If you’re creating a fictional language for a fantasy story, you’ll want to do more than build words out of letters. What you’re going to need are sounds and a way to write them without ambiguity.
In this article, I will discuss how the International Phonetic Alphabet can help you invent a fantasy language. To do this, I will use the IPA to create a simple vocabulary, although you can take it even further and make a fully realized language.
Learn the IPA
The first step is to get to know the IPA somewhat. It may look complicated, but once you figure out how the charts work you’ll be able to find any human speech sound. You should try to memorize the chief sounds of your language first, and then you can decide which others you want in your language.
Phonemes
Once you know how the IPA works, you can decide what phonemes you want your language to use. For this example we’ll start with some sounds that are pretty common in human language.
We’ll go with the voiceless plosives [p], [t], and [k]; the fricative [s]; the nasals [m] and [n]; and the vowels [a], [i], and [u].
Now let’s add just a few sounds to make the language our own. The obvious choice would be to start by adding some voiced plosives to correspond with the voiceless ones, but to make things interesting I think I’ll use voiced fricatives instead. I’ll therefore add [v], [ð], and [ɣ] to the inventory.
For vowels, I’ll add [o], [ɪ], and a long [eː]. I’ll switch [a] out for [ɑ] and include the diphthong [ɑu]. I’ll have nasal vowels like [õ] as well. The liquids [r] and [l] should do nicely. I think I’ll also add another nasal: [ŋ]. Finally, I’ll include the consonant cluster [ŋg].
Phonotactics
Once you’ve decided what sounds your language should have, it’s time to decide how they fit together. This is important for getting your word roots to sound consistent. I think I’ll give my language a simple syllable structure with a consonant followed by a vowel.
But to make things less repetitive I’ll let syllables end with a nasal, a liquid, or a nasal followed by a liquid. This means the language will have something like a “CV(CV)(N)(L)” syllable structure.
Idiosyncrasies
I’ll also have a few idiosyncratic things in my language, but only a few since I want this article to be short. Firstly, if [r] is at the end of a word and immediately follows a consonant, I want it to turn into the voiceless [r̥]. Next I’ll make words stress-accented. Finally, the voiced velar plosive [g] will only occur immediately following [ŋ].
Vocabulary
Once you’ve decided on these things, you just need to make up a bunch of word roots. There are sites on the internet that automatically generate roots for you, but you can make them up yourself if you prefer. I used an algorithm I wrote to generate these roots:
- [ˈsulor]
- [ˈŋoðɑŋ]
- [ˈpeːnol]
- [rõm]
- [ruˈnɪr]
- [ŋiˈkɑun]
- [ˈsɑuɣom]
- [moˈkɑm]
- [ɣol]
- [ˈsɑðõ]
- [ki]
- [ŋɪm]
- [ˌŋ̩guˈðɑunr̥]
- [ˈŋɑmr̥]
- [ˈvɑunɪn]
- [ˈŋɪnr̥]
Grammar
Now all that’s left is to assign meanings to these words and decide how your language’s grammar will work. For this language’s grammar I took a lot of inspiration from Japanese, so it has an SOV sentence structure and particle words to determine case. I made up some sentences like:
[ˈkɑmr̥ si ˈŋolor ɣom ˈðɑŋgr̥]
In this example, [ˈkɑmr̥] is the subject, marked as such by the particle [si]. [ˈŋolor] is marked as the object by [ɣom], and finally [ˈðɑŋgr̥] is the verb.
Orthography
Of course, when you write these words down in your story, you likely won’t be able to use IPA as your readers probably won’t know it. You should include a pronunciation guide, but you want to make it as easy for them to figure out as you can.
The previous example of [ˈkɑmr̥ si ˈŋolor ɣom ˈðɑŋgr̥] could be written as ⟨Kamr si ngolor ghom dhangr⟩ and your readers would probably get some idea of how to pronounce it. It’s almost always better to start with the sounds of a word and then form the spelling afterwards. It means you start with something to go on.
Saving Time
There’s a whole lot more to making a language, but this was just an example of how useful the International Phonetic Alphabet is when you’re making up the vocabulary. If you’re working on a Mac, you can access the IPA through the Character Viewer (⌃+⌘+SPACE).
I know the idea of learning what amounts to a new writing system might sound like a lot of work, but in my opinion it’s the easiest way to figure out the pronunciation of your fictional language. Making up a whole language is, by its very nature, a lot of work. My experience is that knowing the IPA greatly decreases the amount of effort you need to put into keeping your spelling consistent.
Have you ever invented a language? Did you use the IPA? Let me know in the comments. If this is the first you’ve heard of it, I suggest you try it out. You can tell me how it went in the comments.