Tutorial
Writers of fantasy and science fiction often set their stories in settings remote from present-day Earth. These invented worlds have their own cultures, often their own natural laws, and, inevitably, their own languages. Invented languages can lend a special richness to an imaginary world. But how does one go about inventing plausible languages, short of becoming a professional linguist like J. R. R. Tolkien, the unrivaled grand master of fantasy language invention?
There are many people who invent languages as a hobby, and some of them have provided excellent resources and guidance on the web. Unfortunately, these can be overwhelming to a fiction writer who is only looking to add flavor to a story or novel, rather than creating a body of literature in an invented tongue.
My intention in this tutorial is to allow you to choose the level of time and energy you wish to put into language invention, and then offer tools and advice to ensure you a good return on that investment. Hence, this tutorial is organized by levels, with each level representing a higher investment of effort.
At level 0, your concern is to write your story, and not worry about languages at all. The issue is that you will need names for characters and places that don't create problems for your readers. Here are a few things you can do:
The first approach can be fun, but it begins to feel like a trap if you need more than a handful of names. The atmosphere it creates is one of a culture without much depth or memory; it makes me think of hunter-gatherer people wandering from one place to the next and giving everything a very literal name. After a while, it becomes tiresome.
The second approach can work quite well, if your milieu is closely based on a historical one, or else meant to evoke it strongly. For classic fantasy in a pseudo-medieval setting, this can play out just fine. (You may still benefit from doing a little research, though, to learn more historical names from your chosen period, especially if a mix of historical languages and cultures is involved.) There are two problems, though: this will not work if you want your settting to feel more exotic, and it may mislead your readers into thinking your story is historical fiction, or at least some parallel history.
The third option is often the most tempting, but you need to be careful about a few things.
First, it is easy to fall into names that all have a clichéd "generic fantasy" sound, like a murky blend of Tolkien, Dungeons and Dragons, and Star Wars. This is not the end of the world, of course - yours won't be the first story to travel this well-worn track. It is, however, a great missed opportunity to give your world a distinctive quality of its own and to stimulate your readers' interest.
Second, you can inadvertently give your readers false cues regarding the linguistic character (and hence pronunciation) of the names. A city name Chalaise, for example, will strike many readers as French or at least French-like, and so they'll probably pronounce it "Shah-layz". There is no problem with that, as long as some consistency is maintained. But if the next city is named Kalu-Tore, we may be inclined to pronounce it "kah-lu-toh-reh", and then wonder if Chalaise should be "cha-lye-seh" or something similar. The point is that names invented on the run without any thought behind them can become a distraction, as readers get sidetracked into trying to figure out your linguistic intentions rather than just reading your story.
So, if you go this route, my advice is to steer clear of names that will make readers think of a known language (and that includes Tolkien's Elvish languages). Keep names short and with at least one obvious pronunciation. Examples: Kalak, Dolu, Arn, Haslafi. If you're stuck for inspiration, a world atlas can be a great starting point. Look for simple place names of one or two syllables, and perhaps change a letter or two to make them less familiar sounding.
The three approaches listed above can be mixed, of course. The first works well enough with either of the other two. Historical names and made-up names do not mix well, however. They send very mixed signals about the kind of milieu you are describing. It might work in special cases, such as someone traveling though a portal from an Earth-like world into a very alien one.
At level 0, your task is simply to avoid problems that poorly chosen names might create, nothing more. At level 1, we have the possibility of using invented names to actually enrich the story and give a sense of depth to the cultures you've created. At this level, we are creating names that "feel" like they come from a real language, even if we do not develop that language to any extent.
How do we create this illusion of a language behind the names? There are three ways:
Different languages work with different sets of sounds. French, for example, has nasal vowels while English does not. English, on the other hand, has affricates (the ch in "church" and the j in "judge") that are absent in French. So your first task is to list the sounds in your naming language, both vowels and consonants. Here's an example.
Vowels
a e i
Consonants
p ph t th k kh r l m
This is a very simple sound system (only twelve sounds), but it will serve. How do you choose which sounds to use? You can make your selection arbitrarily, but a little knowledge of phonology helps. In English and many other languages, consonants come in pairs: voiced and unvoiced (e. g., b and p). If one member of a pair is missing, it is likely absent from all pairs in the language. Hence, in this example, there is no b, and consequently no d or g either. Similar observations apply to stops and fricatives (t and s), nasals (n, m, ng) and so on. A passing understanding of these patterns and groupings can make for a more realistic selection of sounds. If you know nothing about phonology and don't want to learn, however, you can still make a good naming language by selecting sounds you like the look and feel of.
The next step is to note which sounds occur most often in the language, and which are rarer. You can do this to any level of detail you like, all the way down to assinging each sound a percentage frequency. I prefer a coarser approach. I'll just use a + sign to mark the most common sounds, and a - to mark the rarest:
a
e +
i
p +
ph -
t
th -
k
kh -
r +
l +
m
Now, we are almost ready to start making words.
Words are not just random strings of sounds. Words are formed of syllables, with a vowel or vowel-like sound as their core. Some languages can have consonants on either side of the vowel sound in a syllable, while other languages require (or prefer) syllables that either begin or end without a consonant.
Another thing to consider is consonant clusters. Some languages (Japanese and Hawaiian come to mind) avoid clusters of consonants, leading to words that simply alternate vowels and consonants. The Germanic languages (including English) allow some rather complex clusters (str, rmth, etc.)
For our example language, let's say that most syllables consist of consonant+vowel, but that sometimes consonant+vowel+consonant occurs. Clusters are allowed at the beginning of a syllable, but only where the second sound in the cluster is l or r. The clusters using r are more common.
Now we need to consider how long words typically are in our language. Generally speaking, the fewer sounds a language has, and the fewer options it has for making syllables, the longer the words need to be. When making names for use in fiction, however, one also needs to consider the reader's capacity to recognize and "digest" the names you use. One- or two-syllable names are best. Three-syllable names can be used, a bit more sparingly.
The sounds of this example language are simple enough that we can probably get away with more three-syllable words than usual. So let's say both two- and three-syllable words are common (with two-syllable ones being slightly more common), one-syllable words occur from time to time, and four-syllable words are rare.
Now let's make some words. You can do this by hand, or use the Wordmaker tool I created for this purpose.
One-syllable kra Two-syllable papi Three-syllable talethi Four-syllable karemepa
From these, or a longer list, you can now choose ones you like for
names. Perhaps Pekrem is a character, and she lives in the forest of
Thepari. Take a little care not to use names that are too similar,
particularly those starting with the same letter. Patremi and
Prataka, for example, might cause readers some confusion if both were
secondary characters in a story.
phe
mim
ri
ple
trep
reta
klemti
prate
lamme
rapim
phrepe
pekrem
pitha
tremte
pari
tapra
patremi
pherekhi
prataka
mathepe
krepele
kamepim
tapremel
platepa
thepari
pethetatre
kheplememi
In natural languages, names often have elements in common with other names. Consider the -a ending of feminine names in Latin and many of the Romance languages. There is the -son of English surnames, and the various -ton, -burg, -boro, -wick endings on the names of towns and cities. Whole words can be repeated elements, too: Cities beginning with "Saint", and general geographic terms such as "Lake," "Mount," "Bay", etc.
At level 1, you do not necessarily need to know the meanings of the elements you choose to re-use; simply having some recurring elements in your names will give the illusion of etymological depth. Maybe Pekrem's mother is Talkrem, and two villages in the Thepari Forest are named Ple Krepele and Ple Pari.
A word of caution: don't overdo this. In real languages, names have rich and complex histories, so they don't all follow a simple mechanical pattern. Beside those two villages, there may be a third one name Tapremel Ri, or Pitha.
Now we can even give our language a name! Let's call it Talethi, and the people who speak it are the Taleth.
Let's pause now and reflect on what we've accomplished. For only an hour or so of time, we now have a group of original invented names that seem linguistically connected and authentic, and give the culture a certain esthetic or feel. Furthermore, they don't sound like a shallow Tolkien rip-off either.
If you have more than one culture in your milieu, you can go through the process again for each one. Now the languages will not only contribute to the esthetic of your story, but they will mark the different cultures and help them stand apart from each other.
What more do we need? For many writers, the answer is nothing. The only reason to go further is if you want to go beyond names and have the language convey meaning to the readers or figure in the story or back story. To do that, you need to know what your invented words (some of them, at least) mean. That takes us up to level 2.