I’ve always seemed to have an aptitude for language. I learned how to read when I was 3 or 4 years old and could write by the time I was 5. In middle school, I started learning Spanish and now can speak and write it somewhat fluently. Last year, I taught myself how to write in Tolkien’s writing system of Tengwar, which I did a whole blog post about last year. Now, as a teenager who has been working on writing a quintet of novels since the 7th grade (when will they come out? I have no clue) I have created my own languages for some of the people groups in my books.
Are they wildly incomplete? Yes. But they are languages none the less. Thus, here’s how to write your own fantasy language for your next book.
#1: What is a Language?
A language is essentially the ordered noises that people make to communicate their thoughts, ideas, wants, needs, etc. It shapes culture and history and is vitally important to the creation of any secondary world. Different noises (or a series of noises put together) are attributed to different things and are memorized. Adding more noises to other ones (such as how “cow” is singular, but if I add the “s” sound to the end it becomes plural), can change the meaning of the noise.
But notice how I said “ordered”.
In order for those noises to be considered a language, they must have meaning attributed to them and be able to be put together into a sentence with grammatical structure, including adjectives, adverbs, verbs, present tense, past tense, and all those other things you learned about but took for granted in school. If they don’t have these things, it’s not a language; it is gibberish.
Languages can also have writing systems, which are a series of symbols that are meant to represent the sounds made. While some of these symbols are more complex than others (such as Chinese which has 50,000 different characters representing words, letters, phrases, etc.), they are an invaluable source of knowledge for anyone able to read it. Making a written version of your language with your own alphabet is great if you want to go the extra step, but is optional.
Once you understand the basics of what language is, you can then move on to step two.
#2: What Does Your Language Sound Like?
Finding out the sound of your language can be one of the easier parts of making your own fantasy language. Does it sound angry like German or pretty like French? If you know what other languages sound like from movies, T.V., or YouTube videos, you can absolutely use that as inspiration for your own language and even take and modify words from other real-life languages to incorporate into your own. While this might seem like cheating, just remember that other languages (like English) often do this in real life, so it is allowed.
#3: Figuring Out Grammar
As I said before, grammar is what makes a language a language because it’s what orders it. Because of this, you will need to take on the tedious, but necessary task of figuring out what your root words will be and what suffixes you can add to them later to change their meanings. Will some nouns and verbs share a similar root word but have different suffixes to denote their meaning? How will they be conjugated? Will words be gendered constantly (like in Spanish) or will they only be gendered when talking about something that is actually capable of having a gender (like in English)? How will words be ordered in different contexts? Will adjectives come before or after the noun they describe? These are all important questions to be asking yourself as you create the language. To make it easier, I would suggest writing down your sentences on a piece of paper and dissecting them bit by bit to figure out what you want things to mean.
#4: Putting it all Together
After you’ve figured out grammar rules, you can just start putting together your sentences. Start slowly and work your way up to longer sentences. If you’re like me and don’t write anything based off of an outline, feel free to do this while coming up with new nouns and verbs. Just make sure everything makes sense and flows together. If it doesn’t, your language is starting to devolve.
While I know that this isn’t a deep dive into everything necessary to creating a language, this is just the basics. I am not a linguistic expert and can’t tell you everything that goes into language development. However, I think from this, you can use this as a springboard into creating a language for your fantasy world.
Until next time,
M.J.
The Tanuki Corner 
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