Inside conlangs, the constructed languages on Game of Thrones, Star Trek, and Avatar

The concept of a “conlang,” or constructed language, is mind-boggling. Conlangs are languages made up from scratch, like the Klingon language (Klingonese) from Star Trek, Na’vi from the Avatar movies, and Valyrian and Dothraki from Game of Thrones. And J.R.R. Tolkien created several languages for his Lord of the Rings series. When you think of how complex any given real language is, making up an entire language for a movie or TV show seems like a quixotic exercise in pointlessness. But I think that’s what makes constructed languages so fascinating. Fluent speakers of these languages exist, they’re not just pieces of obscure pop-culture lore; conlangs potentially have a life larger than the stories that birthed them.

Learning a new language can seem daunting, but it seems less daunting when you know that people have done it before. The first conlang was Klingonese, credited to Marc Okrand. According to Paul Frommer,  communications professor at the University of Southern California, after Klingonese was developed, having an alien or fantasy language simply represented by nonsense sounds was a “no-go.”

In 2005, Frommer received an email from James Cameron’s production company seeking a linguist for an unnamed sci-fi project. After getting the job, he began working on the language that would become Na’vi.

Even non-human languages have to be human enough

To anyone who wonders how an entire language can be constructed from scratch, this is where the story gets interesting. Frommer told The Guardian that “It wasn’t a completely blank slate.” The Na’vi language had to be learnable by humans, as the plot of the movie involves humans learning and speaking Na’vi. This may seem like a meaningless detail, but it was crucial to the language’s construction. “Any linguist would be able to come up with a logical language, but it might be so utterly non-human that no human being could ever learn it,” Frommer said.

There are then some fairly well-defined steps to follow when creating a conlong, such as thinking about how the language should sound, and how it relates to the culture of the people who speak it. That last bit is the most exciting part of constructing a conlang, as it requires the linguist to be a storyteller. For instance, ceremonies are important to the Na’vi culture, so their language has a separate register for words spoken in ceremonial contexts.

Even more prosaic aspects of language construction can involve storytelling. All languages have a prescribed word order for simple sentences that just involve a subject, verb, and object. For instance, in English, that order is subject-verb-object. Take the sentence “cows eat grass.” Cows are the subject, grass is the object, and “eat” is the verb.

But only about 45 percent of languages use this subject-verb-object structure. Klingonese uses an object-verb-subject construction, which is present in only one percent of real languages. This was a conscious decision by Okrand to make the language sound counterintuitive to human ears, and therefore alien.

On constructing the Valyrian and Dothraki languages for Game of Thrones

As impressive as Klingonese may be, when David J. Peterson began working on languages for Game Of Thrones in 2012, he took things to another level. Real-world languages evolve over thousands of years, leading to strange inconsistencies, Peterson included such inconsistencies in the Dothraki and Valyrian languages. For example, in Dothraki, the word for “girl” translates to “mushroom.” This, Peterson explained, is because it evolved from a slang term referring to a traditional bell-shaped haircut worn by girls.

Unfortunately, in this day and age, nothing’s ever just simple plain fun. When discussing conlangs, we have to also consider that the real world has dying languages that need our attention far more than fictional ones. But I believe that conlangs have a utility here too. Like I said, conlangs make learning languages less intimidating. Klingonese is a very limited language, with only around 5,000 words, making it a fraction the size of any real natural language. If you want to learn other languages to broaden your horizons or to preserve important cultural heritages, why not use Klingonese, Valyrian, or Na’vi as practice languages, easy starter-level languages so that you can learn the ropes of multilingualism?

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