How to Tell a Realistic Fictional Language (Game of Thrones!) From a Terrible One (Star Wars!)

Huttese, Klingon, Dothraki—it’s all Greek to me. Just a bunch of sounds. Right? Not if you listen closely. Some of these constructed languages, or “conlangs,” pass as real languages much better than others.

What separates a convincing conlang from a bad one? In this episode of Watch Smarter, we examine how movies and TV shows create custom languages, and how the best—or at least the most realistic—evolve like real human speech.

[Hakajin]

Surprised you didn't mention Lord of the Rings; Tolkien started writing Middle Earth as kind of a sand-box to play around with language. Anyway, I get the impression that it's the most commonly used words that tend to be irregular.

[patriciamcgeorge]

gibberish languages don't count as Conlangs. you also missed 1:1 translations, where every English word gets a new sound, or language games like pig Latin. these all, however, don't count. Consistent languages are Conlangs, except not very good ones (usually, Klingon did this on purpose).

[EsperantoVarietyShow]

I've never gone in much for fictional languages (although I do speak Esperanto) - until I learned Pakuni (Land of the Lost) in 2009 and more recently put up some videos on that topic. I'm interested in the question (mentioned at the end of the video) "why bother if most viewers don't notice?". Was the follow up video every made?

[BeekySky]

This video would have been better without the music, or perhaps with it not being so loud.

[elviraerasmus]

I don't really agree with one of your statements, I'm learning huttese and there is definantly a set vocab and basic grammar but it isn't a very complete language though so the vocab isn't very complete. This incompleteness actually helps a little because it makes is easier to learn. Some other star wars languages are much more set and complicated like ewok and geonosian.

[BX]

He says, If you hear the same sounds over and over again, it's gibberish.
But also if you hear some words over and over again, it's a real language.🤷‍♀️

[MrParlophone]

I'd just like to know, where do you get your terminology from for the types of conlangs (more specifically, the list at 0:38 in the video)? I'm actually a linguist, so I really want to know what your source is.

[ZemplinTemplar]

Why care ?

When Marc Okrand created the first fluent examples of Klingon for Star Trek III, there's a scene where Kruge commands his crew member in Klingon to beam him up to the ship. When he has his fight with Kirk and loses, Kirk remembered the phrase and repeated it as best as he could into the Klingon communicator. He was successfully beamed up. The first time that Klingon command was heard in the film, it was of course subtitled. The second time it was heard in the film, it was not subtitled, but the audience remembered it when they heard Kirk repeating it, and cheered.

So conlangs aren't just about window dressing, they can add to the immersion of a story.

[xanthippus]

I'm surprised and slightly dissapointed that Huttese is a gibberish language lol

[chetawitko]

Thâv'é õjazüko sthaaíð-ta zwoč sthaaluðu.
Au Sthaaíð!
[ow stīth']
= Cheers! 🍻

[mmps]

So interesting - I always thought Dothraki sounded realistic

[c-lao]

Dothraki sounds like a combination of Russian, Tamil, and Arabic

[lXBlackWolfXl]

As for people bother to do this, according to David Peterson its because its become popular for people to overanalyze pop culture on youtube, so move makers have been more inclined to put more detail into their films, such as using actual conlangs rather than gibberish in their films.

And it should also be noted that conlanging and fantasy are pretty closely tied together, so its not unusual for fantasy writers to include conlangs of their own invention in their books (be it a good conlang or not).

And irregularities are unpopular in conlangs in general, because they add more time to development. And they don't really add anything to how the language functions anyway. Also, conlanging started off with auxiliary languages, and though conlangs are rarely made with the intent to be auxlangs anymore, you still see this kind of culture of 'perfecting' language. I mean, why have irregularities in your conlang if your conlang will get along just as well without them? The only conlangs I've seen that do include irregularites are naturalistic conlangs, and those just pull their irregularities straight from natural languages. Interlingua is probably one of the most famous conlangs that does this. There's also the occasional inflectional conlang like Sambahsa, but conlangs like these are the exception rather than the norm. Also, inflections take quite a while to make, which is why inflecting conlangs are so rare. You only see them in naturalistic conlangs that is essentially just a creolized version of a real language. Agglutination on the other hand is quite popular, of course the problem with that is you see A LOT of conlangs that look like they're based on the Finno-ugric family. I've seen several people complain about how common they are, like how its VERY common for people to complain about romlangs (conlangs based on the Romance languages), because there's just so god damned many of them out there. I mean, even a shocking percentage of auxlangs are romlangs!

[ilyaleadblade]

Force Awakens is not Star Wars. it's some shitty fan fiction

[Henbot]

How do you not include Belter Creole in this? You call yourself a media channel and you dont watch The Expanse! Belter Creole for the Expanse (the authors recommend the show over the books for the language) is one of the best made languages in media. Tolkien deserved bit more of a nod because he was linguistic marvel.

[foszae]

Fairy-tale religions and/or space wizards? Then it's probably not worth thinking about the linguistics, the science, or the story-telling.

[bassbich]

"the" and "a"? Seriously? That's quite western centric. Even some european languages don't have articles.