A Rose By Any Other Name

I'm a fantasy girl at heart. I write it, I read it, I watch it, I listen to it, I sometimes think I live it. It's my genre, and I love it. Because I read a lot of fantasy, I run into a lot of invented languages. Tolkien did it better than perhaps anyone, and it's been a thing in fantasy as long as fantasy has existed, insofar as I'm aware. Plenty of folks make up languages for their writing, for speaking in code with friends, or just for their own amusement. I've made up a language of my own, for the very first draft of the WiP I'm currently overhauling.

I was talking to my husband about this the other day, since he's a big, big fan of languages. He studies not only foreign languages, but linguistics itself, and his advice to anyone who wants to include a fictional language in a novel is as follows: If you're not completely sure of what you're doing, don't do it.

I have a slightly different opinion on the matter than the Husband Guy, but the sentiment is one I very much agree with: If you don't have at least a passing understanding of how languages work, you run the risk of having an invented language that is little more than gibberish keysmashing, and that leaves readers feeling frustrated. You don't have to be a master linguist, but it's my opinion that if you just try making up a series of invented words, it's most likely not going to flow, not going to make sense, and readers will skip right over it in annoyance. I've seen fictional languages done well, and I've seen them done poorly, and poorly-constructed fictional languages always leave me wondering why the author felt the need to include them in the first place.

I'm not the Ultimate Authority, mind you, but speaking as both a writer who has tried and failed to construct a fictional language, and as a reader, most fictional languages drive me nutty. Tolkien was a philologist and a linguist, and so of course he knew what he was doing. You don't have to be a professor with credentials, but I stand by the opinion that you absolutely must understand how grammar works, and you can't just make up a string of words and expect them to sound good.

Also, a pet peeve: Umlauts. I feel like 99% of fantasy writers who include umlauts in their fictional languages have no idea how umlauts actually work.

I guess what I'm saying is this:

Playing with fictional languages can be fun, and it can benefit your story, but if you don't know what you're doing you run the risk of the language devolving into complete gibberish that can potentially piss off your readers. If you want to include a fictional language, devote time to figuring out more than just "[x] word means [x]." Figure out the grammar, and for the love of whatever gods you hold dear, please don't write "asdf jkl; uiop qwerty xyzqlb" and expect readers to believe it's anything more than random keysmashing.

Until next time,
J.