History Main / IndoEuropeanAlienLanguage

* Have no direct or single equivalent of verbs like [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_copula 'to be']], 'to have', or 'to do' which are kind of a defining feature of IE languages.
** It's often not just non-Indo-European languages. Irish and most modern Romance languages have two copulas ('be') (one of the Romance ones usually deriving from the Latin word for "to stand"). Irish and Russian have no word for "have".
* Do not mark nouns for number. (Japanese.)
** Or, alternatively, have ''more'' number markers than simply singular and plural. Many languages have separate dual or even trial ('three') numbers. There is even at least one language that has marks for zero (I have no cookies), fractional (I have half of a cookie), singular (I have one cookie), dual (I have two cookies), paucal (I have a few cookies), and large-scale plural (I have lots of cookies)!
*** Most Indo-European languages have ''lost'' their duals; Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Old Church Slavonic had them, and there are still traces of them in some of the Slavic languages. English's use of the word ''both'' (rather than *''all two'') may be a remnant of this as well. Latin also had one, which survived in the irregular declension of the word "duo", while Slovene still makes full use of it.
*** Old English possessed the vestiges of a dual, but only in the pronouns. Come Middle English, this dual number was gone.
* Have nouns with grammatical gender. French has two (masculine and feminine), German has three (masculine, feminine, neuter), and some languages assign "gender" according to whether the topic of the subject is visible, known to be near, or far away.
** Other languages differentiates gender by properties of the noun, Swahili has a different gender for people, animals, tools, liquids and so on

* Have a different concept of 'word'.
** Again, Japanese -- are the particles (wa, ga, o, etc) part of the word or separate words themselves? Most linguists say they're separate, but there's no shortage of transliterations that don't have a space there. (Japanese itself avoids the issue by not having spaces between words at all.)
* Are [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative_language ergative-absolutive]] instead of nominative-accusative. Take two similar sentences that differ in verb transitivity (such as 'He ate.' and 'She ate them.'). A nominative-accusative language (like English) case-marks the subjects 'he' and 'she' the same in both sentences (that is, as 'he'/'she', the nominative case, instead of as 'him'/'her', the accusative case) and case-marks the object 'them' (perhaps some apples?) in the accusative (as opposed to in the nominative 'they'). In an ergative-absolutive language, the subject of the intransitive sentence 'he' would be case-marked the same as the object of the transitive sentence 'them' -- in the absolutive case. The ergative case only shows up marking the subject of the transitive sentence 'she'.
** Even so, several Indo-Iranian languages such as Kurdish and Hindi are ergative. They appear to have borrowed ergativity from neighbouring languages like the Dravidian languages, the Caucasian languages, etc.

* Are not isolating languages like English, where word use is determined by position, and there are lots of particles -- small words with purely grammatical functions (like English prepositions). Some languages, like Japanese and Turkish, are agglutinative, where word use and other such markers are affixes that combine in a string. Some languages, like Latin and its descendants, are fusional, where word use and other morphemes are marked by affixes that are all mutually exclusive (so there's one affix in Latin where Turkish might have a string of three or four, but you need a completely different affix in Latin for a small change in meaning, while Turkish can just switch out one of its affixes). Or perhaps they're more isolating than English is, like Chinese (which is pretty much one-morpheme-per-word, and dang near one-word-per-syllable).
** Agglutinative languages are rather famous for their ability to cram very large amounts of information onto single words. For example, in Hungarian, the common toast "Egészségünkre!" is literally "To our health!"; a phrase which takes three words to say in English, but in Hungarian, one word does the job. Some languages really take the ball and run with it -- in Inuit, "he said he wouldn't be able to arrive first" is "tikitqaagminaitnigaa."
*** It gets even worse when you get to polysynthetic languages, where several distinct words get mashed together: archaic Ainu "usaopuspe aejajkotujmasiramsujpa" means "I keep swaying my heart afar and toward myself over various rumors."
* Have adjectives that act like verbs instead of or along with acting like nouns (kind of). For example, some Japanese adjectives can be conjugated just like verbs -- ''shirokunakatta ie'' = ''the house that was not white'' (''white-NEG.PAST house'').
** Or perhaps have adverbs that have to agree with their verb. (As far as I am aware, no natural human language does this. Several conlangs do though.)
* Have prepositions that can be used independently as verbs.
** Or rather, have verbal grammar such that subordinate verb phrases are used when English would use prepositional phrases.
* Have something other than two degrees of demonstratives -- English has just ''this'' and ''that'' (but it used to have ''yonder'' as a third, and ''the other'' is commonly used as a third but decidedly less standard), Japanese has three (''kore, sore, are''), some languages have one, some have as many as five.
** Alaskan Yup'ik has ''thirty''. They are sorted by five layers of location, three layers of visibility and two layers of accessibility. So for example one demonstrative means "partially visibile 'that,' near and accessible to the listener but not necessarily to the speaker." Another demonstrative means "completely visible 'that' which is above the speaker and inaccessible to him/her."

* Lack relative constructions ("the one that does X" etc.), and have to substitute adjective phrases ("the X-doing one").
** Or have correlatives: "This is the man who my wife has been sleeping with him!"

* And above all, do not have only and all of the sounds that are found in English. The pronunciation of even closely related languages like French and German can only be approximated by English sounds, let alone more distant languages, and vice versa: this is of course where foreign accents come from.
** Even a lot of conlangs still use English's horribly complicated tense/lax vowel system (yet many claim to have five vowels, while English generally has 12 or more), and some of the worse-done [[ReLex relexes]] and such employ English orthographic conventions as well -- writing ''reed'' or ''rede'' when the speaker says [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA /r\i:d/]].

* Even {{Tolkien}} fell to this despite his [[ShownTheirWork incredible dedication]] to his [[ConLang languages]] (he himself was a philologist). Quenya ''was'' originally based on Finnish grammar; however, Finnish is part of a language family called Uralic that is [[strike:''close'' to Indo European, but not quite]] unrelated to Indo-European, but shares some similarities, and Tolkien negated any brownie points by removing all the parts of Finnish that made it so Uralic to start with. If we want to be didactic, the phonology was a mix of Finnish and Latin, morphology is totally Finnish, grammar is a mish-mash of Latin and Greek.
** Since both phonology and morphology have already been mentioned, what is it exactly that is a mish-mash of Latin and Greek?
*** Syntax?
** Uralic is a whole separate language family (so 'close' has no meaning), and there's still quite a lot of Uralic grammar in there -- just look at all the noun cases.
** Tolkien's other language, Sindarin was based mostly on Welsh, a Indo-European language in the Celtic subfamily.
*** Interestingly, he made a serious effort (and not too shabby of one either) to derive them from the same source language, even though this would be completely impossible for the languages they were based on.

* StarTrek, at times when the UniversalTranslator still fails.
** All alien languages sound as if they obey English phonology, but their transliteration to the Latin Alphabet seems extremely implausible, using c and k interchangeably and the obligatory [[PunctuationShaker useless apostrophes]].

* Mostly averted in StarWars. People speak Basic (i.e. English) most of the time anyway, but Shyriiwook gets points for A: being just ''one'' language of the Wookiees, B: being very different from English when we hear it and C: being so hard to learn, Leia has to get help from a Wookiee with a speech impediment that makes the language easier for her. Indeed, in the movies it's based on [[StarfishLanguage bear noises]]. Other languages spoken such as Huttese are based on the sounds of languages like Aymara and Quechua (neither of which are Indo-European), although Huttese is not a conlang, [[AsLongAsItSoundsForeign just a bunch of random sounds]]. And, to top this off, there's a lot of [[BilingualDialogue bilingual conversations]] in the ''Star Wars'' movies and EU, with the fairly [[JustifiedTrope reasonable justification]] that some species' vocal apparatuses simply [[TheUnpronounceable can't make the sounds]] of the other languages.

* ''{{Futurama}}'' has written alien "languages" that turn out to be ciphers for English. They are mostly used for in-jokes and [[EasterEgg Easter Eggs]].
** {{Wingdinglish}} is actually quite common. Uryumoco in ElGoonishShive is a cipher using different Latin characters, and Cybertronian in BeastWars is a cipher using alien characters, but the ciphers all decrypt to English. And, again, generally for EasterEgg purposes.
* [[http://www.learnnavi.org/ Averted]] by [[{{Film/Avatar}} Na'vi]], which has a tripartite alignment system (not very common at all!), five verb tenses, inclusive versus exclusive first person plural pronouns, ejective consonants, et multa cetera. [[ShownTheirWork Helps that the language was designed by a professional linguist, though.]]
** A professional linguist who went to [[http://www.okhumanitiescouncil.org/Websites/ohc/Images/Newsmedia/conversation_frommer.mp3 great lengths]] to make the language not resemble any one human language, while still being usable by human beings.
* The Tevinter language from [[{{DragonAge}} Dragon Age]] is very similar to Latin, since[[FantasyCounterpartCulture Tevinter is based on the Roman Empire]].
* Played with in WorldTreeRPG. The world's languages are based on a divinely created Common language with simplistic grammar, and all known languages are based on Common. So every language in that setting is like this trope towards every other, and described as being only about as different as English and Italian (ie. not very). We're also told that the standard pronoun "genders" are based on species, so that "the male Cani greeted the female Rassimel" would be written as something like "Ce greeted rir" instead of "He greeted her". The in-character journal by one of the game's authors has the hero dealing with other grammatical oddities like social-class markings, and even making fun of cheap in-universe novels that don't think through their "aliens"' language.
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<<|LanguageTropes|>>

** Dominionese apparently has a passive voice transitive which serves as an optative mood. Obviously the writers just garbled some terminology together as this more or less implies you can't just politely ask a Vorta to die, you also have to specify the cause or person killing said Vorta. It might translate as "please die in a fire," or as [[http://www.edgesanfrancisco.com/index.php?ch=news&sc=&sc2=&sc3=&id=98884 a 10-year-old Pledge of Allegiance resister]] put it, "with all due respect, ma'am, you can go jump off a bridge".

** Similarly, many non-English languages divide up ''colors'' [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate differently from the Western standard "ROY G. BIV"]], with some having as few as just ''two'' basic colors (black and white). Quite a few make [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language no distinction at all between blue and green]]. On the other hand, some Asian languages have dozens if not hundreds of distinct color names. An author writing a race with a different visual range from humans (such as demihumans from [[DungeonsAndDragons D&D]], who frequently possess vision in the infrared range) may forget to create terms for colors humans can't see at all.

* Are topic-promotional instead of subject promotional (Japanese). In English, the subject is understood to be the topic of the sentence (which the passive voice facilitates). In Japanese, topic and subject do not have to be the same.

** Even so, several Indo-European languages are ergative (Kurdish, Hindi, etc.)
*** True, but restricted to some of the Indo-Iranian languages, and explained by borrowing from neighbouring languages like the Dravidian languages, the Caucasian languages etc.

** It's often not just non-Indo-European languages. Irish and most modern Romance languages have two copulas ('be') (one of the Romance ones usually deriving from the Latin word for "to stand"), and Irish has no word for "have" (and often doesn't say "do" where other IE languages would).
*** How do "other IE languages", other than English, use 'do'?

** Or, alternatively, have ''more'' number markers than simply singular and plural. Many languages have separate dual or even triple markers. There is even at least one language that has marks for zero (I have no cookies), fractional (I have half of a cookie), singular (I have one cookie), dual (I have two cookies), small-scale plural (I have a few cookies), and large-scale plural (I have lots of cookies)!

*** Old English possessed the vestiges of a dual, but it only indicated by the pronouns. Come Middle English, this dual number was gone.

** Have definite articles but no indefinite articles (Irish, Icelandic).
* Have no ''copula''; that is, no direct or single equivalent of verbs like [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_copula 'to be']], 'to have', or 'to do' which are kind of a defining feature of IE languages.
** It's often not just non-Indo-European languages. Irish and most modern Romance languages have two copulas (one of the Romance ones usually deriving from the Latin word for "to stand"), and Irish hasn't got a word for "have" (and often doesn't say "do" where other IE languages would).

*** Most Indo-European languages have ''lost'' their duals—Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Old Church Slavonic had them, and there are still traces of them in some of the Slavic languages. English's use of the word 'both' may be a remnant of this as well. Latin also had one, which survived in the irregular declension of the word "duo", while Slovene still makes full use of it.
*** Old English possessed the vestiges of a dual, but it only indicated by the pronouns. Come Middle English, this dual number was gone. For those who aren't aware what this means, this means that they had phrases for saying single (I) ''exactly'' two (you) and more than two (you). In the South, something similar to a dual has reemerged: I (refers to the singular), you (refers to two people exclusively) and y'all, or you all (which refers to more than two people). Sometimes you see "you" used with a number, for instance, "you three" -- that's an attempt to replicate the dual tense in modern English (which it doesn't do very well).

The fact is that, while media around the world has fictional languages, most of the world's science fiction and fantasy comes from English-speaking countries. Languages like English, French or Hindi are called Indo-European languages because they have descended from a common root -- naturally, these languages are very alike. '[[NotSoFastBucko But wait!]] I did French in secondary school, and it was nothing like English!' Bingo. If Indo-European languages can differ ''that'' much, guess how many languages that aren't Indo-European, like Japanese, Euskara or Innu-aimun, can differ from say, Spanish. The fact remains that a lot of languages:

* Even {{Tolkien}} fell to this despite his [[ShownTheirWork incredible dedication]] to his languages (he himself was a philologist). Quenya ''was'' originally based on Finnish grammar; however, Finnish is part of a language family called Uralic that is ''close'' to Indo European, but not quite, and Tolkien negated any brownie points by removing all the parts of Finnish that made it so Uralic to start with. If we want to be didactic, the phonology was a mix of Finnish and Latin, morphology is totally Finnish, grammar is a mish-mash of Latin and Greek.

* Mostly averted in StarWars. People speak Basic (i.e. English) most of the time anyway, but Shyriiwook gets points for A: being just ''one'' language of the Wookiees, B: being very different from English in its structure (where we hear it) and C: being so hard to learn, Leia has to get help from a Wookiee with a speech impediment that makes the language easier for her. Indeed, in the movies it's based on [[StarfishLanguage bear noises]]. Other languages spoken such as Huttese are based on the sounds of languages like Aymara and Quechua (neither of which are Indo-European), although Huttese is not a conlang, [[AsLongAsItSoundsForeign just a bunch of weird sounds]]. And, to top this off, there's a lot of [[BilingualDialogue bilingual conversations]] in the ''Star Wars'' movies and EU, with the fairly [[JustifiedTrope reasonable justification]] that some species' vocal cords simply can't make the sounds of the other languages.

* Have no direct or single equivalent of verbs like [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_copula 'to be']], 'to have', or 'to do' which are kind of a defining feature of IE languages.

*** Old English possessed the vestiges of a dual, but it only indicated by the pronouns. Come Middle English, this dual tense was gone. For those who aren't aware what this means, this means that they had phrases for saying single (I) ''exactly'' two (you) and more than two (you). In the South, something similar to a dual has reemerged: I (refers to the singular), you (refers to two people exclusively) and y'all, or you all (which refers to more than two people). Sometimes you see "you" used with a number, for instance, "you three" -- that's an attempt to replicate the dual tense in modern English (which it doesn't do very well).

** Similarly, many non-English languages [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate divide up ''colors'' differently from the Western standard "ROY G. BIV"]], with some having as few as just ''two'' basic colors (black and white). Quite a few make [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language no distinction at all between blue and green]]. On the other hand, some Asian languages have dozens if not hundreds of distinct color names. An author writing a race with a different visual range from humans (such as demihumans from [[DungeonsAndDragons D&D]], who frequently possess vision in the infrared range) may forget to create terms for colors humans can't see at all.

Most alien (or non-human of any kind) languages in media are simplistic and based on the language of the creators of the media. Provided the languages have some form of grammar established, be it languages from fantasy creatures or aliens, they will always look more like English than even Welsh looks like English. It seems that even when aliens aren't [[AliensSpeakingEnglish speaking English]], they're speaking something like it. In the ConLang community, these alien languages would be described as a "relexification" of English, or relex for short - many of these may count as [[{{Fictionary}} fictionaries]].

The fact is that, while media around the world has fictional languages, most of the world's science fiction and fantasy comes from English-speaking countries. Languages like English, French or Hindi are called Indo-European languages because they have descended from a common root - naturally, these languages are very alike. '[[NotSoFastBucko But wait!]] I did French in secondary school, and it was nothing like English!' Bingo. If Indo-European languages can differ ''that'' much, guess how many languages that aren't Indo-European, like Japanese, Euskara or Innu-aimun, can differ from say, Spanish. The fact remains that a lot of languages:

*** Old English possessed the vestiges of a dual, but it only indicated by the pronouns. Come Middle English, this dual tense was gone. For those who aren't aware what this means, this means that they had phrases for saying single (I) ''exactly'' two (you) and more than two (you). In the South, something similar to a dual has reemerged: I (refers to the singular), you (refers to two people exclusively) and y'all, or you all (which refers to more than two people). Sometimes you see "you" used with a number, for instance, "you three" - that's an attempt to replicate the dual tense in modern English (which it doesn't do very well).

** Again, Japanese - are the particles (wa, ga, o, etc) part of the word or separate words themselves? Most linguists say they're separate, but there's no shortage of transliterations that don't have a space there. (Japanese itself avoids the issue by not having spaces between words at all.)
* Are [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative_language ergative-absolutive]] instead of nominative-accusative. Take two similar sentences that differ in verb transitivity (such as 'He ate.' and 'She ate them.'). A nominative-accusative language (like English) case-marks the subjects 'he' and 'she' the same in both sentences (that is, as 'he'/'she', the nominative case, instead of as 'him'/'her', the accusative case) and case-marks the object 'them' (perhaps some apples?) in the accusative (as opposed to in the nominative 'they'). In an ergative-absolutive language, the subject of the intransitive sentence 'he' would be case-marked the same as the object of the transitive sentence 'them' - in the absolutive case. The ergative case only shows up marking the subject of the transitive sentence 'she'.

* Are not isolating languages like English, where word use is determined by position, and there are lots of particles - small words with purely grammatical functions (like English prepositions). Some languages, like Japanese and Turkish, are agglutinative, where word use and other such markers are affixes that combine in a string. Some languages, like Latin and its descendants, are fusional, where word use and other morphemes are marked by affixes that are all mutually exclusive (so there's one affix in Latin where Turkish might have a string of three or four, but you need a completely different affix in Latin for a small change in meaning, while Turkish can just switch out one of its affixes). Or perhaps they're more isolating than English is, like Chinese (which is pretty much one-morpheme-per-word, and dang near one-word-per-syllable).
** Agglutinative languages are rather famous for their ability to cram very large amounts of information onto single words. For example, in Hungarian, the common toast "Egészségünkre!" is literally "To our health!"; a phrase which takes three words to say in English, but in Hungarian, one word does the job. Some languages really take the ball and run with it - in Inuit, "he said he wouldn't be able to arrive first" is "tikitqaagminaitnigaa."

* Have adjectives that act like verbs instead of or along with acting like nouns (kind of). For example, some Japanese adjectives can be conjugated just like verbs - ''shirokunakatta ie'' = ''the house that was not white'' (''white-NEG.PAST house'').

* Have something other than two degrees of demonstratives - English has just ''this'' and ''that'' (but it used to have ''yonder'' as a third, and ''the other'' is commonly used as a third but decidedly less standard), Japanese has three (''kore, sore, are''), some languages have one, some have as many as five.

* Have words that don't directly and perfectly translate into English. Sure, there can be some of the whole "[[LanguageEqualsThought showing culture through vocabulary]]" thing, but also more mundane instances - for example, English divides temperature into ''cold, cool, warm'' and ''hot'', but other languages may have only two or three of those, or maybe more.

** Even a lot of conlangs still use English's horribly complicated tense/lax vowel system (yet many claim to have five vowels, while English generally has 12 or more), and some of the worse-done [[ReLex relexes]] and such employ English orthographic conventions as well - writing ''reed'' or ''rede'' when the speaker says [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA /r\i:d/]].

As most writers [[YouFailLinguisticsForever are not linguists]], this trope crops up (un)surprisingly often across fiction. Of course, you would have to be [[ShownTheirWork extremely dedicated]] to create an entire language not based on your own at all - and even if you did, only the particularly dedicated would try to learn it. Thus, it follows that most fictional languages look like English, particularly from the perspective of native speakers of Basque, Turkish or Hebrew, for instance.

** Uralic is a whole separate language family (so 'close' has no meaning), and there's still quite a lot of Uralic grammar in there - just look at all the noun cases.

* Have words that don't directly and perfectly translate into English. Sure, there can be some of the whole "[[LanguageEqualsThought showing culture through vocabulary]]" thing, but also more mundane instances - for example, English divides temperature into ''cold, cool, warm'' and ''hot'', but other languages may have only two or three of those, or maybe more.

** The consonants and several aspects of the verbs are similar to the Sioux languages, while clusivity is a feature of Algonquian languages like Cheyenne and Arapaho - lending credence to assertions that it's DancesWithWolves [-[[RecycledInSpace IN SPACE]]-].
*** WordOfGod names several languages as providing inspiration, including Persian, Malay, Hebrew, and Mandarin. Of these, only Persian is Indo-European.

* StarTrek, at times when the universal translator still fails.

* Lack articles such as ''a'', ''an'', or ''the''. (Japanese, Russian, Latin)

* Are [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative_language ergative-absolutive]] instead of nominative-accusative. Take two similar sentences that differ in verb transitivity (such as 'He ate.' and 'She ate them.'). A nominative-accusative language (like English) case-marks the subjects 'he' and 'she' the same in both sentences (that is, as 'he'/'she', the nominative case, instead of as 'him'/'her', the accusative case) and case-marks the object 'them' (perhaps some apples?) in the accusative (as opposed to in the nominative 'they'). In an ergative-absolutive language, the subject of the intransitive sentence 'he' would be case-marked the same as the object of the transitive sentence 'them' - in the absolutive case. The ergative case only shows up marking the subject of the transitive sentence 'she'. SoYeah.

* The Tevinter language from [[{{DragonAge}} Dragon Age]] is very similar to Latin.