Languages created for fiction

For a verisimilitude that goes beyond the boundaries in movies, books or series, a lot of efforts a put into developing the right scripts that include from the most exact set (if we are talking about historic based productions) and in this case, the proper language. This is what we want to take as our focus, the development of fictional languages on literature, movies and series paying special attention to the social, cultural and political aspects that are built around those languages. As examples of these languages created for fiction are Alienese (from Futurama); Dothraki ( Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire); Klingon (Star Trek) ; Elvish: (The works of J.R.R. Tolkien).

Elvish language

This is a very misterious language and also the most pure language of middle earth, talking about the context of Tolkien’s book. This language embodies the perfection of Elfic society among the books. It is said that this language is pure as tolkien tough of it as a language that could built fromcevery single word perfection as the most important caractheristic of them as a culture. They look forward beauty by speaking, writing and talking between them. In elfic language everything gets poetic, as them are usually seen as the most developed society in the books. Emotions and feelings are printed in every word. They were not into communication as we think of it, they conceived language as a form of trascending meaning and taking it beyond what we built around communication.

There is a certain difficult level, as Gandalf proved by learning the language, and showed how hard was to go over the “mprtal” language structures and immerge in new varieties of constructing meaning. Poetics are all around the elfic, and there is a lot of things to say about them, what is certain, is its fictional origin; anyways, elfic language is very different in movies compared to the books, e obviously the author was able to explore much more. Elfic was not tought to be talked by humans, as in the movie is shown how it happens when Eowym falls in love with Aragorn. This language embodies social status and also, implies the Elf race immortality which is proven to be a other of the elements that makes of this language in its contexts the best among them as the other one as not as old, and had been affected by it, becoming not languages but dialects. This language was tough from an oriental perspective and when it is written, you can deveil that they do not necessarily say things in a literal way but using metaphors.




By: Juan Felipe Pabón

Have you ever heard about Na’vi?

For those fanatics of movies and specifically for those who have seen Avatar, this is an easy question to answer, but for those who don’t have any idea of what it means, let me introduce you a little bit in the Na’vi’s  world.

Na’vi  is a community of indigenous inhabitants of Pandora, a fictional world created by James Cameron In the movie Avatar that is referred as a moon of the Polifemo planet. But this word, Na’vi, also stands for the language this community uses, which was created by Paul Frommer, a professor of Marshall School of Business with a doctorate in linguistics, Tis specialist was brought in by te movies director “to create an entire functioning language for the tribe of 10-foot-tall blue aliens” ( (Boucher, 2009).

Frommer accepted to design the language but it had to be created according to the director´s idea about how it should sound and that it had to be learnable for the actors and easy to pronounce, but it couldn’t seem or sound like any other human language.

So thinking on to those specifications, Paul created the language like this: Na’vi has 20 consonants, 7 vowels, 4 diphthongs, and 2 syllabic “pseudovowels,” rr and ll. It actually counts with more than 1.000 words and it keeps growing because of the fans that create new expressions under Froom’s supervision.

Na’vi is a language that doesn’t count with letters like B, D or G; but it has these vowels:  a, ä, e, i, ì, o, u. For creating the vowels, Froom inspired in Japanese, in which each vowel represents a syllable, for example: the word tsaleioae has six syllables: tsa-lɛ-i-o-a-ɛ. (Zimmer, 2009)

According to the numbers, this language has some similarities with French, because it counts with an octal system taking into account that Na’vis only have four fingers. Some of the numbers recognized in the movie are: Aw’ (1), “Mune” (2), “Tsìng” (3), “Vofu”(16) y “Tsìvol” (32); what takes us to conclude that they use the root of four, which is “tsi” and the root of 8,  which is “vo”

Next I will give you some examples of words in Na’vi for you to have an idea of how it works:

Kaltxì: Hello

Irayo: Thank you

Mìso: Far

Lok: Close

Tutean: Man

Tutee: Woman

Atan: Light

Eyktan: Leader

Fya'o: Road

Hiyìk:Funny

Kerusey: Dead

Lehrrap: Dangerous.

So that is why I would like to conclude with these words: “Fictional languages are by far the largest group of artistic languages. Fictional languages are intended to be the languages of a fictional world, and are often designd with the intent of givin more depth and an appearance of plausibility to the fictional worlds with which they are associated, and to have their characters communicate in a fashion which is both alien and dislocated” (Milani, 2009)

By: Alejandra Ospina

A language came to the future

Since the beginning of the human race, primitive humans communicate with each other through gestures and symbols. Over time, these symbols were being organized specifically in coding systems, thus becoming languages. Languages arise to respond to the need of man to communicate with each other in a particular culture. These were mixed with others, due to the cultural mixtures with the passage of time, thus creating new languages.

However, there are other kind languages that do not correspond to evolution, are languages that have simply been created for fiction. That is the case of Alienese languages, these are two languages created by the tv series Futurama. The alien languages are composed of a set of symbols that at first glance may seem simple scribbles, but that analyzed carefully are a code that encrypts the Romanic alphabet.

According to Britannica website “Alienese (also just called “Alien Language”) is perhaps one of the easiest languages to learn […] the language of the animated show Futurama, began as a simple substitution alphabet, with 26 characters that directly corresponded to the English alphabet. However, that proved too easy for fans, so a second form of the language was devised, using math instead […] Each symbol has a numerical value, and messages are decoded into English thusly: first, translate the first symbol directly (0=A, 1=B, etc.), then for remaining letters subtract the previous symbol’s value (if the result is less than 0, add 26).”

Even though the language was thought to hide clever jokes of black humor in the show, thanks to him also develop several cultures. In the series, the speakers of the alien language are not only intergalactic beings living around the universe but also mutants living in the sewers of New York.

Although so far the alien language is not an official language in any country in the world, there are plenty of websites where you can learn, and translate what you want to this language. And if the predictions in the series are fulfilled (French and German will be dead languages in the future, besides the unification of English and Spanish "Spanglish") it is best that you learn at least the basic principles in Alienese, so that you stay silent when visiting another galaxy.

By: Andrés Correa.