If you’re writing a fantasy story that takes place in a different world, you’ll more than likely have to make up some words. Maybe you want to create a whole language, or maybe you just need a few names for characters or places.
Either way, words are a big deal in the fantasy genre; they have been since Tolkien. One good way to make up names is to take meaningful words from a particular language and use those.
This can save you a lot of work, but what if there’s no real language that sounds the way you want your names to sound? In that case you’ll need to make your own language, which takes a lot more effort.
Regardless which method you choose (and many writers do a bit of both), you’re going to need to know how to pronounce those words. This is even more true if you’re making up your own language. In most cases you won’t be able to use standard English spelling rules for your made-up language; you want the orthography to be at least consistent so the reader knows how they should sound.
A Fantasy Writer’s Best Friend
Many people respond to this problem by inventing their own pronunciation guide, which is usually the same as how the words are spelt in their story. This is usually fine for the person reading the story, but it can be hard keeping track of sounds when you’re making up the words. It’s all too common for English spelling rules to worm their way into how you pronounce a word.
Thankfully there is a solution: a standardized alphabet used by linguists and dictionaries all over the world. It’s called the International Phonetic Alphabet, it can transcribe any human speech sound, and you need to learn it if you write fantasy.
What Is the IPA?
The International Phonetic Alphabet, put simply, is a standardized way to visually represent the sounds of human speech. The word “question” is rendered in the IPA as /ˈkwɛst͡ʃ(ə)n/, for example. You can use it for any known language.
As such, it can help you figure out how your fictional language sounds. Rather than having to remember whether you want ⟨ee⟩ to sound like it does in “feet” or “Beethoven,” you can write the sounds in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
In this case, the ⟨ee⟩ in “feet” is rendered as [i] and the ⟨ee⟩ in “Beethoven” is [e], but because you hold the vowel for a little bit longer than normal, you’d modify it with another symbol, making it [eː].
In english, the IPA transcription of “Beethoven” is usually /ˈlʊdvɪɡ væn ˈbeɪt(.h)oʊvən/ depending on your dialect, whereas in German it’s [ˈluːtvɪç fan ˈbeːthoːfn̩]. If you learn the IPA, you’ll be able to know exactly how a word is pronounced just by looking at the IPA transcription.
If you write “eː” in International Phonetic Alphabet, it will never be pronounced like the ⟨ee⟩ in “feet.” That’s because you’re no longer just writing letters; you’re writing phonemes. A phoneme is a unit of sound in a language that can change the meaning of a word; the inventory of phonemes is different in every language.
For instance, English distinguishes voiced and unvoiced phonemes (the difference between [b] and [p]). Korean doesn’t; whereas [bæd] and [pæt] mean completely different things in English, they’d probably sound the same to someone whose language doesn’t care whether you voice your consonants.
The first step to making up a language is figuring out your language’s phonemes. For this, you’ll need to learn the IPA chart.
Consonants
One of the best things about the International Phonetic Alphabet is that it’s not just a haphazard collection of sounds and letters (of the sort you’ll find in American dictionaries). Instead, it’s a chart based on how a sound is produced in your mouth. For consonants, that means they’re sorted by place of articulation and manner of articulation.
If you want to create an evolving family of languages, then what this means for you is that you’ll have no trouble seeing how the sounds will mutate over time. Most of the letters correspond to English, but there aren’t any digraphs (where two letters together represent one sound) or ambiguities. This means no silent letters.
The prospect of memorizing the chart may look daunting, but you don’t need to learn every letter—only the ones in your native language and any others you want to have in your made-up language. One of the most popular sounds for a fictional language is the voiceless velar fricative, which the IPA writes as [x]; it’s the ⟨ch⟩ in “loch.”
The ⟨ch⟩ in “teach” is not one sound; it’s actually two, which means it’s written with two letters: [t͡ʃ]. The ⟨th⟩ in “thought” and the ⟨th⟩ in “they” are different sounds, so we write one as [θ] and the other as [ð]. Of course, there are sounds on the chart that you’ll never find in English, so if you want your language to use the Cymraeg ⟨ll⟩ sound, you just use [ɬ].
Vowels
The vowel chart is based on where your tongue is in your mouth, as well as what shape you’re making with your lips. The ⟨a⟩ in “cat” is [æ] and the ⟨a⟩ in “father” is [ɑ].
The ⟨oo⟩ in “food” can’t be two letters in the International Phonetic Alphabet because it’s one sound: [u]. But what if the sound you want is more specific? Well, that brings us to diacritics.
Diacritics and Accents
Let’s say you want to distinguish a normal [t] sound from one with a little puff of air—you can do that too. To do this you add a type of modifier called a diacritic.
Diacritics attach to a letter in order to adjust its sound slightly, and they’re what makes the International Phonetic Alphabet so versatile. In the case of the above example, you’d add a small “h” beside the “t” to get an aspirated [tʰ].
Vowels have even more interesting ways to modify them. I’ve already shown you an example of vowel length, but you can have anything from an extra-short [ĕ] through the half-long [eˑ] and all the way to the long [eː] I showed you earlier.
If you want a French-sounding nasalized vowel, all you have to do is add a tilde above the vowel letter: [ẽ]. You can even write tones, either by adding an accent above the letter (like [ê] or [ě]) or by adding more precise tone letters after the vowel like this: [e˦˩˨].
Consistency in Sounds
The last thing you want to do is make a language whose pronunciation doesn’t make sense, and asking them to just make up the pronunciations themselves will just get your readers even more confused. It may take some time to learn, but the International Phonetic Alphabet is your friend.
In my experience it’s the best way to figure out how your made-up words should sound, and it keeps you from just throwing a bunch of letters together and hoping it’s pronounceable. There’s a lot more to inventing a language than just phonemes, of course, but you’re going to need something consistent for this part of the job.
This article has focused mostly on establishing how powerful the International Phonetic Alphabet is. In my next article on the subject, I will walk you through using this system to create a simple fictional language. After that I will look at some alternatives to the IPA and see if any of them can compete with what is the standard all over the world.
Even if you don’t need to make a whole language, even if you’re content just throwing some sounds together to make a name, you should still use the IPA to solidify the pronunciation in your head. To a writer of high fantasy, knowing at least the basics of the International Phonetic Alphabet is indispensable.