GoT show, there's the line that the Dothraki don't have a word for Thank You. That tells you everything you needs to know. without really inventing a language.)
And for the opposite example, think about those who do invent a whole language. Take Klingon, which has actual dictionaries and people who speak it. I don't know a word of it myself, but I still have a good handle on what Klingons are like.
You're doing just fine. There are whole books on this subject ("conlangs" = constructed languages is the right search term).
If you're just making up words, all you need is phonetics. Each language will use a limited subset of all the possible sounds. It will be missing some of the sounds of English and have some we don't. But the latter can make your names hard to understand and pronounce, so you might want to avoid them.
You're off to a good start with morphology with one suffix -u to make a noun into an adjective.
If you want to make whole sentences, you need syntax: how to put words together. Most languages will have a subject, object, and verb, and they will be in a consistent order, but not necessarily the same order as English. Many languages mark which word is the subject and object with some kind of suffix or sound change. Many also mark the verb with changes for tense, number, person, and other aspects. Pick some regular patterns and your language will have a characteristic sound.
I'm going to guess most DMs don't really go full on conlangs (what pavilionaire has explained, and what Tolkien basically did). You can, if you enjoy artificial languages as a sort of game in and of itself, but I wouldn't feel obligated. Seems a lot of folks use a placeholder language, and some might go the GoT route with a handful of words or phrases, which may have or lack continuity. As Klingon is a gold standard of conlangs, I'll go the other route and point out not a single Star Wars "language" (Huttese, Ewok etc) is actually a functioning language it's just a bunch of sounds strung together to sound alien.
I don't do additional languages, because it's a lot of work and the pay off would be only for me. How many of your players are going to call you out on the structure of a game world's language vs how many will simply nod and accept any foreign sounding word as being something from a fantastic speech?
I feel in a fantasy world, languages as a priority take a seat far behind, geography, theology, metaphysics, climatology and astronomical calendar (I'm actually trying to figure out currently a table to determine what color the sky is in a homebrew world that's basically a rogue comet lacking a set orbit). And you're more free with those rulings if you're not pre-binding yourself in the prison house of language, so to speak. Do what's cool for you, but also what's cool for your players. Are they really going to know the workings of this or these languages? Will they want to?
There isn't a "right" way to do it, English would be very hard to reconstruct through synthetic or constructed rules because the language is largely the product of a history centuries of conflict, and some contacts. Remember in fiction, versimilitude feels like "real truth", suspension of disbelief is done through tricks more often than truly comprehensive world building. You're the DM, your players will take your word for it, whether the words are generated out of whole cloth or you just say "from what you know of Primordial, you think they're saying..."
The first response covered everything pretty well. I have one suggestion. Take a look at what you can find about "Indo-European" Supposedly this is the root of all the languages in the European continent. I had a Latin teacher whose hobby was the study of Indo-European. Take for example the word "Peku". It means "cow". That's where we get the five dollar word "Impecunious", meaning "poor". If you didn't have any cows, you were very poor indeed. You might starve to death. Cattle were the preferred currency when most trades were done by bartering. Peku - Cow - Money - Pecunia and so on from there. It might be where the word "Peck" came from, for hitting things with a beak. A little short sharp motion. You "peck" at your keyboard when you type. :-)
There isn't really such a thing as "linguistically correct". All languages follow their rules and while some (especially in the PIE-family) follow similar rules there are still differences. Some languages are more strict when it comes to these rules, other languages have more exception to their rules. You don't even need internal consitency. If you have an exception, that's just the way it is. Unless you're Tolkien, it's probably a waste of time and energy to make up a complete language. :P
How do you make a linguistically correct language? Spend years studying linguistics. If you don't want to (or can't) do that, either use a real language or be satisfied with just making up whatever.
Thanks for all you’re replies everyone. You guys have all given me some excellent pointers. Also, knowing what the actual term is for what I wanted has helped me to find some resources online.
The references that you all mentioned will defiantly help as well. Seeing how other people who have done this kind of thing, approached the topic will be good I think.
It’s not something that I expect to have done over night or in a few weeks, which is why I was starting with my own homebrew. Though actually, I call it a homebrew, but so far I have just been using the half dragon template from the monster manual.
I have been wanting to refine my race though and make it available for everyone. So, there is more to do, they need to be refined and balanced better, and the lore for them needs to be written up properly.
At least starting to create their language, with a few words could be part of that.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
A caffeinated nerd who has played TTRPGs or a number of years and is very much a fantasy adventure geek.
There isn't really such a thing as "linguistically correct". All languages follow their rules and while some (especially in the PIE-family) follow similar rules there are still differences. Some languages are more strict when it comes to these rules, other languages have more exception to their rules. You don't even need internal consitency. If you have an exception, that's just the way it is. Unless you're Tolkien, it's probably a waste of time and energy to make up a complete language. :P
There are definitely wrong ways to do it. A trained linguist could tell the difference between a skillfully constructed conlang and a bunch of gibberish. A real language will have a certain regular pattern to it. There are many patterns they can follow, but there are some more probable than others.
To be honest I studied linguistics in college, and for the game I'm currently running, I babble nonsense when I roleplay an NPC who speaks a language the players don't understand.
To be honest, I don't think my players would know the difference, and I'm a big believer in not doing prep that won't see the table. Don't write a huge backstory for your barkeeper. Odds are the players won't ask, and if they do, improv it. In most cases I role play a foreign language just to set the scene that you're in a foreign environment and you can't understand the person talking to you and they can't understand you. After initial failed communication, your players will most likely work out a way to communicate, such as Tongues. In that case you switch to "dubbed" mode, where you just give NPC lines as if they were in common, maybe with an accent, but not in the original language. Or they will fail to communicate, in which case your NPC will probably quit trying and you don't have to make up any more babble.
Improvving babble that doesn't sound childish can be a challenge, and here a knowledge of phonetics can help, so that you have a certain "sound" to your language, and you avoid too limited a sound inventory. Contrary to what the Greek's thought, foreigners do not all sound like "bar-bar-bar". They sound like "barruntija apzul eliemantan". Vary the length of your words. A good way to practice is to try to say some nonsense, but make the nonsense sound German or Italian or Chinese. There was an Italian singer who made a whole song of what he thought sounded like nonsense American. The soundtrack to Gladiator sounded vaguely like Latin, but the lyrics were nonsense. With practice you can do this with a variety of distinctive-sounding babble languages, so that your players will intuitively know what language an NPC is speaking, even if they have no idea what it means.
I used to play Traveller, a science fiction roleplaying game, and as I looked over the responses here, I remembered that they once had a neat little set of tables for creating realistic sounding words like Pavilionaire was talking about. It's now an automated little tool.
You can pick one of the spacefaring races, really doesn't matter which, decide which set of rules applies to that language, and then it should churn out words to string together. Then you can uugiir iisas gizu gela uki with the best of them in Zhodani.
The only time I can remember Languages being much of a factor in a game I was running was when I had a Kobold (they were little dog-men back then) who wasn't hostile, and kept barking and yipping at the players, non of whose characters spoke Kobold. They had to figure out what the little critter wanted. I note that this gets old very fast. It's ok once in a great while, but I haven't much enjoyed games in which my character was left out because she didn't speak Elvish and everyone else did. That kind of thing isn't fun in the real world either.
I find it interesting how we put our adjectives before the nouns when it makes more sense to me to start with the noun followed by the clarifiers. Most of the Romance languages put adjectives behind the nouns. While it seems strange to me, there could be languages that put priority upon the action (verb) before the subject, thinking what was being done as more important than who or what was doing it.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
I find it interesting how we put our adjectives before the nouns when it makes more sense to me to start with the noun followed by the clarifiers. Most of the Romance languages put adjectives behind the nouns. While it seems strange to me, there could be languages that put priority upon the action (verb) before the subject, thinking what was being done as more important than who or what was doing it.
I could see some hive or collective races developing language like this. Distinguishing more between different actions, rather than different individuals. Perhaps even removing individualism altogether in some extreme cases.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
A caffeinated nerd who has played TTRPGs or a number of years and is very much a fantasy adventure geek.
As someone who severely burned himself out a couple years ago over-worldbuilding a fantasy setting, please take this warning: The amount of effort you put into this kind of thing will usually far exceed the amount of scrutiny people (especially friends) will give it. Unless you're playing with language professors, your players will probably be fine with just a surface level of consistency. Focus on "close enough", not perfection. (This applies to many aspects of worldbuilding, not just language)
As for specific advice...
One thing I've done for naming things is to make a list of common words that would be used to name stuff, then use an online tool to translate that list to languages that fit the sound I want. Then any time I want to name something, I pick a few relevant words and mash their translations together.
In my case, I just wanted it to sound "alternative English". I used Latin and old Norse translators on the list first, since both of those fed heavily into English. But that had too many results that are too recognizably real-English, so to spice things up, I added another column for a Hindi translation. That added some much-needed "not from around here" sounds to the word selection.
To smooth things out afterward, I also tried limiting which letters I would use in the resulting word.
You could also try not translating the words, but instead sticking weird accents on them. Mashing them together after that usually leaves the root unrecognizable as well.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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Hi,
In the story and lore forum, I have just posted a topic asking for opinions and thoughts on the naming styles and conventions for my homebrew race. It made me think however, apart from a few words, I don't actually even have a language for those people, and so I am having to mix and match names, titles and stuff from historical eras. I do have a few words for them:
Mol means sheep. Molu meaning sheep-like, or small and weak, needing protection.
Azem meaning father, caretaker. Doesn't have to be a biological father. Azemu meaning father-like, or fatherly, as in like a father.
Nhaama means mother or caretaker, the female version of azem. They don't have to be a biological mother. Nhaamu meaning mother-like, or motherly, as in like a mother.
Kihlesa is the name of the race.
However, I have no idea if these words are linguistically correct, and having just a few words is a long way from having an actual language. Therein lies the problem. Language is key to understanding a people and their culture and just making up words on the spot, or mixing and matching real world words from different historical periods, does little to make my homebrew feel real, like they could exist in the real world. Neither does it help my players to understand the race, their mindsets, their societies or their culture.
So, how do you do it? How do you create a linguistically correct language for your D&D race?
XD
A caffeinated nerd who has played TTRPGs or a number of years and is very much a fantasy adventure geek.
The first advice I'd give is to just use a real world language, preferably one that your players don't speak. It will sound foreign, and will work well, just plug stuff into google translate, and the work is done for you. Inventing a language could be fun, but it won't really do much to advance your story.
That said, when you linguistically correct, I'm thinking you mean that the words sound like they belong together. And I'd say, if you're going to make something up, don't worry about it too much.
Most every language borrows words and phrases from other languages, so in that context, I'm not sure what linguistically correct would mean. English, in particular, is famous for having words and grammatical constructs derived from latin, greek, german, french, dutch, spanish, pretty much every language in Europe. And contemporary English goes even further afield, where Asian and African words have made their way into use. So, if these people you've invented have trade routes with other cultures, or have been conquered by them, or have conquered them, or border them or really in any way interact with other cultures, they are bound to import words from other languages which might sound a little funny.
And additionally, while you are absolutely correct that language is important to understanding a people, unless you are going to invent a whole language, it won't matter. The players won't have access to the full depth of the language, so they won't really be able to glean much from it. (George RR Martin, for all his world building, wrote something like a half dozen words of Dothraki. Most everything you hear on the show was invented for the show. And that culture in the books still feels completely distinct from the others.) But, you can probably get a lot from just a few phrases. (Again, in he GoT show, there's the line that the Dothraki don't have a word for Thank You. That tells you everything you needs to know. without really inventing a language.)
And for the opposite example, think about those who do invent a whole language. Take Klingon, which has actual dictionaries and people who speak it. I don't know a word of it myself, but I still have a good handle on what Klingons are like.
You're doing just fine. There are whole books on this subject ("conlangs" = constructed languages is the right search term).
If you're just making up words, all you need is phonetics. Each language will use a limited subset of all the possible sounds. It will be missing some of the sounds of English and have some we don't. But the latter can make your names hard to understand and pronounce, so you might want to avoid them.
You're off to a good start with morphology with one suffix -u to make a noun into an adjective.
If you want to make whole sentences, you need syntax: how to put words together. Most languages will have a subject, object, and verb, and they will be in a consistent order, but not necessarily the same order as English. Many languages mark which word is the subject and object with some kind of suffix or sound change. Many also mark the verb with changes for tense, number, person, and other aspects. Pick some regular patterns and your language will have a characteristic sound.
I'm going to guess most DMs don't really go full on conlangs (what pavilionaire has explained, and what Tolkien basically did). You can, if you enjoy artificial languages as a sort of game in and of itself, but I wouldn't feel obligated. Seems a lot of folks use a placeholder language, and some might go the GoT route with a handful of words or phrases, which may have or lack continuity. As Klingon is a gold standard of conlangs, I'll go the other route and point out not a single Star Wars "language" (Huttese, Ewok etc) is actually a functioning language it's just a bunch of sounds strung together to sound alien.
I don't do additional languages, because it's a lot of work and the pay off would be only for me. How many of your players are going to call you out on the structure of a game world's language vs how many will simply nod and accept any foreign sounding word as being something from a fantastic speech?
I feel in a fantasy world, languages as a priority take a seat far behind, geography, theology, metaphysics, climatology and astronomical calendar (I'm actually trying to figure out currently a table to determine what color the sky is in a homebrew world that's basically a rogue comet lacking a set orbit). And you're more free with those rulings if you're not pre-binding yourself in the prison house of language, so to speak. Do what's cool for you, but also what's cool for your players. Are they really going to know the workings of this or these languages? Will they want to?
There isn't a "right" way to do it, English would be very hard to reconstruct through synthetic or constructed rules because the language is largely the product of a history centuries of conflict, and some contacts. Remember in fiction, versimilitude feels like "real truth", suspension of disbelief is done through tricks more often than truly comprehensive world building. You're the DM, your players will take your word for it, whether the words are generated out of whole cloth or you just say "from what you know of Primordial, you think they're saying..."
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
The first response covered everything pretty well. I have one suggestion. Take a look at what you can find about "Indo-European" Supposedly this is the root of all the languages in the European continent. I had a Latin teacher whose hobby was the study of Indo-European. Take for example the word "Peku". It means "cow". That's where we get the five dollar word "Impecunious", meaning "poor". If you didn't have any cows, you were very poor indeed. You might starve to death. Cattle were the preferred currency when most trades were done by bartering. Peku - Cow - Money - Pecunia and so on from there. It might be where the word "Peck" came from, for hitting things with a beak. A little short sharp motion. You "peck" at your keyboard when you type. :-)
<Insert clever signature here>
There isn't really such a thing as "linguistically correct". All languages follow their rules and while some (especially in the PIE-family) follow similar rules there are still differences. Some languages are more strict when it comes to these rules, other languages have more exception to their rules. You don't even need internal consitency. If you have an exception, that's just the way it is. Unless you're Tolkien, it's probably a waste of time and energy to make up a complete language. :P
How do you make a linguistically correct language? Spend years studying linguistics. If you don't want to (or can't) do that, either use a real language or be satisfied with just making up whatever.
Thanks for all you’re replies everyone. You guys have all given me some excellent pointers. Also, knowing what the actual term is for what I wanted has helped me to find some resources online.
The references that you all mentioned will defiantly help as well. Seeing how other people who have done this kind of thing, approached the topic will be good I think.
It’s not something that I expect to have done over night or in a few weeks, which is why I was starting with my own homebrew. Though actually, I call it a homebrew, but so far I have just been using the half dragon template from the monster manual.
I have been wanting to refine my race though and make it available for everyone. So, there is more to do, they need to be refined and balanced better, and the lore for them needs to be written up properly.
At least starting to create their language, with a few words could be part of that.
A caffeinated nerd who has played TTRPGs or a number of years and is very much a fantasy adventure geek.
There are definitely wrong ways to do it. A trained linguist could tell the difference between a skillfully constructed conlang and a bunch of gibberish. A real language will have a certain regular pattern to it. There are many patterns they can follow, but there are some more probable than others.
To be honest I studied linguistics in college, and for the game I'm currently running, I babble nonsense when I roleplay an NPC who speaks a language the players don't understand.
To be honest, I don't think my players would know the difference, and I'm a big believer in not doing prep that won't see the table. Don't write a huge backstory for your barkeeper. Odds are the players won't ask, and if they do, improv it. In most cases I role play a foreign language just to set the scene that you're in a foreign environment and you can't understand the person talking to you and they can't understand you. After initial failed communication, your players will most likely work out a way to communicate, such as Tongues. In that case you switch to "dubbed" mode, where you just give NPC lines as if they were in common, maybe with an accent, but not in the original language. Or they will fail to communicate, in which case your NPC will probably quit trying and you don't have to make up any more babble.
Improvving babble that doesn't sound childish can be a challenge, and here a knowledge of phonetics can help, so that you have a certain "sound" to your language, and you avoid too limited a sound inventory. Contrary to what the Greek's thought, foreigners do not all sound like "bar-bar-bar". They sound like "barruntija apzul eliemantan". Vary the length of your words. A good way to practice is to try to say some nonsense, but make the nonsense sound German or Italian or Chinese. There was an Italian singer who made a whole song of what he thought sounded like nonsense American. The soundtrack to Gladiator sounded vaguely like Latin, but the lyrics were nonsense. With practice you can do this with a variety of distinctive-sounding babble languages, so that your players will intuitively know what language an NPC is speaking, even if they have no idea what it means.
I used to play Traveller, a science fiction roleplaying game, and as I looked over the responses here, I remembered that they once had a neat little set of tables for creating realistic sounding words like Pavilionaire was talking about. It's now an automated little tool.
Pasuuli's Vilani Tools (traveller5.net)
You can pick one of the spacefaring races, really doesn't matter which, decide which set of rules applies to that language, and then it should churn out words to string together. Then you can uugiir iisas gizu gela uki with the best of them in Zhodani.
The only time I can remember Languages being much of a factor in a game I was running was when I had a Kobold (they were little dog-men back then) who wasn't hostile, and kept barking and yipping at the players, non of whose characters spoke Kobold. They had to figure out what the little critter wanted. I note that this gets old very fast. It's ok once in a great while, but I haven't much enjoyed games in which my character was left out because she didn't speak Elvish and everyone else did. That kind of thing isn't fun in the real world either.
<Insert clever signature here>
I find it interesting how we put our adjectives before the nouns when it makes more sense to me to start with the noun followed by the clarifiers. Most of the Romance languages put adjectives behind the nouns. While it seems strange to me, there could be languages that put priority upon the action (verb) before the subject, thinking what was being done as more important than who or what was doing it.
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
I could see some hive or collective races developing language like this. Distinguishing more between different actions, rather than different individuals. Perhaps even removing individualism altogether in some extreme cases.
A caffeinated nerd who has played TTRPGs or a number of years and is very much a fantasy adventure geek.
As someone who severely burned himself out a couple years ago over-worldbuilding a fantasy setting, please take this warning: The amount of effort you put into this kind of thing will usually far exceed the amount of scrutiny people (especially friends) will give it. Unless you're playing with language professors, your players will probably be fine with just a surface level of consistency. Focus on "close enough", not perfection. (This applies to many aspects of worldbuilding, not just language)
As for specific advice...
One thing I've done for naming things is to make a list of common words that would be used to name stuff, then use an online tool to translate that list to languages that fit the sound I want. Then any time I want to name something, I pick a few relevant words and mash their translations together.
In my case, I just wanted it to sound "alternative English". I used Latin and old Norse translators on the list first, since both of those fed heavily into English. But that had too many results that are too recognizably real-English, so to spice things up, I added another column for a Hindi translation. That added some much-needed "not from around here" sounds to the word selection.
To smooth things out afterward, I also tried limiting which letters I would use in the resulting word.
You could also try not translating the words, but instead sticking weird accents on them. Mashing them together after that usually leaves the root unrecognizable as well.