History Main / IndoEuropeanAlienLanguage

* The Enochian language which the literal & proverbial renaissance man John Dee and his scryer Edward kelly allegedly received from angels in 1580s Prague and Poland as the original language God used to communicate with Adam and Eve is written in an alphabet which is essentially a substitution for the 16th century Latin alphabet, and the consonant combinations have much of the same values as they do in English. The language itself has a similar phonological inventory to English, though the way they are used in a word are often downright unpronounceable for an untrained English-speaker. Word-formation may possibly revolve around a vague and more unsystematic echo of Hebrew triconsonantal roots, while the syntax is largely that of english.

** Khuzdul (Dwarvish), and to some extent Adûnaic, have a triconsonantal root structure similar to Semitic languages (which aren't Indo-European, but [[TropesAreFlexible the same applies]]). However, there is too little extant Khuzdul text to compare its grammar. When linguist David Salo developed a more complete version of Khuzdul for the movies, he based the grammar mostly on Arabic, while most roots of the vocabulary [[http://midgardsmal.com/durins-song-the-rest/ come from Germanic languages]] (some more blatant than others).

A good case in point in the RealLife of such a language would be Chinese: while it has gained a reputation for being crazily difficult to master due to the sheer number of characters which constitute the script (that are really rather alienish in their design as well), the language itself is very straightforward, so much so that when translated directly, many phrases, even uttered in a formal setting and/or aimed at an educated audience, will look like child's talk (eg. "The situation in the country was poor, the economy was bad, the quality of living was also bad."). Add to that a familiar SVO syntax (ironically, closer to English than quite a handful of other European languages), lack of anything resembling a case, article or, save for just a couple of nouns and pronouns, even ''plural'', and you get an "alien" language that would probably be dismissed by linguists as being so Indo-European in its appearance that it would be downright impossible for it to evolve independently, even though that was precisely the case with Chinese.

* The Gard language from ''WintersInLavelle'' is actually English written with redesigned characters (the same as Literature/ArtemisFowl's fairy language above), though this may be a sort of TranslationConvention to simplify the decoding process.

* ''Franchise/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]].

** Not all alien languages in Trek though. Because Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra

* The [[http://www.casualvillain.com/Unsounded/world/index.php/Tainish Tainish]] language in ''{{Unsounded}}'' has many similarities to Japanese, especially the combination of a phonetic alphabet and pictograms (analogous to kana and kanji), the [[{{Keigo}} complicated politeness system that makes speakers seem overly formal to foreigners]], and regular conjugations (Japanese has very few irregular verbs). The only major divergences are that Tainish [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branching_%28linguistics%29 branches]] in the opposite direction, and that it appears to use a lot of compound consonants that don't exist in Japanese.

* Even Creator/JRRTolkien fell into this despite his [[ShownTheirWork incredible dedication]] to his [[conlang languages]] (he himself was a philologist).

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 [[ReLex "relexification"]] of English, or relex for short--many of these may count as [[{{Fictionary}} fictionaries]].

Some [[ConLang conlangs]], however, go beyond that, and the author actually [[ShownTheirWork shows their work]] to some extent and creates a language with grammar that is different from that of English. Unfortunately, the result often still shows the [[UsefulNotes/GrammarInForeignLanguages typical features of Indo-European languages]]--similar inflection or conjugation patterns, similar use of copulae and auxiliary verbs, and so on.

What really counts is how an author uses their ConLang in story. A story with a ConLang that shares few similarities with an Indo-European language will still fail if it's a bad story. And remember that as much as authors can try to avert this trope, similarities to other languages is not a bad thing.[[note]]and depending on how this Con Lang fits into your world, can be a very good thing[[/note]] And unless that particular ConLang is going for TheUnpronounceable, then all languages will share some very basic similarities.

* Even Creator/JRRTolkien fell into this despite his [[ShownTheirWork incredible dedication]] to his [[ConLang languages]] (he himself was a philologist).

A good case in point in the [[RealWorld]] of such a language would be Chinese: while it has gained a reputation for being crazily difficult to master due to the sheer number of characters which constitute the script (that are really rather alienish in their design as well), the language itself is very straightforward, so much so that when translated directly, many phrases, even uttered in a formal setting and/or aimed at an educated audience, will look like child's talk (eg. "The situation in the country was poor, the economy was bad, the quality of living was also bad."). Add to that a familiar SVO syntax (ironically, closer to English than quite a handful of other European languages), lack of anything resembling a case, article or, save for just a couple of nouns and pronouns, even ''plural'', and you get an "alien" language that would probably be dismissed by linguists as being so Indo-European in its appearance that it would be downright impossible for it to evolve independently, even though that was precisely the case with Chinese.

A good case in point in the RealWorld of such a language would be Chinese: while it has gained a reputation for being crazily difficult to master due to the sheer number of characters which constitute the script (that are really rather alienish in their design as well), the language itself is very straightforward, so much so that when translated directly, many phrases, even uttered in a formal setting and/or aimed at an educated audience, will look like child's talk (eg. "The situation in the country was poor, the economy was bad, the quality of living was also bad."). Add to that a familiar SVO syntax (ironically, closer to English than quite a handful of other European languages), lack of anything resembling a case, article or, save for just a couple of nouns and pronouns, even ''plural'', and you get an "alien" language that would probably be dismissed by linguists as being so Indo-European in its appearance that it would be downright impossible for it to evolve independently, even though that was precisely the case with Chinese.

Another issue is alphabets. On our own planet there are many forms of writing systems: Some are made up of separate letters (Latin and english alphabets), Some have connected letters (Hindi) or even a combination (Arabic), some are left to right, some are right to left (Semitic languages), some are top to bottom (East Asian languages), some are not even alphabets, but are logographics (Chinese) or even a combination of logographic and phonetic (Japanese). So when it comes to writing systems outside of our own planet, God knows what we should expect. However many aliens in fictional works use writing systems that are just like the English alphabet except for the shape of the letters (some even have upper case and lower case).

* Even Creator/JRRTolkien fell into 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 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, syntax is a mish-mash of Latin and Greek. 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.
** Khuzdul (Dwarvish), and to some extent Adûnaic, have a triconsonantal root structure similar to Semitic languages (which aren't Indo-European, but [[TropesAreFlexible the same applies]]). However, there is too little extant Khuzdul text to compare its grammar. (Tolkien actually wrote a good deal about the grammar of Adûnaic, but this troper doesn't know enough about any Semitic language to compare.) When linguist David Salo developed a more complete version of Khuzdul for the movies, he based the grammar mostly on Arabic, while most roots of the vocabulary [[http://midgardsmal.com/durins-song-the-rest/ come from Germanic languages]] (some more blatant than others).

* ''TabletopGame/ForgottenRealms'': The Ilithyrii, Darkelf or better known as Drow language is just basic English grammar (plurals end with n instead with s, female titles still end in-ess, etc) with new words based on a lot of hissing sounds (sibilants) like x and s to simulate their underdark home that's prone to echo "harder" consonants a lot.

* The Dragon language in ''[[VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim]]'' is basically a relexification of English—except without tenses, since the dragons who speak it are timeless beings; what look like tense-constructions are usually either aspect or passive-voice. Its script was invented [[JustForPun from scratch]]—it's cuneiform-esque, based on scratches made with dragon-claws.
** In the other ''[[Franchise/TheElderScrolls Elder Scrolls]]'' games, the [[OurDemonsAreDifferent daedric]] language is simply English spelled with a unique script.

* [[Series/{{V}} V: The Series]] novel "East Coast Crisis" by Howard Weinstein and A.C. Crispin includes this description of Visitor writing : "To a human familiar with ancient Hebrew or Sanskrit the characters might have appeared faintly recognizable, but to anyone else they would have been totally indecipherable." A brief discussion of this with a comparison of Hebrew and Sanskrit characters can be found here : http://v.popapostle.com/html/episodes/V80/East-Coast-Crisis.htm

* The Gard language from ''WintersInLavelle'' is actually English written with redesigned characters (the same as ArtemisFowl's fairy language above), though this may be a sort of TranslationConvention to simplify the decoding process.

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 "[[ReLex relexification]]" of English, or relex for short -- many of these may count as [[{{Fictionary}} fictionaries]].

Some [[ConLang conlangs]], however, go beyond that, and the author actually [[ShownTheirWork shows their work]] to some extent and creates a language with grammar that is different from that of English. Unfortunately, the result often still shows the [[UsefulNotes/GrammarInForeignLanguages typical features of Indo-European languages]] - similar inflection or conjugation patterns, similar use of copulae and auxiliary verbs, and so on.

As most writers [[YouFailLinguisticsForever are not linguists]], this trope crops up unsurprisingly 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. [[TropesAreTools Not that that's necessarily a bad thing though]].

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* Despite being described as a very difficult to learn language, the High D'Haran from ''TheSwordOfTruth'' series seems to be that from the samples given.

* The Ilithyrii, Darkelf or better known as [[TabletopGame/ForgottenRealms Drow]] language is just basic English grammar (plurals end with n instead with s, female titles still end in-ess, etc) with new words based on a lot of hissing sounds (sibilants) like x and s to simulate their underdark home that's prone to echo "harder" consonants a lot.

* 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 "alien" language.
* The First Tongue from ''WerewolfTheForsaken'', the language of the spirit world. Given its name, however, it may be justified. The developers even admitted they've come up with terms for it by going down the Indo-European language tree and taking a few turns.

** In the other Elder Scrolls games, the daedric language is simply English spelled with a unique script.

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* Played straight with the Vulcan language in ''StarTrekTheMotionPicture'', where, during the Kohlinahr ritual, the actors spoke English on set and were later overdubbed with "Vulcan" words that more or less matched their lip movement.

** Khuzdul (Dwarvish), and to some extent Adûnaic, have a triconsonantal root structure similar to Semitic languages. However, there is too little extant Khuzdul text to compare its grammar. (Tolkien actually wrote a good deal about the grammar of Adûnaic, but this troper doesn't know enough about any Semitic language to compare.) When linguist David Salo developed a more complete version of Khuzdul for the movies, he based the grammar mostly on Arabic, while most roots of the vocabulary [[http://midgardsmal.com/durins-song-the-rest/ come from Germanic languages]] (some more blatant than others).

* Mostly averted in ''StarWars''. People speak Basic (i.e. English) most of the time anyway, but Shyriiwook gets points for A: being just ''one'' [[{{Planetville}} 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.

* The ''TwilightZone'' episode "To Serve Man" runs into this a bit, first because the Kanamit alphabet has uppercase and lowercase letters (other languages have multiple variants—e.g. Japanese hiragana and katakana—but use them differently; hiragana is for normal writing and katakana is basically italics, used for writing foreign words), and second because most languages [[spoiler:don't have an idiom where "serve" means "[[ImAHumanitarian prepare as a dish]]"]].