Cheater's guide to Conlang in fiction
By 'cheater', I mean those of us (me) who don't want to do it the hard (right) way, but don't want it to look too crappy. By Conlang, I mean 'constructed language', like Quenya, Esperanto, and Klingon.

Okay, so, you want your work of fiction to have a language in it that isn't an Earth language. Unfortunately, all the languages you speak are Earth-languages! (Except if you speak Klingon or Quenya, I'll grant.) How to get around this?

Well, you're not writing your entire novel in your made-up language, because no one except you speaks that language, and the audience would be pretty small. (I mean, go ahead if you like. I'll just be... over here. You do your thing.) Want you want to create is the impression on the reader that there is an entire language, just around the corner, like barking off-stage signals dogs.

There are plenty of really fabulous guides to doing it right; giving your language a grammar, a structure, an alphabet, a history, all the things real languages have. But this is hard work.



1. First, you need a phoneme set: all languages are made up of a set of sounds. You don't need very many; Hawaiian has only approximately thirteen, although these can be (and are) recombined to produce nearly infinite variation. (quick analogy: you have ten digits, 0-9. How many numbers can you make with them?)

Phonemes aren't letters, but lets pretend they are. Write down the letters, and if you want to get fancy, letter combinations that produce distinct sounds (ch, th, ts, etc.) in your language. Cross out the letters your conlang won't have. You're not allowed to use these now. You can add in letters for sounds your conlang will have that your language doesn't, but if you use an apostrophe to represent any of them, I will break your kneecaps.

2. Now you need to stick some words in your novel, from your conlang. There are two ways to do this, (okay, three, but the third is mostly a bad idea, although I'll cover it.) The first two involve contact between people from two language-groups. If they both speak each other's language fluently, there's not really any need to put in any words from your conlang, except to maybe demonstrate to your readers "hey, look, I mashed up some letters randomly and replaced some of the words with mashed letters for your reading enjoyment!" Your readers will probably not be thrilled.

A) However, if communication is imperfect, you might want to convey that to your readers by giving them the experience of listening to a foreign language and struggling to make sense of it. You've probably listened to the news, or seen a video clip in a language you don't understand before (and if you haven't, and want to, go hunting around youtube) and the experience is pretty much like this:

"President Bush XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX X XXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXX XXXXXX XXX XXX United Nations XXXXXXXXX X X XXXXXX X XXXXX X XX XXXXX XXXX XXXXX XXXX"

A stream of noise, with blips of signal. Even if they're not discussing international affairs, and you don't speak a word of the language, if you listen long enough, you'll start picking up signal. If it's all noise, there's really no point putting it in.

You can mash up your phoneme set, trying to strike some balance between consonants and vowels, (try pronouncing lsdkjfzxjqwrrjdf, I dare you) and putting spaces in to simulate words. Then add some signal, the words that point of view character recognizes.

B) Alternately, you may be listening to a relatively fluent speaker, who occasionally can't find the word they want in the language they're speaking, and reverts to their native tongue. If they're very fluent, these words will mostly be place-names, social structures, and local customs and foods. If they're less fluent, these will be words that are used less often in conversation: here are the 1000 most common words in English. Don't use any of these.

One common mistake I see is when people signal foreign language usage by using the words they themselves know: "Gracias," said Maria, "I appreciate that." But if you know that word in Spanish, Maria certainly knows it in English. Maria's more likely to say "Thank you, muy amable."

Try to avoid over-use of humorous foreign swearing. Trust me, you learn the curse-words, although not what they literally mean, pretty quick.

If you're using this approach, your readers will be able to intuit the meaning of the missing words fairly well, so keep track of what you have meaning what, and don't change 'em around. Related words may have similar construction, like ride/rode or not particularly, like thought/thinking. If you want to get fancy, decide whether your language likes to modify words with prefixes, suffixes, or both, and in what circumstances.

C) or maybe you would just like to put in random words in your conlang, for exotic flavour. This is mostly annoying. I don't usually enjoy reading half a book before I realize that the hejur is a frickin' horse. We have a word for that in English. Which is the language this book is written in. If you must do this, do this with items we don't have a word for in English, since this is generally when English adopts foreign words, like sushi, taco, zeitgeist, and ennui.

3. Pitfalls:

Learning languages: For the love of tofu hotdogs, do not have anyone learning a language in a week. If I put you in a foreign language environment, a week later you would be able to thank people, apologize, explain that you don't speak the language, and ask for the bathroom. Two weeks later, you'd have a heck of a headache, be beginning to have paranoid suspicions that everyone was talking about you, and know the word for the local painkiller. It would be a month before you could know the general subject of the conversations around you, although you would be missing most of the content, and it would be three months before you could speak to a five year-old child as a peer.

Well, maybe you'd be quicker than that, I don't know you. But I'm just sayin', if anyone learns a language in a week, there had better be magic spells or hypno-learning or something.

Figures of speech: Figures of speech don't make sense. You may think they do, but that's because you grew up with them. Some of them may make some sense as a metaphor, but by and large (and what exactly does 'by and large' mean? By what? What's large?) figures of speech are illogically, hair-pullingly nonsensical. Make sure you don't have anyone exactly recreating an English figure of speech. Figures of speech also tend to keep words long after they've passed out of common usage: if you're buying a pig in a poke, what's a poke?
In 'hither and yon', what's yon? It's some place far away, right? Your characters aren't really any more likely to know all about this stuff than you are, unless you or they are linguists.

Punctuation: if I see anyone setting off their constructed languages using punctuation marks, I will confiscate those punctuation marks and put them in protective custody. Although alien languages aren't really too likely to punctuate exactly like English, they're not too likely to use the roman alphabet either, so unless you plan to design your own alphabet as well, I suggest giving your readers hints in the form of normal commas, periods, and question marks.



If you're going to ask me what are my qualifications, that's fair. I don't really have any, except that I've read a lot of stuff that does it wrong, and some stuff that did it right, and I can find the bathroom in three languages.