Welcome and thanks for reading!

Today’s Worldbuilding Topic: Language!

Specially how to create words in your world’s language that seem uniform and consistent without coming up with an entire language.

A few caveats to this post.

First, if you are planning to completely create a language from scratch, good luck and this is not the post for you. There are many excellent resources out there for that and I wish you must success.

Second, there are a few dos and don’ts with made up words in your world.

DON’T make up words for concepts that are already concepts in whatever language you are writing your book in, with the sole exception of if your main character and reader are not supposed to understand the word. Ie. Don’t invent a new word for bread. Just use bread

DON’T make up words for the sake of making up words. They should serve a purpose in your story.

DO go ahead and create word for things that are unique about your world, such as dishes we don’t have on earth, clothing items we don’t have, magic, where English equivalents don’t work, weird physics in your world (such as places where there are no gravity.)

DO go ahead and make up words for more than one word concepts that exist in your world but don’t in the language you are writing. IE, if there is a concept in your world of a specific emotion for that feeling when you put a book down and are disappointed there isn’t a second one, go ahead and make up a word for that.

KEEP in mind, whatever word you are making up, you are going to have to explain the concept to your reader. Sometimes you may have to explain the concept more than once.

Basically as long as it doesn’t exist in the language you are writing and serves a purpose, feel free to make up some words for it!

Now onto what you came here for!

The first step I do is create a sound inventory for my language. This helps make the words all sound like they belong to one language.

Check out this link to the IPA sound inventory, with auditory sounds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_pulmonic_consonant_chart_with_audio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio

Now, to make your sound inventory’s more realistic, I highly recommend watching some introduction videos on conlanging, but if you’re looking for a quick and dirty – and probably not fully accurate way of making them semi-realistic, keep in mind that languages tend to pick more than one sound in each column and each row that they choose, but not every sound in each column and each row.

If you are looking at that chart and just hugely confused (which I don’t blame you if you are), here’s a link to a video that gives a basic understanding of what you are looking at and how to pick sounds off of it for your language.

My next step is to assign characters to the sound inventory. In general, you are going to want to keep this as close to the characters in the language you are writing, so you don’t confuse your readers. (IE. don’t make the plosive d, into the letter R). Take a listen to the sound inventory and choose letters that closely resemble that sound or are that sound.

The next step is to create a how the words are put together or phonotactics. Ie. What format do consonants and vowels form in your language or what sequence of sounds are allowable in your language. For example: in japanese, each syllable is CV(n). The paranthesis represent an optional sound, in this case, literally the n character, whereas C represents consonant and V represents vowel. There are a lot of much more complicated ones, but this step is the part that makes your sound inventory sound like its own language. How you no garple could be an English word but Llvnta isn’t. Other simple phonotactics could be: C(C)VC or C(V)V or CC(V)(C)VV(C)

Keep in mind that this will not build hyper realistic languages. This is just a base tool to get your made up words sounding like they might all belong to the same language.

Good luck!

As always, remember, in writing there’s no such thing as absolute advise. Enjoy your story and have fun writing!