Fictional Languages

The difference between fictional and constructed languages

Fictional languages are present in literature and movies by creating a language with a unique, alien sounding grammar and phonology with the goal of providing immersion and additional depth to the world depicted in the work of art without claims of usefulness – hence their name artlang, or artistical languages.

Constructed languages are made for human use in the real world, for the purpose of making it easier and more efficient to communicate with each other.

Constructed languages

Constructed languages are developed artifically instead of a natural evolution like most languages

They have many variants, such as:

Microlanguages: Talossan – the official language of the Kingdom of Talossa, a micronation located in Wisconsin, United States

International Auxiliary Languages: Esperanto – a language meant to ease communications between different nations, with an estimate of 2 million speakers worldwide. It was proposed in 1887 and accepted by UNESCO as an official language in 1954

Communication with non-humans: Robot Interaction Language (ROILA) – ROILA is a spoken language created with the goal of easy human learning and efficient robotic recognition.

Fictional languages

Examples include:

Middle-Earth Languages – Created by J.R.R. Tolkien for the Middle Earth universe, most famously known from the Lord of the Ring series, including Elvish and Black Speech

Klingon – Created by Mark Okrand for the fictional alien race of Klingon from the Star Trek series

Dothraki – Spoken language created by David J. Peterson for the television adaptation of Game of Thrones written by George R. R. Martin

The Languages of Tolkien

Includes Elvish speech and Black speech, with their own alphabets, the ‚tengwar’ or ‚sarati’

Klingon Language

Has three noun classes (sentient beings, body parts, everything else)

Has no articles (a table/ the table can only be inferred from context)

Verbs have no tenses, time adverbs define the ‚when’

No adjectives

Dothraki language

Spoken language of 3163 words

During it’s creation, it had to reflect to the uses it has in the books as well as being easy to learn by actors and actresses

No written version

Basic Subject – Verb – Object word order

Inspired by the descriptions of George R. R. Martin and a few real languages, such as Russian, Turkish and Swahili

Dothraki do not have a word for ‚Thank you’

The words that have been released so far can be all found at http://docs.dothraki.org/Dothraki.pdf