Languages are interesting things. As a dabbling linguist, perhaps this is just my own preferences showing through, but the sheer number of made-up languages done for stories is... well, it's kinda scary, actually. Especially for the writer, because there's this impossible question of How on earth do I make a nice language? Is it possible to do so without going nuts and spending hundreds of hours pouring over resources on languages from Papua New Guinea?
There is, thankfully. You can merely listen to those fine fellows who spent hundreds of hours on the languages of Papua New Guinea. Of course, these fine fellows are often rather obtuse in their word-choice and seclusive in their online presence. Problems problems problems. Too much, darling. Far too much.
To attempt the Making of a Language, some understanding of how grammar and phonology (the study of the sounds of languages) work is very desirable. The best way of learning these is to learn another language, but that is not possible for everyone. An attempt at teaching these is probably in order, but this is not the time for them. Maybe some other post. This post is trying to focus on how to make a naming language that will be interesting.
Making a language has many forms, already. It might be a naming language, with only names and perhaps the odd word being tossed out. It might be a full language, with poems written in this language and left for the reader to translate. The best languages for a fantasy or science fiction writer to make are probably somewhere between these two options - but the naming language is easiest and gives a huge amount of gain.
What concerns are there with naming languages? There are three big ones: Aesthetics, Readability, and Consistency. A naming language needs to Look Nice, it needs to be Readable by people who know nothing about languages, and it needs to be Consistent. If you have names being always consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (with however many syllables of consonant-vowel (CV, to use the terminology) the name needs), then having a name of Kantar would be really really weird. It looks nice, it sounds nice, but it doesn't fit the language. Similarly, if you have hundreds of names but only one "s", it'll look odd. Aesthetics is more a warning against unsightly clusters like "Ngistodh". Simplify it, perhaps ("Nistodh" is already a lot better, and won't be pronounced very different), or maybe use the less common letters of the alphabet. This second option is dangerous, however: if I were to use "Ŋistoð" for that horrible-looking mangle above, phonologists would understand me because I'm using the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA (Wikipedia can help you lots with that) letters for those sounds. But the reader who does not know IPA will be entirely lost. They'll recognize the name when it comes up again (probably), but they won't be able to talk about this brilliant character with their friends.
Other things to look at would be how the language names things. Is it a Native-North-American style, with names like That-Big-Brawny-Guy-With-The-Amazingly-Straight-Hair, or is it today's English style of "just chuck sounds into the name and go with that"*? The second option is easier to make, but the first option can give a deeper feel to the world. Up to a point. As with everything, diversity is key.
I am not a trained linguist by any stretch of the imagination. I've wiki-surfed and been lucky to stumble on some useful websites. But I still have two recommendations for people who don't want to bother much with languages.
First, look at your vowels. English has something like 12 vowels (this changes with accent, too, so it's really complicated) which differentiate with each other (don't ask me how we get away with only five "vowel" letters). This is number is huge compared to most languages. A source I have (here) says that 93 languages have 2-4 vowels, 287 have 5-6 vowels, and 184 have 7-14 vowels. So, watch your vowel-count. Think about what makes sense.
Second, consider the verbs. English ties things like tense (past, present, future) into the vowel, and leaves some things out (like case - a command and a statement have the exact same verb in English, but not in some languages). Consider splitting everything out of the verb, or combining everything into the verb. Or somewhere in between (please, don't have all of your languages be on the extremes of this gamut).
I may return and flesh out how to create phonologies ("a phonology" is often used to mean the inventory of sounds of a language), or what to consider when constructing grammars, but this is not that day. I hope this isn't too long and scatter-brained already. Fethroh Anaesh - Live well.
~Theoden.
*okay this isn't quite what English's current names are. But the meanings are often so old and obtuse that most people don't know them.
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