Just as Tolkien gave us our modern definitions of Elves and Dwarves, he also gave us on of the best examples of fantasy constructed languages. Since the beginnings of tabletop roleplaying there has been a long tradition of GMs and world builders making up languages. I'm writing this article about my experience with the process of formally designing and building a language. I'm going to try and avoid using technical terms as much as possible.
Background
Years ago I embarked on the traditional language-construction quest to build a Drakoni language as an outshoot of my work on Drakoni culture. More recently I put some examples of romanized Drakoni words in articles on this blog.
Below is an example of formal edict written in Drakoni and Elvish (in Teredahar, Elvish is the primary language of trade, thus English is used for all Elvish writing) modeled off of the Rosetta stone.
I have used Drakoni for a few years in my normal Pathfinder group's stories. The Frozen Kingdom only has a few examples of the Drakoni language so I could have just stuck with the same version I have been using (version 2, technically). However, recently someone with a formal background in speech and linguistics joined my circle of friends. She has agreed to help rework Drakoni as a properly-modeled, internally-consistent, and usable language.
Physically Speaking
The first step was just working out what sounds a Drakoni can actually make. For Mac's
concept art I described the Drakoni as having crocodile-like features. Typically dragons are drawn with shorter, more iguana-like features. Various other fractional-dragon races are portrayed with wildly differing facial structures and different kinds of tongues that impact what kinds of sounds they can make. We had to settle on the shape and position of teeth, lips, and tongue and how flexible they are. In the end we decided that:
- A Drakoni's tongue is in-between a crocodile and an iguana. It's broad, flat, and unforked but long and flexible enough that all Drakoni can touch their noses with their tongues. They can make a wide range of tongue and throat-based sounds.
- Their teeth are triangular, spaced out, and stand in two rows such that some sit outside of the lips when closed. This makes sounds that use the lips over the teeth like "f" and "v" impossible to cleanly make and requires using a stiffened upper lip instead of the top teeth to make sounds resembling "th". As a result, these sounds are rare and sound "lisp-y" when made.
- Their lips aren't able to make an "O" shape.
Evolution
Just as lifeforms change and evolve over time, so to does language. I'm assuming you know English if you're reading this (Hello, users of Google Translate) so I'm sure you know that languages pick up features over time mostly from other languages. For Drakoni, it was previously established that it evolved from an older Draconic language (no surprise there) so we started with what that older language was like.
Dragons aren't the most sociable creatures so it was probably very simplistic. Lots of hissing and growls and forceful words. This gave us an evolutionary starting point for the language of their smaller, more sociable offshoot race. Drakoni have ancestry from lizardfolk who are commonly depicted as being social, living in tribes, and doing trade. Drakoni doing similar would have evolved their language include more diverse sounds and convey more information. The swear words probably stayed close to the original Draconic, though.
Selecting Sounds
The next part is a bit arduous. I had to go through the 80-ish words that exist in v2 of the language and try to sound them out based on the newly-detailed understanding of Drakoni anatomy. This often involved sticking fingers in my mouth or holding my lips in different places to try and tease out what sounds you can make with those teeth and lips. I used the
International Phoenetic Alphabet and Wikipedia's interactive
sound tables to take a first pass at classifying the noises and then my linguist friend helped clean the data up.
Having clear IPA classifications meant we could now agree on how a particular string of sounds would add up to a word and how to speak words written in Drakoni. Not every language uses all of the sounds possible for its speakers to make, so we looked at anatomy again and decided that any sounds that might be possible but difficult to make are only found in loanwords taken from other languages. For example, we decided native Drakoni speech has an "n" but no "m" sound. "Magik" for instance in Drakoni is a loanword from Elvish.
At the end of this process we had 5 vowels and 28 consonant sounds. Three of the consonant sounds are made in ways that are less natural for Drakoni to make, so those are foreign sounds added to the Drakoni language over time. Knowing which sounds are common in the language and which are not is important when it comes to creating the language's vocabulary and written components.
In Part 2
Now that we know how Drakoni
speak, the next step is to turn it into an actual
language. In the next part I'll cover how the grammar, syntax, and writing system for Drakoni v3 were created.
Chapter 9 of The Frozen Kingdom is now available for preview.
