How to Create a Language

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From the Klingon language of the Star Trek universe to the Na’vi language of James Cameron’s Avatar, fictional languages can do a lot to make a work of fiction real. Creating a fictitious language can be an intensive endeavor as the process is complex and requires a lot of thought. However, with some practice and dedication, anyone can create their own language for fun or as part of a fictional world.

Start building basic vocabulary with translations for everyday words like pronouns, body parts, animals, and common verbs like “go” and “eat.”
Create an alphabet with pictograms, original symbols and letters or borrow characters from other languages.
Decide how to arrange the subjects, verbs, and nouns in your sentences so that they have a grammatical structure that makes sense.

Examples of Dothraki phrases

Examples of Klingon phrases

Examples of Na’vi phrases

Assign voices to pronouns such as “I”, “my”, “he”, “his”, “she”, “her”, “they”, “it” and “we”. Then decide how to pronounce verbs like “to be,” “to have,” “to love,” “to go,” and “to do.” You can also include simple words like “a,” “and,” “that,” “but,” and “or.”[1]
- You can also come up with words for numbers up to 10 and then decide how you want your language to count to 100.
- For example, in the fictional Sindarian language, “Him” is translated as “Hon”. In Dothraki, “She” translates as “Anna”. In Valyrian, “to go” translates as “naejot jikagon”.
As your vocabulary grows, start naming everything that comes to mind. As you come across something, think of a word for that item or concept and write down how it sounds when you say the word out loud. This will help you start thinking in your new language.[2]
- Check out the lists of frequently used words to get an idea of which words you should add first. Think of words for objects in your house, animals, days of the week, weather, body parts, food, people, jobs, locations, clothes and more.
- If you are confused, remember that you can borrow words from other languages. You can even change the word. For example, the French word for man is homme. The Portuguese word — homem — is almost the same, with just a few letters/pronunciation changed.
Basic words for translation
Animals: dog, cat, fish, bird, cow, pig, mouse, horse, wing, animal
Transport: train, plane, car, truck, bicycle, bus, boat, ship, tire, petrol, motorbike, ticket
Locations: city, house, apartment, street, airport, train station, bridge, hotel, restaurant, farm, court, school, office, room, town, university, club, bar, park, camp, shop, theater, library, hospital, church, market, land, building, soil, space, bank
Apparel: hat, dress, suit, skirt, shirt, shirt, trousers, shoes, pocket, coat, stain, clothes
Colors: red, green, blue, yellow, brown, pink, orange, black, white, gray
Open the dictionary and start translating all the random words from your native language to your fictional language. Not only will this be helpful if you forget how to say something, but it will ensure you don’t miss a word. You can also use translation dictionaries, such as an English to French dictionary or a German-English dictionary to get an idea of how words are pronounced in different languages.[3]
- Try to make the words easy to pronounce and read in order to avoid the tangles that make language learning difficult.
- In general, simple, common words should be shorter. For example, a long word like “kesolainotokos” would mean “volcanic ash”, while a short word like “giob” would mean “you” and a middle word like “umevo” could mean “movie”.
Compound words are a great way to develop your language quickly without having to invent entirely new words, and this method works great for nouns. Simply take the first noun that describes the function of something and then add it to the second noun that describes what the noun is. Modern languages like German and English use this technique to create new words every day.[4]
- For example, if the word ‘Khinsa’ means ‘China’ and the word ‘Bever’ means ‘Drink’, you can make the word ‘Khinsabever’, which means ‘tea’. This works because the beverage tea originates from ancient China, so it can be considered a Chinese drink.
Use your new language to come up with a name for the language. Try to come up with a short, unique word that captures the origin of the language or identifies the race of people who speak the language.
- The name of your language doesn’t have to be related to race or country, but it can be if you want it to be.
- For example, in the show Star Trek, the Klingons speak Klingon, and in the movie Avatar, the Na’vi people speak Na’vi. In Game of Thrones, the Dothraki, who live by the Dothraki Sea, speak Dothraki.

Draw your own letters to represent the sounds that make up your language. Then arrange them in a pattern to create the alphabet. You can even sing it out loud to practice making the sounds.[5]
- Keep in mind that this can be a long process and that each letter or syllable should have at least one sound in your language.
Consult the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Georgian and Coptic alphabets, which are still used by native speakers around the world today. If one of these alphabets contains all the sounds you need, you won’t need to create a new one. You can assign a new pronunciation to the letters if needed. This will also make learning your language easier for people who already use that alphabet.[6]
- You can combine alphabets using letters from Latin, Cyrillic or Greek words, for example. In this case, you can use “Â” for the sound /j/ (“y”), and Latin letters for other sounds.
- You may also want to use romanizations, which are translations of other words that use different scripts. For example, the Russian word znam is romanized into English as “znayu”. This can be very useful if your language does not use Latin.
Draw what each word means using simple lines to make a pictograph or symbol. Then come up with a pronunciation for each symbol based on the different parts of the drawing. Make sure each symbol or mark has its own unique sound.[7]
- Many languages, such as Chinese and Japanese, use pictograms or symbols to represent their spoken language.
- In English and other languages, numbers are considered pictograms or symbols because they are not part of the alphabet.
To keep your alphabet short, include accents, small marks above and below some letters to change the pronunciation. In general, accents can go on vowels, such as a, e, i, o, uiy, and some consonants, such as c, l, n, r, s, ti z.[8]
- For example, E can be pronounced /ɛ/, like the “e” in “dress”, while É is pronounced /ə/, like the “o” in “from”.

Decide whether you want the subject to come first and then the verb when you make a sentence, just as you would make a sentence in English. Then decide in which order people should put the words to ask the question. You can use your native language to decide the sentence structure or you can create your own rules.[9]
- For example, in English the word order is subject-object-verb (SOV). In Japanese, the word order is subject-verb-object (SVO). An example would be, in SOV order “I (subject) walked (verb) home (object)” So the SVO version would be I (subject) home (object) walked (verb)
- Once you’ve decided on this order, you can make general rules about where to put adjectives, possessors, adverbs, and more in your sentences.
Choose a prefix or suffix for nouns if you want to show the difference between one and more than one. Some constructed languages use “double” words, which just means that a word is repeated 2 times to show that there is more than one. Note that you can construct language without plural nouns, but this can become confusing for learners and speakers.[10]
- Plurals can be as simple as adding an “a-” sound before a word or even putting an “-s” sound at the end of the world, as you would in English.
In most languages, verbs change depending on the subject and tense of the sentence. Decide whether you want to modify the verbs in your language by adding sounds, such as prefixes or suffixes, to indicate who is speaking and when the action of the sentence happened.[11]
- For example, if you want to say that a person or thing likes something in the present tense in English, you would say “I like,” “you like,” “he/she likes,” “likes,” “we like,” or “They love.” In this example, you can see that the verb “to like” has been modified by adding an ‘s’ to the end for pronouns that are in the third person singular, such as he, she, and it.
- You may also want to add a word to distinguish between words like “swim” and “swim”. However, some languages, such as French, do not. In French “Je nage” can mean “I swim” or “I swim”.
- You can also choose to change the word entirely to match the subject and action of the sentence. These are usually called “irregular” verbs.
Start with a simple sentence like “I have a cat.” Then you can move on to more complex sentences, like “I like watching TV, but I prefer going to the movies.” If you come across words that you haven’t created yet, make them up and make sure they fit the grammatical rules of your sentence.[12]
Ways of practicing the language
Keep a journal in a new language. This is a great way to practice your new language every day. Start a write-only journal in your language and tell about your day.
Teach your friends how to speak your language. Once they learn this, try to hold a full conversation with them. Keep a “dictionary” of your words close by so you can refer to it while you’re talking.
Recite poems in your own language. They may not sound so nice, but this will give you good practice speaking your language out loud.
Translate the Babylonian text or another text into your language. Choose a favorite book, article, or novel to translate, or use the Babylonian Text, a piece of text commonly used by people creating their own languages. It contains words and phrases that should test the limits of your language.

Categories: How to
Source: HIS Education

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