How to Create a Language

From the Klingon language in the Star Trek universe to the Na'vi language from James Cameron's Avatar, fictional languages can go a long way towards making a work of fiction feel real. Making a fictional language can be an intense undertaking because the process is complex and requires a lot of thought. However, with some practice and commitment, anyone can create their own language.

Things You Should Know

Start building a basic vocabulary with translations for everyday words like pronouns, body parts, animals, and common verbs like “go” and “eat.”
Design an alphabet with pictographs, original symbols and letters, or borrow characters from other languages.
Decide how to arrange subjects, verbs, and nouns in your sentences so they have a grammatical structure that makes sense.

Sample Phrases

Sample Dothraki Phrases

Sample Klingon Phrases

Sample Na'vi Phrases

Part 1

Part 1 of 4:

Creating a Phonology

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1
Learn the IPA. The International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, is used by linguists to accurately denote sounds. Learning it will help you to identify what sounds you want to include in your language.
- You don't need to know every sound in the IPA, but knowing the common ones will help a lot.
2
Choose your consonants and vowels. Every language has some consonants and some vowels. Pick yours based on how you want your language to feel.
- Keep in mind that some common sounds, such as /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, and /n/, are found in almost every natural language, and can provide a good starting point.
- Decide on a large, medium, or small phonemic inventory. This is good to have in mind so that you know how much more you should add.
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3
Decide whether to include more complicated features. These include tone, phonation, and other things that not all natural languages have.
- Don't feel like you need to have everything in your language. Leaving things out contributes to coherence, and simplicity can be a good feature in a language.
4
Make phonotactic rules. All languages obey certain rules restricting what can make up a syllable. Decide on what these rules are.
- English, for example, has the syllable structure (C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C), meaning that there is a mandatory vowel with up to three preceding consonants and four final consonants in each syllable.
- Most languages have much smaller codas (ending sounds in a syllable) than English. For instance, Mandarin only allows three codas: no coda, /n/, and /ŋ/.

Part 2

Part 2 of 4:

Building a Vocabulary

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1
Identify simple words that you can use to form basic sentences. Assign sounds to pronouns like "I,” “my,” "he,” "his,” “she,” “her,” “they,” “it” and “we”. Then, decide how you’ll say verbs like "to be", "to have", "to like", "to go", and "to make.” You can also include simple words like “a,” “and,” “the,” “but,” and “or.”^{[1]
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- You can also make up the words for numbers up to 10, and then decide how you would like your language to count up to 100.
- For example, in the fictional Sindarin language, “Him” is translated to “Hon.” In Dothraki, “She” is translated to “Anna.” In Valyrian, “to go” is translated to “naejot jikagon.”
2
Come up with words for common things that you encounter in daily life. As your vocabulary grows, start naming everything you can think of. As you come across something, think of a word for that item or concept, and write down how it sounds when you say the word out loud. This will help you to start thinking in your new language.^{[2]
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- Look at lists of commonly used words to get an idea of which words you should add first. Think of the words for items around your house, animals, days of the week, time, body parts, food, people, jobs, locations, clothing and more.
- If you're stumped, remember you can borrow words from other languages. You can even alter the word. For example, the French word for man is homme. The Portuguese word—homem—is almost the same, with only a few letters/the pronunciation changed.
Basic Words to Translate

Animals: dog, cat, fish, bird, cow, pig, mouse, horse, wing, animal

Transportation: train, plane, car, truck, bicycle, bus, boat, ship, tire, gasoline, engine, ticket

Locations: city, house, apartment, street, airport, train station, bridge, hotel, restaurant, farm, court, school, office, room, town, university, club, bar, park, camp, shop, theater, library, hospital, church, market, countries, building, ground, outer space, bank

Clothing: hat, dress, suit, skirt, shirt, T-shirt, pants, shoes, pocket, coat, stain, clothes

Colors: red, green, blue, yellow, brown, pink, orange, black, white, gray
3
Create your own dictionary by translating from your native language. Open the dictionary and begin translating any random words from your native language into your made up language. Not only will this be helpful if you forget how to say something, but it will ensure you don't miss a word. You can also use translation dictionaries, like English to French or German to English dictionaries to get an idea of how words are pronounced in different languages.^{[3]
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- Try to make the words easily pronounceable and readable to avoid tongue twisters that make learning the language difficult.
- In general, simple, common words should be shorter. For example, a long word like "kesolainotokos" would mean "volcanic ash,” while a short word like “giob” would mean “you” and a medium word like "umevo" could mean "movie."
4
Combine simple words to make compound words. Compound words are a great way to grow your language quickly without having to come up with entirely new words, and this method works great for nouns. Simply take the first noun that describes the function of something, and then add it to another noun that describes what the noun is. Modern languages like German and English use this technique to make new words every day.^{[4]
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- For example, if the word 'Khinsa' means ‘China,’ and the word ‘Bever’ means ‘Drink,’ you can make the word 'Khinsabever,’ which means ‘tea.’ This works because the beverage tea originated from ancient China, so it can be considered a Chinese drink.
5
Name your language using your new sounds and vocabulary. Use your new language to come up with a name for the language. Try to come up with a short, unique word that encompasses the origin of the language or identifies the race of the people who speak the language.
- The name of your language doesn’t have to be related to a race or country, but it can be if you want it to be.
- For example, in the show Star Trek, the Klingons speak Klingon, and in the movie Avatar, the Na’vi people speak Na’vi. In the show Game of Thrones, the Dothraki people, who live by the Dothraki Sea, speak Dothraki.

Part 3

Part 3 of 4:

Writing Words and Sentences

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1
Create your own alphabet if you want to write in your language. Draw out your own letters to represent the sounds that make up your language. Then, organize them in a pattern to create the alphabet. You can even sing it out loud to practice making the sounds.^{[5]
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- Keep in mind that this can be a long process. Take your time to make it to your liking.
2
Borrow letters from an existing alphabet for an easier route. Consult the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Georgian, and Coptic alphabets, which are still used in the world today by native speakers. If one of these alphabets contains all of the sounds that you need, you won’t need to create a new one. You can assign new pronunciations to letters if you need to do so. This will also make it easier for people who already use those alphabets to learn your language.^{[6]
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- You can combine alphabets by using letters from Latin, Cyrillic or Greek words, for example. In that case, you could use "Я" for the /ja/ ("ya") sound, and Latin letters for other sounds.
- You may also want to use romanizations, which are translations of other words that use different alphabets. For example, the Russian word знаю is romanized into English as "znayu". This can be very useful if your language does not use the Latin alphabet.
3
Use pictographs or symbols to visually represent words. Draw out what each word means using simple lines to make a pictograph or symbol. Then, come up with a pronunciation for each symbol based on the different parts of the drawing. Make sure each symbol or marking has its own unique sound.^{[7]
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- Many languages, like Chinese and Japanese, use pictographs or symbols to represent their spoken language.
- In English and other languages, the numbers are considered pictographs or symbols, since they aren’t part of the alphabet. On the other hand, some languages use letters to represent numbers.
4
Add diacritics to existing letters to create new letters. To keep your orthography concise, include diacritics, which are small markings above and below certain letters. Generally, diacritics can go on vowels and some consonants. Keep in mind that some fonts and keyboards may not support all diacritics.^{[8]
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- For instance, E can be pronounced /ɛ/, like the "e" in "dress", while É is pronounced /ə/, like the "o" in "of.”

Part 4

Part 4 of 4:

Forming Sentences that Make Sense

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1
Pick the best word order for sentences and questions, or your language won’t make any sense . Decide if you want the subject to come first followed by the verb when you’re making a sentence, like you would make a sentence in English. Then, decide what order people should place the words to ask a question. You can use your native language to decide on sentence structure, or you can create your own rules.^{[9]
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- For instance, in English, the word order is Subject-Verb-Object (SVO). In Japanese, the word order is Subject-Object-Verb (SOV). An example would be, in the order SVO "I (subject) was eating (verb) dinner (object)." So the SOV version would be "I (subject) dinner (object) was eating (verb)."
- Once you decide this order, you can make general rules about where to put adjectives, possessors, adverbs, and more in your sentences.
- Some languages have free word order, in which there are no rules, or less stringent rules, surrounding word order.
2
Consider noun inflection. Use prefixes, suffixes, or reduplication (repeating a word) to mark number (how many of a noun there are) and/or case (the role of the noun in a sentence).^{[10]
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- Other things may also be marked on the noun, although this is less common, or you can even mark these things with separate words entirely.
- Keep in mind that not all languages inflect their nouns, even for plurality, and that you can have a perfectly functional language without inflection. Many natural languages, such as Chinese, are isolating, meaning that they do not inflect any words.
3
Figure out how to use verbs to build sentences. In many languages, verbs change depending on the subject and tense of the sentence, among other things. Decide if you want to alter the verbs in your language by adding sounds to them, like prefixes or suffixes, to indicate who is speaking, when the action of the sentence took place, and possibly other things.^{[11]
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- For instance, if you wanted to say that a person or thing likes something in the present tense in English, you would say "I like,” “You like,” "He/she likes," “It likes,” “We like,” "Y'all like," or “They like.” In this example, you can see that the verb “to like” is altered by adding an ‘s’ on the end for pronouns that are third person singular, such as he, she, and it. Many languages have different endings for each combination of person and number.
- You may also want to add a way to distinguish aspect, which is how a verb extends over time. For example, in English, the progressive aspect distinguishes "I swim" and "I am swimming." However, some languages, such as French, lack this distinction. In French, "Je nage" can mean "I swim" or "I am swimming.”
- Voice is commonly inflected for in most languages. English has active and passive voice; active voice is shown in "I close the door," as opposed to the passive construction "The door is closed by me."
- There is also mood, which is the relationship of a verb to reality or truth. For instance, most Romance languages distinguish indicative and subjunctive mood. The indicative means that something is true, while the subjunctive expresses doubt. This is approximated in English by the difference between "I swim" and "I might swim."
- You might also choose to change the word entirely to match the subject and action of the sentence. These are normally referred to as “irregular” verbs, and tend to be the most common verbs if they exist.
4
Consider the morphosyntactic alignment of your language. Morphosyntactic alignment is the relationship between the subject of an intransitive verb, which does not take an object, and the agent ("doer") and object of a transitive verb, which does take an object.
- In English, we use nominative-accusative alignment, which is the most common type. This alignment treats the subject of an intransitive verb the same way as the agent of a transitive verb. This is why we say "I fell" instead of "Fell me."
- Some languages, such as Basque, have ergative-absolutive alignment, the next most common type. In this alignment, the subject of an intransitive verb is treated the same way as the object of a transitive verb. These languages will use sentences such as "Fell me" and have different grammatical constructions that nominative-accusative languages do not have, such as antipassive voice, which has no way of being expressed in English.
- There are more alignments, such as active-stative, but they are much rarer and not easy for beginners to use.
5
Research natural languages. You may be inspired by features you encounter while reading about languages that are different from the one or ones you speak. Especially interesting are rare languages outside of Europe, which do not follow many of the rules found in Indo-European languages.
Start off with a simple sentence like "I have a cat." You can then move on to more complex sentences, like "I like to watch television, but I prefer to go to the movies." If you run into words that you haven’t created yet, make them up and ensure that they fit into the grammar rules of your sentence.^{[12]
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Ways to Practice Your Language

Keep a diary in your new language. This is a great way to practice your new language every day. Start a journal just for writing in your language, and recount your day.

Teach your friends how to speak your language. Once they learn it, try holding an entire conversation with them. Keep a “dictionary” of your words nearby so you can reference it as you talk.

Recite poems in your language. They might not sound as pretty, but this will give you good practice for speaking your language out loud.

Translate the Babel Text or another piece of writing into your language. Choose a favorite book, article, or novel to translate, or use the Babel Text, which is a piece of text commonly used by people who construct their languages. It contains words and phrases that are supposed to test the limits of your language.

Community Q&A

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Question

There are so many words. How do I ensure that I have words in my language for all words?

Community Answer

New words are added to dictionaries every year. Language evolves, and can never be considered "complete," and not all words translate into existing languages. Just keep adding to your language as needed.

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If I change the order of months, how can I remember it?

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You can write the months down or try make a small rhyme or song to try to remember it.

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How do I know if my words are too random?

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Your words may be as random and as outside-of-the-box as you like. However don't get too carried away, otherwise they'll be too hard to pronounce. Remember, this is a good reason why you should test your language by using it with friends. If they or even you have trouble pronouncing most words, you might want to do some rethinking.

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Tips

Basic word lists, like Swadesh's lists, or Ogden's Basic English list, can help you remember which words you'll need in your new language.

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When you’re starting your language, follow your grammar rules closely. Once you get better at it, you can start incorporating slang and other shortcuts.

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Write a book of sentences based on your language.

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Tips from our Readers

The advice in this section is based on the lived experiences of wikiHow readers like you. If you have a helpful tip you’d like to share on wikiHow, please submit it in the field below.

Use consistent sounds for letters and symbols. Pictographs, original letters or borrowed alphabets should represent unique, clear sounds aiding reading and speaking.
Borrow useful grammar or sounds from real languages. Mimicking features from Latin, Cyrillic, etc. or using bits of French or Chinese terms boosts authenticity.
Build vocabulary systematically from basics. Start with pronouns, regular verbs, common nouns, numbers, etc. Complex terms evolve through compound words later.
Practice speaking, writing, translating early and often. The more you actively use your language, the more intuitive it becomes over time through immersion.
Name language based on fictional origins. Tie the word for your language to its fictional creators or geography adding realism and interest.
Set grammar rules early guiding sentence structure. Determine order of subjects, verbs, questions, plurals, tenses, etc. first for cohesion.

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