A “Naming Language” is a language that, as might be expected, is used for names, specific words, and maybe short phrases. Depending on how detailed you get, you could put about the same amount of time into a Naming Language that you would put into revising gobbledygook, or you may invest more time. Either way, the result will likely be more structured than gobbledygook and easier to develop into a more complete language if you ever get the itch.
It’s generally easiest to build a naming language following these stages, in this order:
Sounds —> Syllables —> Words
Stage 1: Sounds
Sound Collection
Begin by imagining what you want your language to sound like. Does it sound harsh to your ears, or does it flow gently? Do any particular sounds stand out in your mind? Can you think of any sounds that you don’t want in your language? Write out any ideas you have, and feel free to add or remove from this list until you are happy with it.
Once you have a general idea of what you want your language to sound like, organize and record each sound in a single spot and in a manner you will easily understand. Include both vowels and consonants. (I highly recommend using the International Phonetic Alphabet [IPA] when you do. For those unfamiliar, see the end of this page for more information.)
Here’s a tip for collecting sounds faster: if you want your language to be inspired by the sounds of a real-world language (or if you want to wholesale steal the sound chart of an existing language), consider searching for that language’s phonemes[1] on the internet. Looking up “[Language] IPA Chart” or “[Language] Phoneme Chart” will usually do the trick, and often Wikipedia will get you close enough to what you want. (This recommendation works best for those using IPA. If you are making up your own system for representing individual sounds with symbols, you might be better off looking up audio samples of the language and recording the sounds and sound combinations that spark your interest.)
Sound Curation
Once you have a list of sounds, organized and recorded, you now need to curate that list—or, remove sounds that don’t really fit with your overall vision (even if you like them), find sounds that fill gaps, and so forth. While sound collection is about discovery, sound curation is about conscious formation.
If you want your language to sound naturalistic, most natural languages average 4–6 vowels and 20–30 consonants. Going outside these rough guidelines may result in a language that sounds increasingly strange, but there are real-world examples of languages that break these averages. As an extreme example, the real-world language Rotokas has only 7 consonants, but this is balanced out by having many more vowels than most other languages. On the opposite extreme, the Caucasus Mountain language family has only with 2 vowels in its sound inventory, but significantly more consonants than the average language.[2]
Languages often feel defined by swathes of sounds that are present and used frequently, or that aren’t present at all. When curating the sounds for your language, look at each sound you have and consider as many similar sounds as you can think of; adding a few, or all, of those sounds could help your language sound distinctive. You can also accomplish addition through subtraction by removing categories of sounds. (If you are using the IPA, this is made easy by just looking at sound categories, such as Plosive or Fricative, or the positions that sounds are produced, such as Labial or Glottal.)
Example: Kekeblin
I invented the language Kekeblin for my Third realm universe. When collecting and curating sounds for this language, I wanted to focus on sounds that, to me, created a strong, easy flow with little interruptions—“flowy” sounds like l, r, f, s, z, sh. (Fricatives and liquids, to use linguistic jargon.) I also accomplished this by removing sounds with “stoppage”—p, b, k, g, and the like. (Plosives.)
I provide a little deeper dive into Kekeblin in Addendum A (Method 3: Kekeblin). To my ears I succeeded, but ultimately the “feel” of a language is subjective, so don’t be surprised if readers or hearers of your language have different thoughts.
Stage 2: Syllables
Most people have an instinctive understanding of what a syllable is in their native language and can clap out the syllables of a word to a beat. What most people don’t know is that every language has rules for syllable formation, what sounds can and can’t be placed next to each other (and at the beginning or end of a syllable). It’s likely you started unconsciously thinking of syllable formation while selecting and curating sounds, perhaps evidenced with thoughts like “These sounds go well together,” or “I like these sounds but don’t like them together.”
Defining Syllable
A single word can be formed using one or more syllables. For our purposes, syllable is defined as “a part of a word that is a vowel and that may have a consonant (or consonants) before it and/or after it.”
Inventing Syllable Rules
When deciding how syllables can be formed in your language, you make the rules for how many sounds can show up in each part of a syllable. You can also make exceptions for syllables in specific locations, such as those that begin a word or end a word, or for syllables that are part of words borrowed from other languages. What sounds you allow, and where, greatly influences the sound (and therefore identity) of your language; when coming up with ideas, sound things out, see what you like!
When making rules for syllables, you may find it useful to use a linguistic notation. I’ll provide an example below:
(C)(C)(C)VC
“C” stands for “Consonant,” and “V” stands for vowel. Parenthesis represent optional sounds. So, the above notation creates a syllable rule that means, essentially, “Up to three consonants may precede a vowel in a syllable, but a vowel is always required and one consonant (no more or less) is required after the vowel.”
You can leave your general syllable rules that simple, or you can get more specific by adding further rules: sound (A) may never precede sound (B) in a syllable, sound (C) only ever shows up before (or after) a vowel in a syllable, etc.
Note: Sounds and letters do not match 1:1. Keep that in mind when recording potential syllables while using your syllable formation rules. For example, “c” and “h” are letters with their own unique sounds, but when combined into “ch” they represent a single, different, distinct sound. Separating sounds from letters, while still being forced to use letters to represent sounds, can be tricky, but it makes language play a lot easier. (This is another reason to use IPA, which has fewer instances of using two syllables to represent one sound.)
Creating Syllable Inventory
One thing that I recommend not doing is create an extensive inventory of all the syllables that will be present in your language. That’s boring, time-consuming, and just plain unnecessary. Once you have a start on what you want your rules to be, you’re set to begin forming words using those syllables as needed.
It may be helpful to write down some sample syllables so you have an idea of what your syllables will sound like, and you can have fun combining different syllables to get a sense for what longer words will sound like. You may find, as you do this, that you want to revise your sound inventory or revise your rules for forming syllables, and that’s a good thing. That’s part of the inventive process!
Example: Kekeblin
Here is Kekeblin’s syllable structure:
(C)(l/r)[3]V(C)
To translate my rules for syllable formation in Kekeblin, the smallest syllable that I can make is just a vowel, syllables may have up to two consonants before the vowel (the second of which must be either an l or r), and then up to one consonant after the vowel.
I made a handful of rules regarding syllable formation beyond this, and I’ll share just a few here. Rule 1 is that, in Kekeblin, syllables with no consonants are extremely rare (even if technically allowed). Rule 2 is that certain consonants that are, linguistically speaking, almost vowels can be used in place of a vowel when forming a syllable. This does lead to some very unique word formation that is technically readable but very difficult to pronounce with a human mouth.
I also chose to make heavy use of sound combinations that don’t happen in English, like ts, when coming up with sample syllables. (That sound, ts, might look like it breaks my syllable rules above, but in linguistic terms ts can be translated as a single type of sound called an “affricate.” The English language doesn’t have a single symbol to represent that sound, so I’m forced to represent it with two.)
Stage 3: Words
Once you have decided how syllables are formed in your language, you can start making words in a structured way. Words can be made up of anything from a single, minimal syllable (such as the word “a” in English) to a long, complicated string of syllables (“supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” if you count that as a word, which you should, it being so atrocious and all).
Once again, you make whatever rules for your language. Maybe you want a minimum number of syllables per word, or a maximum number, or you don’t want certain sounds to be allowed next to each other even if they aren’t part of the same syllable. You can also make rules about what sounds must begin or end a word—like how in Spanish grammatically “male” words end in -o and grammatically “female” words in -a. Once again, the world is your oyster, and you can later change that oyster to a clam if you think it’s worth the effort, so have fun with it.
Generating Words Directly
If you’re lacking ideas for things to create words for, make a list of English words that the translations of would be used often in your fictional language. For example, if the culture you are making a language for is agrarian, then your language is likely to have a word (or words) for sheep, cows, pigs, wheat, and various vegetables (or whatever animals and plants they farm).
The words you choose to invent can also reflect the unique traits or perceptions of the people that speak that language. For example, some Native American languages don’t have separate words for “green” and “blue”; if you needed to differentiate between the two, you’d be forced to use a reference point, such as the color of the sky versus the color of grass. As a more extreme example, if your language does not have a word for “water,” then its speakers likely are life forms that live in an environment extremely alien to humans!
Generating Words Through Derivation
You can also make your word invention a little easier by using derivations. For example, in English you can invent something, then you can describe what you invented by calling it an invention; adding –tion to some verbs turns them into nouns. You can do the equivalent in your language, and you don’t have to do it with suffixes either—many languages derive words using prefixes or even infixes (sounds inserted in the center of a word)!
Sound Identity
Naturalistic languages do not have an even distribution of sounds. Most languages overuse certain sounds in their sound inventory and underuse others, rather than having every sound evenly present among commonly used words. If your goal is to make a language that sounds naturalistic, then it’s okay to lean on your favorite sounds more often than others. This will contribute to your language’s unique identity, and make the less-commonly-used sounds stick out more when they do show up.
Don’t Overdo It
Whatever you do, do not attempt to make a large dictionary all at once. Now that you have clear rules on how words are allowed to be formed, and well-organized notes on what sounds are in your language’s sound inventory, you can invent words as needed. Doing this will help your words feel fresh, and help keep you from going insane. Making up words can be a dry, dry experience.
Example: Kekeblin
Returning to Kekeblin, I made detailed rules for how syllables may be combined to make different words and different types of words, which I don’t think would be much value to provide here in full; however, an example is that nouns must begin and end with consonants, although internal syllables aren’t necessarily required to begin or end with a consonant.
I also made rules for how long different kinds of words can be, syllabically speaking: for example, nouns can be a maximum of five syllables long, and verbs three. This is before combining words and derivations, which means words in Kekeblin can get very long when used in complete sentences.
My initial vocabulary also featured many words themed around honor and bravery, as I determined those two ideals were a critical aspect of Kekeblin culture. Two examples are “honor” (tsehr) and “coward” (nehlethimon). Other words simply resulted from me playing around with my own sound rules and finding uses for the results I liked; the Kekeblin word for dog, “bvarch,” resulted from this.
Aside: Stress
I’ve been talking a lot about the “sound” of your language a fair amount because, even though it’s going to be read, your readers will look at how you spell your language and make up sounds in their head (or skip over attempting to pronounce it). They may or may not imagine sounds similar to what you intend, but most will imagine something. They will almost certainly imagine a stress system that matches their native stress system, however.
Stress happens when a vowel in a specific syllable is emphasized more than the others. Stress is easy to interpret when spoken, but it can seem very arbitrary when written. Consider the following two words: contract and contract. The former is a piece of paper formalizing an agreement, while the latter is a verb that states something has bunched up against itself. Now that you know which words I am referring to, you will read them with different stress, despite being spelled the same, but you didn’t know that before I put them into context.
Why am I bringing this up? If you were taking a course on inventing a language, probably an entire unit would be dedicated to linguistic stress patterns. Well, those aren’t represented in writing, so you don’t need them if all you want is a language sketch for your SFF novel.
That said, deciding on how you want stress to be handled in your language could be useful, for example, if you plan on narrating your audio book or if you want to provide pronunciation instructions to your narrator. Alternately, deciding on a stress pattern for your language can simply be fun. Some languages use a “formula” for determining stress (for example, the penultimate syllable of most words is always stressed), while other languages have unique stress per-word that just has to be memorized, and a wide spectrum in between.
Aside: International Phonetic Alphabet and Romanization
To finish up, I want to make good on my promise to mention the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA); I highly recommend using it when crafting your language. The IPA includes nearly all sounds that have appeared in a recorded human language, making it the best tool for creating sketches for invented languages. It’s also good for generating ideas—looking at a complete IPA chart and seeing all the recorded sounds might give you inspiration for sounds you want to include in your own language.
Here’s a link to an IPA chart with the sounds each symbol makes (just click on the symbol), and here’s an online keyboard that you can use to type in IPA.
Note: If you are attempting to create a language sketch for a species capable of making sounds that humans cannot, the IPA (and probably any other human alphabet) might have difficulty representing those sounds. Depending on how far removed from human-possible speech you want the language to sound like, you may be better off describing it rather than trying to build a formal language.
Note: Regardless of what symbols you choose to represent the sounds of your language, if you’re going to publish your story in English you are going to need to translate your language’s sounds into English letters—in other words, romanize it. When romanizing, the number one rule is KISS—Keep It Simple… well, you know the rest. If a single English letter can represent a sound, don’t use more. Don’t insert unnecessary symbols that don’t actually represent sound or stress—this is a common sin with apostrophes in fictional words.
Creating a romanization can happen at any point during this process, so do what’s best for you. For me, I romanize my languages after deciding on a sound chart.
Creating a romanization does not mean you should abandon tracking the IPA spelling of words in your language. The IPA spelling helps you remember how the word is intended to be pronounced, while the romanization helps you present that word in a form comprehensible to your readers; in other words, have both present in your dictionary.
Advantages
At this point, you probably have more than you need to insert snippets of your invented language into dialogue, to use it to help you name things, and you have all the framework you need to build on the language in the future if you so desire.
Using the tools you have prepared for yourself, your invented language will have more consistency than a gobbledygook language and will be more resistant to scrutiny from fans (or critics). When making new words and phrases, you’ll have a framework to work within rather than needing to produce new words from thin air and a vague feeling.
At any point in the process, you can stop and revise the rules you’ve made, so you don’t need to feel eternally bound by any rule you set—although be wary of this the more you use your language, as changing things after you have written a lot can lead to one of two problems:
- A lot of extra work updating older instances of your language.
- Older instances of your language become out-of-date because you don’t update them.
Disadvantages
Initial time investment is the biggest disadvantage of sketching a naming language. Building a language sketch takes time, particularly if it’s your first time, and especially if you are unfamiliar with IPA and either need to learn it or invent your own system for recording unique sounds.
Method 2 Steps Summarized
- Make a record of the sounds you want included in your language.
- Most languages have about 5 vowels and 25 consonants, but consider that a loose guideline.
- Decide on rules for how those sounds can be combined to form syllables.
- Syllables are composed of a vowel that may or may not have a consonant (or consonants) before and after it.
- Decide on rules for how syllables can be combined to form words.
- Use your syllable rules to create words.
- If you want, create further rules for how different types of words must be formed using your syllables.
- Don’t create a lot of words all at once—just the words you need.
- When creating words, think about what words would be included in your language—and especially which words would be used most often.
- Put words together to create phrases, if desired.
You may find a personal example of a naming language here.
[1] A linguistic term that basically means sounds.
[2] The Art of Language Invention, pages 50–51.
[3] This means “the sound l or the sound r.”
Copyright © 2023 by David Ludlow
Boo Ludlow 