Conlang

Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.^Translation
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

Sheldon: Now fetch me Wil Wheaton! bortaS bIr jablu'DI' reH QaQqu' nay!
Wil Wheaton: ...Did that guy just say "Revenge is a dish best served cold" in Klingon?

— The Big Bang Theory

Conlang is short for "constructed language," such as a language the writer, their friend, or some other associate has made up for the purpose of using in a book or show.

No, they did not just say that the Aliens/Elves/Bee People/Whatever speak a different language, they actually made up an exact vocabulary and grammar, one that can be translated into English (or equivalent). This is where Translator Microbes are abandoned and a dictionary given to the reader. Gibberish does not count as a language, regardless of whether or not the other characters say they can understand it, and using a mere handful of alien words, even if you give them a translation, does not count either.

In Real Life, an auxiliary language or "auxlang" is a conlang intended for use by real-world groups. Esperanto is the best-known example.

Since virtually any fictional language could theoretically be part of a larger language, this trope only applies to those fictional works that actually give us enough to say some things of our own. The more dedicated Fandoms will often design languages — or at least large vocabulary lists — of otherwise unorganized languages. (See Fictionary.)

There are four types of conlang:

• Argot or Direct Translation. The author just substituted made-up words for the words of their native language, and to translate it back you just substitute them word-for-word back (even though this would produce a "Blind Idiot" Translation in any real language). Realistically, this may be a secret language used solely to exclude others from the conversation. Results in Conveniently Precise Translations. In linguistics, this is called a relex or a relexification. It is a type of Indo-European Alien Language.
• Foreign conversion. The language is closely based on a language foreign to the audience, but only differing slightly (in either words or structure) from its derivative. May include special letters and phonemes that are not found in the native language, and require a special pronunciation guide to be spoken properly. Not the same as foreign-sounding gibberish.
• Complete original. Very rare; words, grammar, and pronunciation are made up entirely by the author. More likely to include a unique alphabet and special pronunciations. May be loosely based on a foreign language, sometimes a dead language, but even then a hard translation.
• Newspeak. A language derived from our own with limited change in the actual words, usually as an advanced form of Future Slang. Overlaps with Strange-Syntax Speaker. For the Nineteen Eighty-Four version, see Newspeak.

Note that while some writers go to great lengths in trying to make the languages they come up with seem as natural and realistic in terms of grammar and syntax as possible, this rarely affects the script. While Earth's writing can be allocated to five categories (Alphabets with distinctive letters representing both vowels and consonants such as Greek, Latin, Korean, or Cyrillic; Syllabaries which are similar to alphabets except each letter represents a syllable such as Japanese and Cherokee; Abugidas which are similar to syllabaries except letters are formed from a base shape representing a consonant and modified according to what vowel comes after it such as Hindi; Abjads which limit themselves only to consonants such as Arabic or Hebrew; and Logographies featuring thousands of characters representing particular concepts rather than sounds such as Chinese or Old Egyptian), you'll be hard-pressed to find non-alphabets being used in any world of fiction. Often, it's a result of Write What You Know (or should that be Make What You Are Familiar With?), but it can also be a result of easiness or practicality: for alphabets you only need to make a glyph for every sound you have which should be quite small (less than 40), while a syllabary for example would require you to make a glyph for every syllable you have, which for any language that even remotely allows consonant clusters means you're looking at a few hundred glyphs. Even the fictional people who speak your conlang would find a few-hundred-glyph syllabary too much and simplify it.

The complete original sort has picked up in popularity in the recent decades, and especially recent years, with the likes of linguists Mark Okrand and David J. Peterson being hired to provide a fictional language with completely unique grammars and writing scripts, the target ostensibly being to make the language in question as far removed from English as possible, so expect a non-SVO word order, tons of grammatical cases, obscure tenses, postpositional adjectives and no articles. And don't even think about your "modern" left-to-right direction of writing! ^note Even though it was used by the Sumerian cuneiform script, the oldest in the history of mankind.

It should be noted, however, that in an example of The Coconut Effect, a sufficiently "exotic" language doesn't need to differ from English in every possible way just to seem more plausible. Contrary to the popular belief, a language's complexity (or lack thereof) hasn't been proven to be linked to a society's level of civilizational advancement,^note In Europe alone, the nightmarishly complex Finnish did not hold back Finland from becoming a welfare state on a par with its Swedish neighbor and Romanian, arguably the most regular of the languages used in Eastern Europe, happens to be used in Moldova, the poorest country on the continent.^note Early scholars studying Hawaiian, unable to discern the subtle nuances of its grammar and sound system — especially the vitally important 'okina glottal stop — called it "a pleasing, childish lisping, which can scarcely be called a language". and many languages which linguistically are not related to English in any way, such as Hebrew or Chinese, might turn out to be much more familiar in structure to speakers of English than even some of their fellow Indo-European languages, such as Slavic ones.

It's just as ungrounded to expect every "ancient" language to be much more complex than any that is to be found in the modern world. While it's partly true that isolation might contribute to a language retaining its original form largely intact (such as is the case with Icelandic), some of the areas in which extremely archaic languages are spoken (most notably the Baltic ones) have been anything but isolated throughout the last centuries. And even though the general trend does seem to be towards simplification of a language over a period of time, it's important to note that most studies on this focus on the Indo-European languages, which all descend from a language called, well, Proto-Indo-European, which is a very grammatically complex language already. So it's hard to imagine any culture would go with even more complexity.

Cypher Languages are a subtrope of this, and many forms of Black Speech fall here as well. Contrast with Wing Dinglish where a supposedly alien or original language is just regular English in a strange font. Compare and contrast Fictionary, when the language in story is just a few exotic words or phrases rather than a full grammar or syntax— but, as noted, sufficiently dedicated fans may be able to turn this into a Conlang of their own.

Interestingly, an alternative title interpretation is that these languages tend to be spoken by die-hard fans at Cons...

Our own conlang can be found here. If you want to try your hand at making your own conlang, you can check out SoYouWantTo.Create A Conlang, though be advised that the page is under construction. If you want to go further and create entire language families like Tolkien did, check out SoYouWantTo.Create A Language Family.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind has a very detailed Dorok writing system (in which Dorok dialogue is rendered, in addition to appearing on signs and buildings), but leaves out the actual language under it.
• A two-volume artbook for Space Battleship Yamato 2199 reveals that the language of the Garmillas race is created from scratch by a linguist who goes by the alias "Hoffnung". A comprehensive guide to its structure can be found here.
• Super Dimension Fortress Macross and the other Macross shows include Zentradi. It was originally based on Japanese syntax, but drifted away as more was added to it.

Comic Books

• The DCU has not one, but three alphabet ciphers that translate to one of 26 Roman Alphabet Letters: Kryptonian, Interlac, and Venusian. It's explicitly stated that English sounds different than Kryptonian (which has been hinted as vaguely Swedish sounding), which sounds different from Interlac, despite having the same amount of symbols to depict those sounds, and that each symbol matches a Roman symbol as well. Makes some sense in Interlac's case, since it could be descended from our alphabet. Some of the symbols might've been repurposed for new sounds, too; after all, the modern Greek vowel letters were consonants in Phoenician. They have one non-cipher language: the language of the Indigo Lanterns. Anyway, there's an official Kryptonian alphabet and an unofficial Kryptonian language page. You can also find the old Venusian Mind Worm language online.
• ElfQuest has Elvish. There's a small official dictionary in one of the encylopedias, but for the first twenty-or-so years of the series, the only way to know what the words meant was to deconstruct some of the characters' names. (Ex. "Leetah" - "healing light", "Tyleet" - "healer's gift": so "leet" apparently means "heal-".)
• Supergirl writer Steve Orlando stated (as he discussed his Supergirl (Rebirth) book) that he created Kryptonian grammar in the book, from scratch.
  "If you want to translate Kryptonian, it's not just English with Kryptonian characters. There are rules here."
• Tintin has Syldavian and Bordurian; a conlang enthusiast attempted to analyse Syldavian into something coherent, although it turns out it's basically the Brussels dialect of Dutch/Flemish with extra letters spewed all over it. There was also the earlier Arumbayan language, also based on the Brussels dialect in the original French version, but altered to phonetically-spelt Cockney (though it's heavily disguised so as not to be obvious) in the English version.
• Walter Moers invented Pimperanto ("pimpern" is German and means "to shag") for a Little Asshole comic special. It's got bits and pieces from other languages, it's the only language in the world that knows three "i"s in a row, and its four most important words are:
  • "Hoogla" (yes, no, me, you, now, later, please, thank you, good, bad, breasts, weltschmerz, identity crisis, pedestrian area etc.)
  • "Boogla" (compulsory helmet wearing, penis envy and always the opposite of "hoogla")
  • "Yoogla" (a description of a state, roughly referring to emptiness in men's case and filledness in women's case)
  • "Zoogla" (a super-term that can mean anything and everything — except for what "hoogla", "boogla" and "yoogla" mean)
  "Tu hoogla beautifullo as Frans Kawka!" ("You are more beautiful than Franz Kafka!")
  "Youra sausagi es multo bifteckiii!" ("Your sausage is very meaty!")
  "In Jordaniii no has hoogla!" ("In Jordan, there are no pedestrian areas!")

Fan Works

• Ahsoka: A NZRE Star Wars Story: The Sarvchian language is a fully-constructed language, as opposed to random letters joined together.
• Ginevra Weasley And The Disorder Of The Phoenix presents Dlobokzprak (Goblin-speech), derived from German.
• Hivefled created it's own version of Alternian; most of the words we've seen thus far have been slurs (such as mutevir, meaning slut) or proper nouns (the trolls' ship is Naelenurenna, or Mindscar). There is also Piltara, the sacred language of the Dyelus.
• In Harry Potter fanfiction The Parselmouth of Gryffindor, due to the story's focus on it, Parseltongue, while still usually rendered as italicized English, is sometimes shown "as it is" and rudiments of vocabulary and grammar are beginning to surface.
• Pokemon Opal And Garnet and its spin-off Between Sun and Moon created the language of PokeLatin, known as "a language everyone can speak." Et ka certabut libt gret ta zjit promuter! ^note And they certainly lived up to that promise!
• Oversaturated World: The language of Sirens. Wavetongue, with its own grammar and specific words for magic, and things.
• Warriors Redux takes a note from Watership Down and Tailchaser's Song by creating a language for cats. Examples include: "aea" (female cat), "ota" (male cat), "ai" (a respectful honorific for a female cat of higher ranking), "oun" (a respectful honorific for a male cat of higher ranking), "ei" (kitten), "riin" (one moon cycle/a month), "ra" (crow), "ulof" (a collar, literally translates to "neckband"), and "sona" (are/is/am).
• C'hovite, the language of C'hou, in With Strings Attached. Mostly used for difficult-to-translate concepts, though the four don't always understand what the C'hovites are saying even when they're using plain English, thanks to their slang. Entirely a construction of the author, and has internal consistency.
• The Teen Titans fic Prey Mate has dialogue in "Daemos", a language spoken by demons.
• Black Speech, the language spoken by Orcs, is frequently featured in Splint, although mostly just in single words or phrases. The author of the fic drew upon the Black Speech in The Lord of the Rings and the version developed for the film adaptations, as well as adding words of her own. She usually provides translations at the end of each chapter.
• Many Vulcan languages were created by fans in the early days of Star Trek: The Original Series. One of the most cogent was by linguist Dorothy Jones Heydt, who also gave us the Eight Deadly Words. It had grammar, syntax and roots, and was used by several other fan authors. More recently, the phrase ni var, meaning two form and referring to an art form that contrasts two aspects of a subject, was used as the name of a Vulcan ship in Star Trek: Enterprise.^note The writers of that episode were working off a much later fan novella by Claire Gabriel. She'd called it The Thousandth Man, but editors Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath re-titled it Ni Var when it was published (in condensed version) in their 1976 anthology Star Trek, The New Voyages. The Enterprise writers were not aware that Jones-Heydt had created the term.

Films — Animation

• Atlantis: The Lost Empire gave us the Atlantean Language.
• Despicable Me: The creators wrote a language for the gibberish the minions speak. They called it "minion-ese". Each word the minions speak translates into an actual word.
• Planet Turo's Tantalog language from Lilo & Stitch would also count as this, as practically every writing not on Earth is composed of it. It took some sequel and spin-off material to sort of develop it, however.

Films — Live-Action

• Arrival featured a constructed language with a vocabulary of about a hundred words; written in circular patterns that resemble complex coffee stains more than they resemble any human script.
• The Na'vi language from Avatar, developed for the film by linguist Paul Frommer.
• The Baahubali films feature the Kilikili language, spoken by a warrior tribe called the Kalakeyas. The Kilikili language was developed by Madhan Karky, who also wrote several pieces of dialogue for both films; the language has at least 750 words and over 40 grammar rules.
• Cityspeak in Blade Runner. Most prominently spoken by Detective Gaff, it uses syntax from French, Hungarian, German, and Japanese. Even though he only uses it in one scene, Edward James Olmos went so far as to create an entire vocabulary and grammar book, so that he would appear to speak it as a 2019 native.

Detective Gaff: Monsieur, azonnal kövessen engem bitte.
Sushi Chef: He say you under arrest, Mr. Deckard!
Deckard: ...Tell him I'm eating.

• The Blade Trilogy gives vampires their own language. While made up for the films, the book Fictional and Fantastic Languages notes that it appears to have Slavic roots with mixes of Czech and Russian.
• The cast of the movie Caveman (except for one Asian guy, who speaks English for some reason) communicates in a made-up language that has maybe two dozen words in it, not counting personal names. There is no real grammatical structure, as there are no sentences spoken with more than three words in them, and these sentences can mean different things depending on context. For example, "Nya ool" (literally "no food") can mean things like "There is no food", "I do not have food", or "This is not food".
• In The Dark Crystal, the Pod People speak a language of the "foreign conversion" variety. It mostly uses Serbian words (or Croatian, or Bosnian — they're very similar languages), but is pronounced with an accent more akin to Russian.
• The languages David J. Peterson created for Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two — Chakobsa, Sardaukar, Harkonnen, and House Atreides' sign language.
• The Fifth Element director Luc Besson developed the "divine language" heard in the film on his own and taught it to Milla Jovovich. They had conversations in it and wrote letters to each other in it to practice.
• The Martian language for Disney's John Carter was developed by linguist Paul Frommer.
• The Lord of the Rings movies make much use of conlangs in conversations and background chorus lyrics — in fact, the first words that lead off The Fellowship of the Ring are Elvish, spoken by Cate Blanchett over a dark screen — and while the languages were already created by J. R. R. Tolkien for the original books, often they weren't developed enough, or the linguistic material published about them was lacking. The two Elvish languages used (Quenya and Sindarin) were already mostly completed by Tolkien, and the only additions needed for the films was some vocabulary, which was entirely based on existing roots. For Dwarvish, Black Speech and Orkish, however, linguist David Salo had to develop those languages nearly from scratch.^note Dwarvish has about 100-200 words and a well-known derivation system, but no grammar to speak of. There's little of Black Speech other than the Ring inscription, and of the Orkish languages we know literally a only couple of words. Indeed, Salo's version of Dwarvish is known as "Neo-Khuzdûl"^*"Khuzdûl" is, of course, "Dwarvish". to distinguish it from Tolkien's.
• Though it's never spoken aloud in the DC Extended Universe, Kal-El/Superman's suit in Man of Steel (and civilization in the latter), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League features an original written Kryptonian language developed by Professor Christine Schreyer, an expert in anthropology and linguistics. The "squiggles" you see on various Kryptonian structures and clothing, including Superman's suit, are actually full phrases in Kryptonian script. Schreyer later confirmed that the markings on Kara Zor-El/Supergirl's suit in The Flash are not the language she created, on the other hand.
• Several prehistoric languages were made for the film Quest for Fire. They are untranslated, leaving the viewer to guess what is being said based on context and getures.
• Star Trek: While the idea of Klingons speaking their own language goes back to the original series^note which lead to John M. Ford's Trek novel The Final Reflection developing its own version of the language, "Klingonaase" the films gave us a functional Klingon language. It was first created by James Doohan and used in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, though with just a few phrases. Linguist Marc Okrand was brought in to develop a full-fledged Klingon language for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, which was based on those phrases that appeared in The Motion Picture. Later lore established that the Klingon spoken in every Star Trek film - from Star Trek: The Motion Picture through to now - is "tlhIngan Hol", and often Okrand coached the actors himself. Unfortunately most writers in the TV series (Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) just looked up the words in the Klingon dictionary rather than using them properly, presumably due to time/money constraints. Today, much of this language has been documented and established through the officially-endorsed (but still independent) fan group the Klingon Language Institute, who often supervise the use of Klingon in modern software such as Duolingo's Klingon course. They have also translated — no, found the original Klingon Hamlet. Later translations have ranged from The Art of War (Sun Tzu) to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. One of their members, linguist d'Armond Speers, even tried raising his child to speak Klingon as a bilingual speaker but abandoned the effort after several years, finding that the vocabulary was not extensive enough and the child abandoned speaking the language when he found only his father spoke it.
• For Thor: The Dark World, a language for the Dark Elves was developed by linguist David J. Peterson. (see the Live-Action TV folder for more of his work).
• Out of Darkness: All the dialogue is in a conlang called Tola, with subtitles provided. Tola was created specifically for the film, and is based on Arabic and Basque.

Gamebooks

• For the Lone Wolf series of gamebooks, Joe Dever developed the Giak language used by the Darklord armies, with a vocabulary of about 400 words, and rules of grammar for agreement of adjectives and adverbs. It was described in the source book The Magnamund Companion, and readers found that the words spoken by the Giaks in the previous gamebooks were actually translatable.

Literature

• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: The Nautilus crew uses a language that The Professor Aronnax cannot recognize, but Verne didn't bother himself making any word of it except "Nautron respoc lorni virch" that Aronnax thinks must mean: "There's nothing in sight". Aronnax describes it as "a sonorous, harmonious, flexible dialect whose vowels seemed to undergo a highly varied accentuation." Given that the Nautilus crew is a N.G.O. Superpower, it makes sense this language is a Conlang Completely Original, designed to replace all the other "continental" languages that were original to each of the crew countries that the crew has abandoned. Aronnax observes that just moments before his death, one of the crew forgets to use that Conlang and ask for help in French. A hungry Ned Land also theorizes:
  "Don't you see, these people have a language all to themselves, a language they've invented just to cause despair in decent people who ask for a little dinner! Why, in every country on earth, when you open your mouth, snap your jaws, smack your lips and teeth, isn't that the world's most understandable message? From Quebec to the Tuamotu Islands, from Paris to the Antipodes, doesn't it mean: I'm hungry, give me a bite to eat!"
• Adrian Mole: In Wilderness Years, the precocious children of Adrian's landlord have their own language, Oombagooma. Adrian recalls how he used to have his own made-up language (Ikbak), until his father beat it out of him during a long car journey.
• The Artemis Fowl series has lines of Gnommish and Centaurian running along the bottom of each page (omitted in some U.S. editions.) Rather than being graphemes of a full-on Conlang they constitute a Cypher Language offering an Easter Egg to those who decode them. There are a few spoken Gnommish words such as "d'arvit", which is an emphatic swear word.
• In Babel-17, Babel-17 itself is an in-universe example. It is a language specifically constructed to take advantage of the Language Equals Thought trope. Learning Babel-17 has significant effects on the way you think. When Wong first starts to learn the language, she finds it makes certain kinds of strategy puzzles much easier to solve. Later, she also finds it has some additional not-so-pleasant effects.
• Will Self's novel The Book Of Dave introduces a far future where the common language Mokni (a phoneticized cockney initially quite tricky to read) is peppered with bastardised London cabbie slang since their religious book is the rantings of a present-day taxi driver.
• A Clockwork Orange had Nadsat, created for use by the teenage subculture, based on English but with influences from Russian and Cockney rhyming slang.
• Crest of the Stars uses Baronh, based on a variation of ancient Japanese, and having gone through several thousand years of lingual drift into something that sounds nothing like Japanese. Its alphabet, Ath, is further based on Latin characters rather than Chinese idiograms, though some vestiges of Japanese katakana can be seen in a few of its characters. Further complicating things is the fact that Baronh spelling is non-phonetic, especially when transliterated to English (the female lead's name, which is pronounced "Lafiel", is actually spelled "Lamhirh").
• Deptford Mice: The water voles who appear in Whortle's Hope have their own language. They refer to the titular character as a "rimpi-too" as that is their word for "field mouse".
• Discworld gives us the Kad'k.. This was created to look approximately correct and perhaps to be a parody of Tolkein's immaculately constructed conlang; but some people out there have taken those fragments of Discworld Dwarvish, their "English translations", and tried to build grammatical logic into them.
• Older Than Print, thanks to The Divine Comedy:
  • In the seventh canto of Inferno, the demon Plutus speaks about Satan in an ugly language that seems to borrow from Hebrew and Greek. A damned Roman is able to understand his tongue while our living protagonist is lost to its meaning. Plutus says more after the initial sentence about Satan, but that first sentence is all that is made available to the audience.
    "Pape Satàn, pape Satàn aleppe!"
  • In the seventh canto of Paradiso, the saint Justinian sings of God in a divine mixture of Hebrew and Latin. Said blessed Greek is able to understand the song while our living protagonist is lost to its meaning. Justinian sings more after the first verse, but the rest of the chorus is only made available to the audience through the joy and dance described elsewhere in the Canto.
    "Osanna, sanctus Deus sabaòth,
    superillustrans claritate tua
    felices ignes horum malacòth."
• The Empirium Trilogy: There are several languages mentioned throughout the series: Celdaria, Old Celdaria, Borsvallic, Lissar (one of the angelic languages), Common, and so on.
• In The Enemy Papers, two main characters learning the other's language is a major theme, so the readers learn some Dracon along with the protagonist. The language is also used in a couple other stories set in the same universe.
• In the Heralds of Valdemar series, there is Karsite and the Kaled'a'in language family (ancient Kaled'a'in, Shin'a'in, and Tayledras). The last three are notable because the second two are dialects of the first which evolved into new languages, and there's a mild language-family resemblance (tale'edras and tayledras, she'chorne and shay'a'chern, etc.).
• Hunter's Moon (1989) sprinkles about fox terminology suchas rangfar (a vagabound fox) into its text.
• Joanne Greenberg's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden has Yri, the sacred language of Deborah Blau's Kingdom of Yr. It is a secret language, and there is a cover-language based on Latin, a facade for the real thing. To speak regular Yri all the time would be "like powering a firefly with lightning bolts." Deborah actually thinks in Yri and sometimes has difficulty remembering English. It is rich in metaphor and has morphemes to indicate levels of intensity. This language got started because as she entered adolescence, Deborah had begun to have thoughts and experiences that there seemed to be no English words to describe. One word can suffice to explain all the emotions and memories of a single significant day in her life. A doctor who pinch hits for Deborah's regular psychiatrist attempts to dissect Yri as a mishmosh of French, German and Latin. The book is autobiographical, and there actually was such a doctor during Joanne Greenberg's hospital stay; she dismissed Joanne's language (actually called Irian) as bastardized Armenian. ^note In the documentary Take These Broken Wings, about treating schizophrenia with ordinary psychotherapy and minimal or no medication, Joanne confirmed the language was real, and she still knows words of it. Case notes revealed by Gerald Schoenewolf show that she created it as a child to shield her poetry from her extremely intrusive father. It even had its own writing system, resembling Chinese ideographs.
• The Inheritance Cycle has "The Ancient Language" spoken by elves and magic-users (in which it is impossible to tell a direct lie), and relatively less-detailed languages for dwarves, urgals and nomadic tribes.
  • The "Ancient Language" is based very closely on Old Norse (as per "Foreign Conversion", above), but the Dwarves' language is far, far closer to a true "complete original". Paolini has been known to speak paragraphs in his Dwarvish language when requested to do so at conventions and such.
  • English relexification shows in a few places, most notably in the plot point differentiating between "shielded" versus "shield" (the verb). There is no language in the world that forms the transitive past by adding the past tense morpheme to the noun form of the verb—however, in English, the present transitive and the verbal noun happen look the same, which is where the confusion arises. This is seen in a few Germanic languages.
    • Also, "may you be shielded" is NOT the past tense of "may you be a shield". It's the passive non-past optative subjunctive of "to shield," which just happens in English to use the past participle of the verb.
    • The Ancient Language could have the same rule, and probably does, seeing as the only significant difference from English grammar is placing the adjective after the noun.
• The Lord of the Rings (and various other works set in the same world) is the Trope Codifier. J. R. R. Tolkien was a language professor at Oxford — he knew his stuff. His grand dream since his childhood was to create a language. He then realized languages didn't exist in a vacuum — they require people that speak it and a culture in which it developed. As a result, he created a world full of languages, language families, and dialects (just read through them.) with an internal history, along with several scripts and modes in which they could be written. Although most of them are not actually fully detailed languages, several are more detailed than others, and at least the Elven languages Quenya (influenced by Finnish) and Sindarin (based off Welsh) are complete enough to be learned and spoken. Indeed, the (Elvish) languages came first, and the setting in which they could be spoken came after. The attempts by fan scholars and creators of adaptations to extrapolate from and expand the existing material are usually referred to as Neo-(insert language name). Tolkien's languages are not just shoehorned mutilations of existing languages, but very much their own living languages with unique grammar, orthography, phonemes, pronunciation, and rules. Tolkien's academic paper "A Secret Vice" was one of the first serious studies of constructed languages as an art form in itself, focusing mostly on his own work and youthful experiments with language. He coined the term glossopoeia to describe creating languages for artistic purposes.
• Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue series (Native Tongue, Judas Rose, and Earthsong) featured a "women's language", Láadan. Elgin is a linguist, and the language was an attempt to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — she actually made up the language, and there are online lessons.
• Night Gem contains several, some of which are translated by characters in the series, created by the books' co-writer Elliott Lash.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four does this with Newspeak, which is not a new language but a degrading hyper-simplification of English. Bonus points because an exact guide for the simplification is given.
• Phenomena has one called milescript that is sorta described which at first sounds like runes but are different. It seems to have rules similar to Japanese with some being like kanji and another script being hiragana to assist it. The lack of better describing can be explained by that it was supposed to be a Picture Book series but the publisher wanted it to seem more "mature" (probably because it'd be cheaper to print). There are also many other languages like Aldran, Dragon language, and many more, and scripts, but Eliassen seems to have given up on constructing them.
• The Railway Series and its companion books give us Sudric, the native language of the Island of Sodor. Influenced by Manx, it appears in the roots of various place names in Awdry's Fantasy World Map.
• The Space Trilogy gives us Old Solar, the interplanetary language spoken throughout the Solar System, which is completely constructed from scratch. There are two reason why it no longer exists on Earth (Thulcandra): firstly, because Thulcandra is "bent", i.e., corrupt and cut off from Maleldil, and secondly, because of the Tower of Babel.
• Diane Duane created partial languages for the Vulcans and the "Rihannsu" (Romulans) in her Star Trek novels, most of the words of which are given only approximate translations. There was supposed to be a dictionary to go with the Rihannsu series, along the lines of Marc Okrand's The Klingon Dictionary, but it died in Development Hell. The fans, however, took the groundwork laid in-series and ran with it. In-story, the Rihannsu language was originally a direct translation conlang. When the first Rihannsu left Vulcan, they invented a new language — with very different phonemes, but near-identical grammar, to make it easier to learn — and started using it immediately, all in an effort to distance themselves from the planet they were leaving. They went back to Old High Vulcan and took it in a different direction, a bit like making up your own Romance language by fiddling with Latin.
• The Stone Dance of the Chameleon has Quya. The opening poem is written out in both Quya and English. There is also a system of glyphs to write Quya in and the name of every chapter is written out in both English and Quya glyphs. Sometimes attention is drawn in the story to a peculiarity of the language — which completely passes the readers by. Hear the author speak it here.
• Stranger in a Strange Land has Martian, which is presented as an essential tool to unlock spiritual potential in humans. The characters spend most of the novel learning the language and, eventually, writing a full dictionary. Interestingly enough, it works almost exactly the same as Nineteen Eighty-Four's Newspeak (abolishing the need for synonyms), but would lead to a utopian society, instead of a dystopian one.
• Tailchaser's Song has each animal having its own native tongue, though some animals can learn each others tongues. The book comes with a glossary at the back to help readers understand the terminology. For example, fela means "female [cat]" and comes from 'Fela Skydancer', the first female cat created by Meerclar Allmother.
• The Torin stories include occasional words and phrases (and, at one point, an entire verse of a song translated from English) in the Moruian language, which is developed in sufficient depth for it to have its own puns.
• In The Traitor Game, this is combined with Multilingual Bonus. Mereish and Evgard combine a multitude of words from different languages spelt weirdly. Also, lots of Latin.
• Watership Down gives us the Lapine; a language for the rabbits.
• The Wheel of Time gives us the Old Tongue. It draws vocabulary from various real-world languages, because the cyclical nature of time in the series means that it's actually a distant descendant of those languages. It also has a fairly consistent morphology of words, but a syntax that is sketchy at best. The series encyclopedia reveals that the way to form sentences in the Old Tongue is to choose the right words and put them in an order that seems aesthetically pleasing. As such, its use to convey complex meaning is limited.
• The Wind on Fire books contain plates with Old Manth writing; again, this is just a Cypher Language with some unusual features (a single character for th, no double letters...)

Authors who worked on multiple conlangs:

• C. J. Cherryh:
  • The Foreigner (1994) novels introduce the reader to a good amount of Ragi (an alien language; one of many spoken by the atevi species). Not surprising, as the protagonist is an interpreter by profession.
  • The Alliance/Union universe has the hani, kif, mahen, and stsho languages.
• Ursula K. Le Guin knows her stuff:
  • The Earthsea series has Hardic, which we see a little of. And Kargish, Osskili and Old Speech, in which wizards cast spells. Not that the author is above a pun — the word for stone in Old Speech is tolk and that for sea is inien, making Earthsea translate as... Tolkienian!
  • The language of Kesh in Always Coming Home has a considerable vocabulary given. The expanded edition also adds the syntax rules.
• M.C.A. Hogarth is fond of creating languages for her various series, one of the most developed is the Ai-Naidar language from the Kherishdar series. In the Paradox, series most Pelted languages were invented in-universe by the linguistically talented Seersa.

Live-Action TV

• Beforeigners features a number of people from the mesolithic era being inexplicably transported to the present day. The show's creators devised an elaborate conlang to represent the language spoken by the Prehistorians in Norway. The creators themselves have a background in linguistics and sociology, plus they hired experts to consult on the series and come up with a plausible-but-alien-sounding Mesolithic conlang.
• In The Boys (2019), Kimiko communicates with her own unique form of sign language.
• In Encantadia, the inhabitants of the eponymous world speak a language called Encanta, which is inspired by both the Filipino language and Romance languages such as French and Spanish.
• The book series on which The Expanse is based has a melting-pot language derived from several source languages, and adds hand gestures. In the TV series, Belters (residents of the asteroids) communicate in their language but can code-switch relatively effortlessly between that and English.
• In Inhumans, a few signs were created for Black Bolt's Inhuman sign language, but his actor, Anson Mount, took it much farther, creating hundreds of signs, nearly a functional language. It was carefully made so that none of it duplicates ASL or any other real-world sign language.
• Kamen Rider:
  • Kamen Rider Kuuga has the Grongi Language, which is a cipher of Japanese with some words that don't change ("Kuuga" and "Linto") and some grammatical flipping just to screw with the audience. Fans managed to decipher the language, which was never subtitled into Japanese at the time.
  • Similarly, Kamen Rider Gaim has the language spoken by the Overlords, which is also a cipher of Japanese but unnecessarily more complicated than Grongi. Fans only managed to decipher this language due to closed captioning tracks featuring the phonetics and the translation. With Grongi, the cipher kept the vowel sound and swapped around consonants, some of which repeat; "geemu" ("game") becomes "Gegeru". The Overlord language swaps out consonants and vowels and sometimes adds the final n sound; "ningen" ("human") becomes "Femushinmu".
• Sid and Marty Krofft hired a Ph.D. linguist to create a language for the proto-human Pakuni in Land of the Lost (1974), with a grammar, syntax, and two hundred word vocabulary. The full language is included as an extra on the Season One DVD.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power makes use of Elvish in conversations between elves and the background chorus lyrics. Some Khuzdul is also used in a similar way for Dwarf-focused scenes.
• Linguist David J. Peterson became the go-to guy for this trope in Sci-Fi and Fantasy shows in The New '10s:
  • He reified the Dothraki language for the 1st season of HBO's Game of Thrones. For the 3rd season, he also reified High Valyrian, including several rules to transform it into different dialects of Low Valyrian, and improved it further for House of the Dragon. It's reached the point where George R. R. Martin consults him on the fragments he puts in later books.
  • He has created languages for the Castithans and Irathients in Defiance, which also includes a base-6 number system to avoid the usual glaring omission of number systems as discussed below under "Resources".
  • He created the Sondiv language for the Atrians in Star-Crossed.
  • He created Lishepus the language of the angels for Dominion.
  • For The 100, he came up with the Grounder language, Trigedasleng, which is English that drifted over three generations under pressure from enemies. The Grounders can still communicate with the standard-English-speaking Ark arrivals and Mountain Men, however.
  • He created the Verbis Diablo for Penny Dreadful.
  • He created Noalath, the language of the Druids that is spoken in The Shannara Chronicles.
  • For Emerald City he created the Munja'kin language spoken by the people of the same name, and Inha, the tongue the witches use to cast their spells. For this particular example, Inha was divided into four separate dialect, called Earth, Fire, Water, and Air Inha. Peterson did not come up with this idea, but Ana Ularu, who played Mistress West in the show, did.
  • For Into the Badlands he created Azrán, the language spoken in Azra.
  • For Another Life (2019) he created the alien languages of Achaian and Tala.
  • He created the Elder Tongue for The Witcher (2019).
  • Together with with Jessie Sams, he created the language of witches for Motherland: Fort Salem.
  • He created the language of Adam used in Lovecraft Country.
  • He created several languages and writing systems for Shadow and Bone: Ravkan, Fjerdan (together with Christian Thalmann), and the Kerch writing systema and sugn language.
  • For Halo (2022), he worked with Carl Buck to create Sangheili, the language of the Covenant.
  • For Elemental (2023) he created the Firish language spoken by Ember's family.
• For a comment on Klingon in the Star Trek TV series, see the Films — Live-Action folder above.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation has a unique example in the Tamarian language, introduced in the episode "Darmok": the Universal Translator can translate their language without issue, but the Tamarian language entirely consists of references to their mythology: thus, without knowledge of this mythology, there is no way to know, for example, that "Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra" means "to cooperate" by referencing two disparate individuals coming together for a common purpose.
• Star Trek: Picard:
  • The Romulan language for this series was created by linguist Trent Pehrson, and he discusses the process in this Facebook post:
    "I was given instruction on what preexisting fragments were to be considered as canon. I incorporated all of those. Essentially, those really only yielded limited phonotactic information, some vague lexical items, and a hand-full of possible grammatical morphemes. There was also some Vulcan canon, which was useful, in a historical linguistic sense, to further flesh out phonotactics, and to derive another small set of lexical items. Native Romulan orthography fragments, used in prior canon production, were aesthetically pleasing, but were clearly just a thinly disguised version of the Roman alphabet. So, I used only the visual aesthetic from that, and created a system fitting to the actual phonotactics and phonemic inventory of the Romulan language. ST:Picard, E2 recently featured a decent sampling in a scene. The rest (the majority of the language) I had to construct."
  • In-universe: Thaddeus Riker, elder son of Will Riker and Deanna Troi-Riker, constructed a fantasy language and was well on his way to become a 24th/25th century J.R.R. Tolkien before a rare silicon-based virus took his life. His younger sister Kestra keeps the language alive, and it was learned by Soji as well in mere minutes because she's a Soong-type android.
• Star Wars: In The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, the Tusken Raiders use a sign language. A hearing person on the team who knew sign language mentioned that a deaf person should be consulted. That person became Troy Kotsur. He developed the language, and he also played the lead Tusken Raider.
  Troy Kotsur: So I was helping consult on the show. And later on, he didn't realize that I was an actor myself, because I didn't want to say, "Hey, by the way, I'm an actor." You know, it would just sound like I was brown-nosing. I really wanted to focus on the sign language. But my manager let them know, and said, "Hey, by the way, Troy is also an actor. Why doesn't he play a Tuscan Raider?"
• Supergirl (2015): Starting in season 3, Kryptonian characters occasionally speak "Doyle Kryptonian," which is a fan conlang attempting to create a reasonable language out of all the scraps and hints from decades of Superman media. The show's grammar and pronunciation is a bit hit-or-miss, though.
• Andy Kaufman created a language for his Foreign Man character when the persona was adapted into Latka Gravas for Taxi. He later taught it to Carol Kane when she played Simka, taking her to dinner and refusing to speak to her in any language but the one he'd created. It's mostly similar-sounding syllables strung together, but over the years he developed them into a small, consistent vocabulary. (Ibbi = one, dibbi = two, abbi = three, dabbi = four, ibbida = thank you, etc.)
• The Wheel of Time (2021): In the "3000 years ago" scene in episode 8 the characters seem to speak the Old Tongue Jordan invented for the Age of Legends.

Music

Multiple songs:

• Aina has two languages: the more frequently heard Ainian language that sounds fairly similar to Quenya (the song "Lalae Amer" is sung entirely in this language) and the harsh and guttural language of the Krakhon.
• Alice Schach and the Magic Orchestra describes themselves on their official site as "an independent music group" who "use a self made language "Alician" in all songs."
• On Enya's album Amarantine, about a quarter of the songs are in the Conlang "Loxian", said to be from a distant planet.
• Lisa Gerrard also sings in a mysterious language, but it is a kind of glossolalia and not a structured language. She says "The words are in my own internal language, and mean more than I could ever explain."
• Susumu Hirasawa's Hirasawanese, a language mostly created for a few Berserk songs (Sign, Sign 2, Aria), a mix of elements of German, Thai and Latin. The meaning is unknown to anyone but Hirasawa himself.
• Yuki Kajiura's Kajiurago. Nobody besides her knows the meaning of the language. It can be heard in the Madlax theme "Nowhere" and the Puella Magi Madoka Magica song "Credens Justitiam (Mami's Theme)".
• Some of Yoko Kanno's songs are either in constructed languages or Singing Simlish, with perhaps the most famous example being Cowboy Bebop's "Green Bird".
• The French progressive rock band Magma invented a language called "Kobaïan" for their albums because they felt French wasn't expressive enough. The constructed language also enabled their albums to sound more alien and prevented people from over-scrutinising the lyrics (although unofficial Kobaïan-French and Kobaïan-English lexicons were constructed by fans, and band leader Christian Vander eventually revealed the meanings of some words). Does it even have to be said that most of the band's albums constitute an extended Rock Opera based around the human race settling another planet? No? Didn't think so. TOW has details on the language here. Following the example of Magma, their disciples in Ruins and Koenjihyakkei (the two of which share some of the same musicians) utilise what appears to be another constructed language for their songs, although unlike the case of Kobaïan (where some of the words have been officially translated to French) it's not known what any of the words mean or indeed whether they mean anything at all. (It's also possible that more than one Conlang is involved, since as TOW notes, orthography has been known to vary between albums and songs).
• Beginning in the mid-1960s, Joni Mitchell created a mythology with its own language. Names of people and places were derived from acronyms based on descriptive phrases. A race of miniature women were called Posall ("Perhaps Our Souls Are Little Ladies"), and their men were Mosalm ("Maybe Our Souls Are Little Men"). The beautiful queen was Siquomb — "She Is Queen, undisputedly, Of Mind Beauty." The place name Sisotowbell turns up in her dreamy Arcadia ballad "Sisotowbell Lane" — it means "Somehow, in spite of troubles, ours will be ever lasting love."
• Akiko Shikata sometimes uses the conlang of whatever video game's theme she's singing, the most famous example being the Hymmnos lyrics used for several songs in Ar tonelico.
• S.K. Thoth prayforms in a language of his own creation.

Single songs:

• siromaru and cranky's "conflict" is sung in a made-up language.
• In 2005, one of the entries in the Swedish version of the Eurovision Song Contest was Cameron Cartio's "Roma." Word of God is he came up with the language himself.
• In 2003, Urban Trad competed for Belgium with the song "Sanomi", the contest's first entry in a fictional language. It came very close to winning but was beaten by Turkey.
• "Sugaan Essena", produced for Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order by The Hu, is sung in "Huttese", the language of the Hutts.

Tabletop Games

• The Kafer Sourcebook for 2300 AD includes a brief overview of Kafer language and writing.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Both Elven and Draconic has received vocabularies. Several, in the Elven case, consistency not always being 100% (sometimes explained away as dialectal differences, and sometimes not).
  • The language of the Drow in has been given a fairly extensive vocabulary and sophisticated gramma in books such as 3.5E's Drow of the Underdark. Several in-universe proverbs exist which illustrate the character of the drow, such as, "All trust is foolish."
• Empire of the Petal Throne, set on the world of Tekumel, has a serious and early case of Complete Original, including Tsolyani and many other languages designed by an academic linguist, M. A. R. Barker, complete with a hard core non-Roman written form. They are notably unlike European languages.
• Magic: The Gathering's design philosophy is generally to not use fictional languages due to the hurdles of maintaining a consistent worldbuilding, but it happens occasionally:
  • There is the very harsh and alien-sounding Phyrexian language created by a professional linguist. It can only be heard in two promo videos, seen on a handful of cards, based on a mix of Mongolian and the early Irish "Ogham" script, and it is quite literally impossible to pronounce by unmodified humans, requiring a voice box able to make the sound of sharpening knives and other metallic sounds. Despite this, one fan was able to accurately translate a leaked Phyrexian card before the English version was revealed.
  • Children of the Nameless mentions "Old Ulgrothan", though for now there are no samples of it.
• Traveller has enough languages and sublanguages to cover thousands of worlds. To handle this a system is provided for random generation of words as well as sample words and details about linguistic style from various culture. However "Ganglic"(evolved English) is the common speech of trade and travel.
• Warhammer has numerous languages each with their own distinct alphabets and scripts from the Germanic Reikspiel to the predominantly Slavic Kislevarin and the dwarf Khazalid, the language of the dwarfs wonderfully described with grammar and pronunciation. The Elf and Chaos tongues get some of Khazalid but not as much.
• In Warhammer 40,000, both the the Tau and Eldar have their own lexicon described.
• Werewolf: The Forsaken uses many examples of the First Tongue, the language of the Spirit World. The creators have pretty much said it's generated by going back as far back into Proto-Indo-European language tree as possible and making a few detours on the way.

Theme Parks

• Lost Island Theme Park in Iowa has Aukipi, the language of the residents of Auk Modu, which also comes with a corresponding script. Primarily serving as a means of adding an extra layer of encryption to Aukipi script messages scattered around the park, a translation key and a limited glossary was printed in the back of the park's picture book "Sneaky Tamariki" and some other merchandise features proverbs from the different Elemental Nations presented in romanized Aukipi and English. A more detailed "Aukipi Dictionary" was released for the 2023 season, alongside the introduction of walkaround characters to speak it.

Video Games

• Arena of Valor: The setting Athanor has an ancient language known as 'Ancient Veda Language', which is spoken in conjunction with English, but the two languages are never spoken together in one sentence. You usually hear this once a hero respawns from death. Linguist David J. Peterson is hired by Tencent to construct the language.
• Assassin's Creed: The Isu, a precursor race who died out after the Toba Catastrophe 77,000 years ago, had a language that, while never spoken, was written all over their ancient temples and artifacts. The language's script is similar in style to cuneiform, one of if not the earliest known writing systems. Fans on Twitter managed to transliterate some of the Isu script in 2021, to Ubisoft's approval.
• The Ar tonelico series has Hymmnos, a language vaguely based on English, Japanese, Sanskrit and German. In the setting of the games, it is an obsolete language, used to interface with ancient technology in the form of songs. Unusually, Hymmnos is a language constructed specifically to express the singer's emotions (with special grammar rules that aid them). Though Hymmnos and one of its dialects (New Testament of Pastalie) are the ones that gets the most attention, the series also has the Carmena Foreluna and Ar Ciela languages, predecessors to Hymmnos. A detailed insight into all three of these can be found here.
  Its prequel, the Surge Concerto series, follows suit with two conlangs: Emotional Song Pact, with glyphs based on the Korean Hangui, and REON-4213, which is practically a programming language.
• The gameplay of Chants of Sennaar actually revolves aroud this, with each of the tower's five cultures having their own language that the player has to translate based on context clues. For the most part, it's just logographic Wingdinglish, though there are a few changes like how each of them works with plurals and one group being Strange-Syntax Speakers.
• Dead Space has Unitology's cypher language, which is often found scrawled on the walls in blood. It is an Argot language consisting of the ten numbers and 26 letters of the English Alphabet, as well as a few additional symbols◊. It can be translated to reveal several hidden messages,◊ including a few easter eggs. This even includes the seemingly random symbols that pop up during hallucinations.
• The demon language of Ozkavosh created for the remake of Defense of the Ancients is almost entirely symbolic, full of synonyms and essentially requires context to be understood. It also does not conjugate, and due to the demons' nature, the word for "self" (Ozh) is both capitalized and emphasized in speech, or in case of another object of emphasis, emphasized more.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The most complete and oft-used is Daedric, the alphabet of which is simply a cypher for Roman.
  • Three now extinct races of Mer (Elves) each had their own. The ancient Dwemer had Dwemeris, the ancient Falmer (Snow Elves) left their own simply known as the "Falmer Alphabet", and the Ayleids (Wild Elves) left their own in Ayleidoon.
  • Skyrim adds Dovahzul, the language of the Dragons. It is also a Language of Magic, where the words can actually be used to slightly alter reality. With sufficient understanding, certain words can be shouted to produce magical effects such as conjuring fire, cold, or wind; slowing time; or pushing an enemy away. This ability is known as the Thu'um. The Player Character is a Dragonborn or "Dovahkiin", a mortal born with the immortal Aedric (loosely Angelic) soul of a dragon. With it comes an innate understanding of the dragon language and mastery of the Thu'um. The main theme song for Skyrim, "Dovahkiin", as well as the endgame theme song, "Sovngarde", are sung in it. It also has it's own alphabet, consisting of 34 letters of pseudo-cuneiform, based on scratches with dragon-claws. The grammar of the language bears some similarities to German: simple concepts are a single syllable, with multi-syllabic words being compounds of several single-syllable words. Still, there are some completely alien concepts: there are no tenses, and at the base level there are only nouns and verbs, requiring compounding for anything else.
  • The "Elder Alphabet" is a yet-untranslated one, whose characters appear on such Eldritch items as the Elder Scrolls themselves as well as the Eye of Magus.
  • Jel, the language of the Argonians, is another. Unlike the other languages of Men and Mer, it does not descend from Ehlnofex, but rather comes from the Hist. Like Dovahzul, it has no past tense or future tense verbs, only present tense.
  • Ta'agra is the language of the Khajiit, which obviously makes heavy use of the Punctuation Shaker. It famously has no word for "rules", with the closest word, Thjizzrini, meaning "foolish concepts". "Khajiit" itself loosely translates to "desert walker" in Ta'agra.
  • "Giantish" is the language of the Giants, and is a very simple language. To an outsider, it sounds like an incomprehensible string of grunts and roars. However, it can be learned by non-Giants, and Giants tend to have greater respect and reduced hostility toward Giantish speakers. Giants are not known to have any written language, though they will carve/paint symbols with some sort of meaning into their own bodies, the tusks of their mammoths, and around their campsites.
  • Nymphs, a type of nature spirit who take the form of beautiful, naked women, have their own language as well. It is said to sound similar to Ayleidoon, but does not actually share a vocabulary with it. Mortals who can speak it have been known to render Nymphs non-hostile.
  • The in-universe book N'Gasta! Kvata! Kvakis! is written in the language of the sload (an aquatic species that lives off the coast of Morrrowind). As an Easter Egg, the language is actually modified Esperanto: A translation is available here.
• Far Cry Primal is set in Stone Age Central Europe, and the dialogue is in Wenja (and its close relatives Izila and Udam), which is based on Proto-Indo-European. Deluxe editions of the game come with a Wenja phrase book, and extensive details about the language can be found on the personal site of historical linguist Andrew Miles Byrd, one of Wenja's creators.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy X features Al Bhed, which is made up of a simple cypher of English/Japanese (depending on which localization of the game you play obviously) but is spoken in the game by the Al Bhed as a real language. As an added feature, the player can pick up 'primers' throughout their visit to Spira and slowly translate the language, letter by letter. This is part of a small New Game Plus bonus: The next time a player decides to play through the game, if they had collected most/all of the primers before, they can load up their completed 'dictionary' and understand what various characters/signs are saying right from the beginning!
  • Final Fantasy XIV has "Dragonspeak", a language telepathically "spoken" by dragons, with its own grammatical rules and sentence structure. The voice acting for dragon characters is always in this language, with translations in the text provided by either the Warrior of Light's Echo, or by the dragon in question choosing to have their words understood by the mortals they are speaking to (which is how the Warrior's NPC friends are able to understand them in Heavensward). Outside of dialogue, most dragon words are left untranslated. There exists three separate topics on the official forums that detail how the language was created, how the language works, and a dictionary of commonly-used words.
• The Gostak is an Interactive Fiction game written mostly using made-up words. You can usually work out what's a verb, adjective, or noun based on the context of the sentences, and have to use Trial-and-Error Gameplay to figure out what each word means.
• Gravity Rush and its sequel have all spoken dialogue use a constructed language meant to sound similar to French, inspired by the director's fondness of French comic book artist Jean Giraud's work and watching Japanese dubs of French movies. Meanwhile, the writing system is constructed from a combination of English and romanized Japanese with some letters.
• Heaven's Vault, a game about archaeology and translating ancient language, has Ancient, the ancient language of the Nebula. There's basic syntactic similiarites to English ^note The developers said that at one point they tried something less similar to English, but the testers got confused, however there's multiple subtle difference grammar-wise ^note Like having no articles, no gendered terms, no verb case, very few tenses, scriptio continua writing, and the writing system is completely different, being hieroglyphic and relying on forming compound words from basic glyphs. The game puts most emphasis on written Ancient than spoken, however, since very little of the latter remains, mainly in form of some Elboreth slangs.
• Written material found within Hello Neighbor seems to be a mix of word exaggeration, syllable-shifting, and letter substitution/omission. For example, a sign that should say "Welcome to Raven Brooks" is written as "Calwom oot Wayron Croobs", while missing posters say "Simming".
• In the first Infinity Blade game, everyone speaks a fictional language called Pangean.
• Jade Empire has some NPCs speak "the Old Tongue" (Tho Fan), a mixture of Asian languages specially invented for the game by a Canadian linguist. Sadly wasted, unfortunately: the spoken phrases are chosen mostly at random and consist almost entirely of cow jokes. Their actual purpose is to make it less obvious the same lines of dialog are being endlessly recycled to save disc space.
• Just Cause 3 takes this in an interesting direction by making the language spoken in Medici the existing auxiliary language Interlingua. Interlingua looks and sounds enough like a Romance language to the untrained ear that most people can buy it being the native language of a small Mediterranean island nation.
• Kings Quest (2015) features Achaka, a knight hopeful from a foreign land hoping to win the knighthood that Graham is after. Since he's from a foreign land, no one understands his native language. Manny, another knight in the running, attempts to translate, but runs into problems. Later on, an entire puzzle is based on learning a few phrases from him; "stalama" meaning no, "affa nata" meaning yes, and "shrekee" meaning dragon. While the player never sees his language in written form, it can be assumed its written as it is spoken.
• Kirby:
  • Kirby Star Allies has the Jambandran language, which mostly consists of altered words from English, Japanese, and other languages (for example, "bonjam" is "hello", "jambuhbye" is "goodbye", "jawaii" is "cute", and "jamanke" is "thank you"). We don't see very much of the full language in action, but its sentence structure appears more similar to Japanese than English.
  • Kirby and the Forgotten Land has a separate language that's slightly more developed. Its alphabet and writing are just a Cypher Language for English, but the song "Welcome to the New World!" is sung entirely in this language and sounds completely unlike English. A few of the words unique to this language have been revealed through Word of God: for example, "neichel" is "nature" or "fresh greenery", "nodiruna" is "nap", and "adureshia" is "canvas".
• Klonoa has Phantomile. The second game actually has a song sung entirely in the language.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Zelda series features Hylian, of which there have been six variations of so far. Outside of the Hylian seen in A Link to the Past, each variant can be translated into either written Japanese or English, depending on the game. However, spoken Hylian was only heard once in the series before proper voice acting was introduced in Breath of the Wild; this being when Zelda sings during an early game cutscene in Skyward Sword. Otherwise, characters other than Link were heard speaking short clips of gibberish in the 3D games.
  • While it's nowhere near a complete language, the series does have a recurring collection of prefixes, affixes, and suffixes used in the naming of various enemies that have fairly clear meanings like stal- (skeletal), -mol- (swims through dirt), and -fos (humanoid).
  • In Twilight Princess, Midna speaks Twili, the language of her character's race. The language is never seen written, but the spoken aspect is basically scrambled English. If one takes the time to unscramble every phrase Midna speaks, you'll find that it is applicable to the given situation. For example, Midna's statement when teleporting you being "I will take you there with my power."
  • Breath of the Wild introduces proper in-game words and translations for the Gerudo language, as opposed to their more random typography that has existed since Ocarina of Time. Examples include "voe" and "vai" meaning man and woman, respectively. It's very bare-bones, but it's more than can be said for any other language in the series.
• Metroid Dread: The Chozo (and Samus herself) speak in their own native tongue, which is an actual conlang with its own words, rules, and sentence structure. While variants of the written script have shown up in prior games, Dread is the first time where it doesn't simply translate directly into English.
• Myst: D'ni is a completely original version.
• All the songs in NieR (except for one) are in languages made up by the vocalist herself, who may or may not know what the lyrics mean.
• Outcast has the Talan language, with the growing dictionary provided to the player. Talans will use some words from it when talking to the hero, and there's also a whole song in it, written in the hero's honor.
• Phantasy Star uses its own lingo for spells, otherwise known as techniques, which are augmented with specific prefixes, complete with 'language drift' across games (though this is very likely a happy accident caused by translation difficulties). In the fourth game, the prefixes used seem to indicate numerical magnitude: Gi- for times three, and Na- for times ten, based on the spellcasting animations. And this is, of course, never referenced anywhere.
• The Phantasy Star Online sub-series has a Foreign Conversion conlang in the form of Coralian, which is English with a new, distinct alphabet. Its sequel Phantasy Star Online 2 will continue the post-millennial tradition of Foreign Conversion conlangs, featuring a new distinct alphabet for Star Fleet Oracle.
• The Phantasy Star Universe sub-series continues the use of Foreign Conversion conlangs:
  • The language used on Parum is most similar to what was used for Coralian in PSO, being a simple (if sometimes Engrish-y) instance of English with a new alphabet.
  • The language of the Wutai planet Neudaiz uses the English alphabet, but with letters that look more like distorted kanji. Neudaiz script is also used as an Argot to write in Romaji (Japanese transliterated into the English alphabet), just to further confuse the native Japanese player base (and confuse foreign players even more)!
  • The Moatoob language also uses its own alphabet for English writing. Moatoob also has its own language (as evidenced by Photon Arts and weapons originating from the planet), but it's not been made clear if this is an Argot or something more.
• The Sims's simlish, of all things, has aspects of this. Some of it is gibberish, and it's really hard to catch, but if you listen hard enough there are actually a good few constant words.
• The Splatoon series features the Inkling language, though other species such as the Octolings also have their own languages. While the vocal aspect is almost completely random, some of the written scripts can be reliably deciphered into English words (with some misspellings here and there thanks to Japanese Ranguage). In addition, there are also the occasional instances of actual English words appearing in the game, such as the MakoMart stage in Splatoon 2 having a cereal box with the word "choco" on it amongst its shelves or the entirety of Ruins of Ark Polaris, which the game strongly hints was a failed attempt by humans to leave Earth during the apocalypse, with the aftermath being left to decay in the ocean for millennia.
• Star Fox introduced the Dino language (also called Saurian) in Star Fox Adventures which is used on Dinosaur Planet (Sauria in Star Fox Asssault). It is a cipher language. More info here: Saurian Translator
• Tales of Legendia has Relares, an ideographic language that works by conjugating a set of core base ideas into nouns, verbs, and adjectives/adverbs. In-universe, it's the traditional language of the Ferines, though its modern in-universe usage is primarily for naming, important declarations, and records of major historical events. It's also used in the game's soundtrack. Relares is notable in that the other functional languages invented for the Tales Series are fairly simple cipher languages based on English.
• Team ICO Series of games all feature a conlang spoken by the main characters of their games, which is clearly based on Japanese but unintelligible to a Japanese speaker. The language is subtitled for the player. ICO has a second conlang spoken by Yorda, which is subtitled in Wing Dinglish to emphasize the fact that she and Ico don't speak the same language.
• In Telepath Tactics, the lissit have their own language, which is featured in some scenes in the campaign. In particular, Silithis Predat ("Patient Hunter") enjoys inserting Lissit words into her speech. A limited Lissit-to-English dictionary is provided in the manual, allowing players to translate most of the instances in the campaign.
• The Tiamat Sacrament: The dragons have their own glyph language that translates to a handful of human phrases, though the author didn't develop this language any more than is necessary for gameplay. While Az'uar will usually automatically translate any glyph he examines, the player is required to memorize glyphs in order to solve an optional puzzle in the Borderlands, where the terrain will form glyphs.
• Total War: Warhammer III: With Forge of the Chaos Dwarfs Downloadable Content, the titular dwarves speak their own language with subtitles which borrows from esablished Dawi, and has loan words from english for diplomacy dialogue.
• Urban Dead users developed several English cyphers to work with and around the limited speech options of zombies, but a few have tried to construct actual grammars. Zamgrh/kiZombie is the most ambitious and zam arrh zambahz gab zam but most know only a few of the most important words.
• Warframe has a constructed language and writing system for each faction. The alphabets are your standard Cypher Language, but they fit into each race's personality.
  • The Grineer speak a harsh, guttural language with some recognizable English words and a few that are unique, and write in the English alphabet (minus the letters Q and X) using odd block letters (an "idiot-proof bar code", to paraphrase the developers), albeit with many words having corrupted spelling.
  • The Corpus speak an artificial language and write in the English alphabet which uses a Roman numeral-esque font. The Corpus have very odd choices of words and often omit or replace letters - Corpus Sigil Spam includes variations like KORPUS, CORQUS, and so on. Their grammar alternates between English on their motivational flags to nigh-incomprehensible jargon on terminals.
  • The Tenno/Orokin language has no known speaker as the Tenno are mute and the Orokin are dead. Their written language is extremely ornamental◊, with a calligraphy-like style where letters look like slashes from a sword, and words are read diagonally, with the vowel accents being to the top left of consonant.◊ Spelling is similar to phonetic spellings in dictionaries; the Latron rifle has EE'OOH AW'R DH'AW'H HOP A'ND F'EE'OO'CH'OOR" inscribed on the barrel, which translates to "You Are The Hope And Future"
• Although details didn't really start coming out until later in the Wing Commander series, there is a good bit of detail about the Kilrathi language beyond occasional "color" words.
• World of Warcraft has a whole host of these, with Common (humans), Orcish (orcs), Darnassian (night elves), Gutterspeak (undead), Dwarven (dwarves), Gnomish (gnomes), Zandali (trolls), Draenei (draenei), and Thalassian (blood elves) barely scratching the surface. An interesting note with the Undead: During the beta for World of Warcraft (a.k.a. "Vanilla"), the Undead (being formerly living humans) could speak Common, acting as a Translator between the rival factions. However the player-base's tendency to be... juvenile led directly to the creation of Gutterspeak, and is the primary reason you can never learn additional languages, despite some characters knowing 1-2 languages (Faction and Racial).
  • In a note of ingenuity and perhaps an example of metagaming, Players have over-time, made simple translations for some of the more commonly spoken enemy chatter as perhaps a way to quickly denote if the enemy player is going to be combative or not. (For example, an Alliance player who says "lol", would be heard by a Horde player as "Bur", and going in the other direction, it would read "Kek", to an Alliance player who encounters a laughing member of the Horde).
  • While most people who encounter these languages might cross them off as just made up chatter, there even exists a degree of similar word structure between the Night and Blood Elf languages, given their in-game distant shared ancestry (Darnassian and Thalassian respectively), which shows that the Blizzard creative team probably Showed Their Work in conlanging. Since in-game NPCs often speak these constructed languages from time to time (battle cries & so forth), any player will inevitably come across some words multiple times, but a complete translation of these languages is unavailable, and only a select number of phrases and words have been given official translations by Blizzard.
  • More information can be found here: World of Warcraft Languages
  • It should be noted that since these languages appear when the game "translates" player communication into an unintelligible from for those whose character doesn't know said language, a translation back into English is impossible for anything remotely complicated said. The "translation" is intentionally lossy, with many different English letter combinations resulting in the same "translated" words (e.g. both "you" and "lol" are rendered in Orcish as "bur"). This is done on purpose, to prevent players from being able to understand what their opponents are saying even if they have translation software on their side. (This not only prevents the Alliance from getting wind of what the Horde is up to and vice-versa, it also prevents rival teams from hurling insults or death threats at one another; the hot-tempered environment of a Battleground would make this a real danger otherwise).

Webcomics

• Aquapunk: Sennan. The dominant language spoken through the story world, and has been in development since 2006. Currently it's used for names, obscenities, euphemisms, difficult-to-translate slang, and some sound effects.
  • Yes, it's very fleshed out, and while it bears some similarity to English, it is almost completely original. A "Sennan 101" PDF is currently in the works.
• Darths & Droids represents R2-D2's droid beeping with a series of onomatopoeic beep-like words. Outside the RPG campaign where the story happens, these are produced by his player with a mobile app. The beeps began innocuously enough, but slowly got more complicated until it was eventually revealed in-story (after 1180 strips!) that the beeps are a comprehensible language, which Chewbacca has at least partially decoded. It was only at this point that the readers of the comic became aware that R2's beeps were not just random sounds, thus launching a fan decoding effort using the corpus of previously published strips. This spawned a long discussion thread on the forums where readers worked together and realised the language was much richer than anyone had suspected.
• Sarilho: At least the written language of the Mediterranean Empire. The spoken languages seem to be fairly close to their modern counterparts, though.
• The Interstellar Tea House has Sierk D, one of the languages of the Sierk species, which falls into the "completely original" category. The author will sometimes, in lieu of a comic for the day, provide a Tolkien-esque discussion of Sierk syntax and grammar, or ask the readers to offer phrases for translation. (It's Sierk D because there is also a Sierk A, B, and C, and possibly an E and so forth; Sierk D happens to be the language local to the setting of the story).
• Juathuur has juathuuvei. It's used mainly for consistency in character and place names; a full sentence has yet to be heard in it.
• Outsider has Ikkukhak, the language of the insectoid Umiak. Its details are given a full page on the site. There's also a page for Trade Language.
• Even Dahm created a few different languages, complete with unique alphabets, for his Overside comics (Rice Boy, Order of Tales, Vattu). The Overside wiki has an article about them.
• Anecdote of Error is set in a Constructed World with its own languages that have their own script, though the full details have not been revealed yet.
• Unsounded: Tainish is a pretty elaborate invented language, and Ashley will often give translations when it's used on page though some readers are starting to be able to guess at what was said. Old Tainish is less built, but related to the Tanish characters use in everyday interactions.

Web Original

• The Ill Bethisad project started when someone wondered what English would look like if the British Celtic languages were supplanted by Latin, and Romano-Britons were capable of resisting the Saxon invasion? The result was Brithenig, spoken in the nation of Kemr (Cambria). Other languages included are Wenedyk (Latin-based Polish), Dalmatian (a Romance language based in the Dalmatian coast), Narbonosc (the lingua franca in southern France)... and many, many more.
• NationStates has many user-created languages in varying levels of refinement.
• Centaurians in The Pentagon War speak their own language, but it's intentionally not fleshed out. The author didn't want to spend years developing a real, working language for an alien species that speaks out of 4 mouths simultaneously.
• Conlang Critic, a web series by jan Misali, is a Video Review Show that analyzes various kinds of conlangs. Previous subjects have included Klingon, Na'vi, and Esperanto.

Western Animation

• The Good Witch Azura series from The Owl House is mentioned at one point to have a language called witch tongue, though it's never shown or heard. Luz (a big fan of the series) proudly states that she can read and write it in five different dialects.
• Most of the first season of Primal (2019) has no dialogue, with main character Spear only ever communicating with inarticulate grunts and shouting. In the final episode of the season we meet Mira, who does speak in a genuine language. As of Season 2, more humans are encountered that speak in fictitious languages, though there are no subtitles, and the viewer must guess what is being said based on context and gestures.
• Young Justice (2010) has Markovian, whose lexicon hasn't officially been revealed but is an actual constructed language for the show. It follows grammatical conventions typical for Baltic languages.

Real Life

• The first wide-spread artificial language was Volapük, which meant "World speak". The language's author was attempting to build a universal language that everybody worldwide could use to communicate. It wound up fizzling due to, among other things, heavily affix-based grammar, and it was displaced by easier languages such as Esperanto and Interlingua.
• Stanley Unwin built a career out of his invented language "Unwinese" also known as "Basic Engly Twentyfido". Deep Joy!
• Esperanto, the Universal Language counts so much so. It is also the most widely spoken today and very much the Trope Codifier.
• Like Esperanto, many of the other proposed international auxiliary languages have also tended to be based of the Romance/Latin languages. This is probably due to the worldwide spread of English,^note Which is not a Romance language, but most of its non-core vocabulary comes from Latin French, Spanish and Portuguese, and also Latin's historical role as Europe's lingua franca. Interlingua is unusual in that it is designed to feel like a natural language, in contrast to Esperanto's logical approach. Ido, an offshoot of Esperanto, takes a hybrid approach. Lingua Franca Nova, Interlingue (Occidental) and Novial are other examples.
• Loglan was developed in the 1950s to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Lojban: A realization of loglan (short for logji bangu or "logic language") is a derivation intended to be used as an actual language.
• While not strictly a ConLang, E-Prime is of interest for those thinking about how language shapes culture and vice-versa. E-Prime calls for the complete elimination of "to be" and all derivatives, so that the English sentence "The Electron is a particle" must instead be rendered as "The electron functions as a particle when measured with...", or "I am depressed" as "I feel depressed about...". The intention is to break with dogmatic statements and encourage greater clarity and qualification in communication. Opponents have a variety of criticisms, which can be read in full at the linked Other Wiki page.
• John Quijada's Ithkuil is well-known for packing a lot of meaning into as short a space as possible, as well as being as unambiguous as possible by explaining exactly how everything in a sentence pertains to everything else.
• Almost the complete inverse of the above mentioned Ithkuil is Toki Pona, a language created for the purpose of simplifying thoughts and communication. It's most notable for it's extremely small vocabulary of around 120 words. Toki Pona speakers use a combination of context and compound words to express more specific meanings.
• In 1827, Frenchman Francois Sudre invented a language based on solfége, the major scale in music (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, and ti). It could be spoken or written in many ways, from numbers and colors to handsigns and hand-tapping. The end result was Solresol. Each note also corresponds to a color of the rainbow and the single-digit numbers 1 through 7. The language was designed for maximum versatility- Messages can be spoken or written as words or numbers, played on musical instruments, and signaled over long or short distances using colored flags or flares, allowing people who are blind, deaf, mute, and/or dyslexic to communicate in Solresol, one way or another. However, this was forbidden by French law because it would be "rewarding" people for being disabled. It is also quite easy to confuse the words for each other.
• The Other Wiki mentions Helene Smith, a medium who spoke in the Martian language while in a trance.
• A Northern California argot called Boontling, one of Cracked's 5 secret languages that stuck it to the man. It uses English grammar but replaces many of the content words.
• Artificial language was part of the 1926 SAT exam for college entry in the United States. In 1924, the Secretary of the College Entrance Examination Board wrote a seven point list of things to test for in the future; number seven was "Facility in conversation in foreign languages." Questions about a constructed language tested for this without favoring speakers of any specific natural language. ^note Reprinted and discussed in Daniel J. Boorstin's The Americans: The Democratic Experience, "Statistical Communities".
• The entirety of the /r/conlangs subreddit and the related /r/conscripts and /r/neography.
• Esoteric programming languages can look completely alien even to the most seasoned computer programmer if he/she had no knowledge in the language prior. Top examples include Brainf**k and Malbolge, which bears more passing resemblance to compiled binary code than to anything comprehensible to a human being.
• CBB forum
• Conlanger (in Polish)
• In 1930 the linguist and philosopher Charles Kay Ogden created a language he called "Basic English," which was basically English stripped down to a mere 850 words, with some rules for making new words using prefixes and suffixes and the like. It never caught on, mainly for two seemingly obvious reasons: 1. Vocabulary and spelling aren't the only hard parts of learning a new language, as things like proper grammar and syntax are far more difficult and 2. The extremely limited vocabulary (and lack of rules for making new words as opposed to just modifying existing ones) made it really hard to describe anything that didn't already have a word.
• Proto-Indo-European is a theoretical reconstruction of a language spoken by prehistoric Eurasians that is believed to be the common ancestor of virtually every language from Spain to India. The historical language that PIE attempts to emulate is theorized to have been the language of the Yamnaya culture, early horsemen believed to have spread out of the Caucasus behind a bubonic plague pandemic that wiped out most of the indigenous peoples in the places they migrated to.
• Elizabethan astrologist John Dee developed the Enochian Language with assistance of Edward Kelly. It was allegedly dictated by Angels using a Crystal Ball and it's supposed to be the language of both Angels and Demons and also that of Adam and Eve before they were cast out of Eden. The language is still used, mostly in Esoteric Orders and Western Magick Traditions. The language has its own alphabet and grammar and can be learned, but it's very basic so it's use outside of ritual purposes is limited.
• Noted as possibly one of the world's oldest known constructed languages, Balaibalan is an Ottoman conlang dating to around the late 14th or early 15th century, combining elements of Arabic, Persian and Turkish grammar, with evidence of the language principally existing in a dictionary written in 1580 and a couple of manuscripts. Current scholarship suggests that it was initially created by the jurist and poet Moḥyi Moḥammad Golšani although the dictionary indicates that creating the language was a collaborative effort over a number of years. It has been deemed as likely to have been created as a holy/religious language for the Hurufism sect or as a secret language used by those of an inner circle. Balaibalan is agglutinating like Turkish, written in an abjad script and much of its vocabulary is wholly invented although it also features some words borrowed from Arabic and others can be traced indirectly to other source languages.

Resources

• Zompist.com is the home of the online version of The Language Construction Kit, which is an excellent resource for getting into conlanging. The site's home page also includes a link for purchasing the printed version, which expands upon the online version, including several chapters exclusive to the printed version. In addition, the author has also created another book on conlanging (Advanced Language Construction) which goes into the finer aspects like logic, pidgins/creoles, and logographic systems.
  • Also, the creator of the kit has come up with quite a few constructed languages for his own conworld.
• In The Land Of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent is a wonderful introduction to the history of constructed languages. It focuses primarily on interlanguages, those like Esperanto, Volapuk, aUI and Blissymbolics which were invented to help humanity understand one another, but she doesn't neglect art-languages like Elvish. The author describes attending a Klingon Language Institute conference and learning to speak basic Klingon.
• Linguist and computer programmer Tom Scott spoke on Numberphile about how conlangs seem to ignore number systems in their development, comparing how languages on Earth treat numbers very differently in written, spoken, and gestured forms, when fictional languages like Klingon seem to be a base-10 system like English^note ''The Klingon Dictionary'' and ''Klingon for the Galactic Traveler'' explain that Klingons used only to have words for numbers up to three and only switched to base-ten to aid in dealing with other species and may have borrowed the words for the other numbers from the names of musical notes. The examples he covers include:
  • The remnant uses of base-12 ("dozen", "gross") and base-20 ("score") in English
  • The irregular word patterns in other European languages like French (quatre-vingt-sept^note "four-twenties-[and]-seven" for 87) and Danish (otteoghalvtreds^note "eight-[and]-half-away-from-thrice-[twenty]" for 58)
  • The irregular word patterns in Hindi that lead to a hundred different words for the first hundred numbers
  • The simplified system in Tongan that ignores words marking powers of ten and instead just reads out multiple digit numbers digit-by-digit
  • Formal and ceremonial uses of written numbers that are not Arabic numerals in China and India, as well as the use of Roman numerals in Europe and the Americas (without going into languages that don't use [western] Arabic numbers at all)
  • The reversed uses of the period and the comma to mark either powers of a thousand or decimals between Anglophone countries and Continental Europe and the way to denote "and no cents" when discussing money
  • The use of lakh and crore as ways to write out large numbers in the Indian Subcontinent rather than grouping digits by the powers of a thousand (without discussing East Asian languages' use of powers of ten thousand as the basis of their digit groupings)
  • The use of different hand gestures to gesture for numbers over 5 in remote parts of China to resemble the Chinese written form of the number rather than counting on a second hand as in English.
  • The studies of Glendon Lean in the South Pacific that identified languages with base-6 or base-15 counting systems, that end up averaging out to a base-27 system of gesturing to different parts of the body to count on once the numbers on one hand are used up
• Other Numberphile videos have touched on issues where linguistics and mathematics meet:
  • An earlier video than Tom Scott's goes into more detail on the differences between English and French numbers, with the complexities that arise from: having more unique words for "-teen" numbers than English; the irregular nature (or rather lack) of the unique words for numbers 70, 80, 90, and others in between ("soixante-dix", "quatre-vingts", "quatre-vingt-dix", etc.), the standard practice of grouping digits in pairs and reading out the numbers as the two-digit number word (leading to 20 numbers that start with "soixante-"); and the practice of reading fractional decimal numbers as a whole number rather than individiual digits after the decimal separator which is the comma in French rather than a period as in English.
    • Not touched upon in the video is how other Francophone countries have invented words for 70, 80, and 90 to use instead of the ones used in France and Canada. Switzerland, Belgium, and the DR-Congo have septante and nonante for 70 and 90, huitante is used in some parts of Switzerland and Belgium for 80 as is huiptante in parts of Canada, and a variant of 80 as octante has become entirely obsolete.
  • Mathematician James Grime discussed a proposal to switch English to a base-12 counting system as a "conmaths" (or "conmath" for American English speakers)
  • Dr. Grime and physicist Tony Padilla "debate" (in two different interviews) over English moving away from naming numbers in powers of a million, where a billion is either 10^9 (a thousand million) or 10^12 (a million million), and dropping numbers like the "milliard" for 10^9
  • Two New Yorkers discuss their confusion when it came to speaking about numbers when they moved to the U.K., with respect to repeated double- or triple-digit sequences, the different phone number pattern, their preference to say "xty-y hundred" instead of "x thousand y hundred" for four digit numbers, the different filler words for counting out one-second intervals ("Mississippi" and "One Thousand" vs. "Piccadilly" and "Elephant"), the differing ways to read out the the first years of the new millennium, and the differences in street addresses between America's grid-based block systems and the UK's comparatively arbitrary house numberings (e.g. "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" vs. "10 Downing Street").
• Other real life number-based linguistic changes:
  • There is a proposal to eliminate the Latin-based prefixes of the long and short million/billion systems and replace it with a simplified Greek-based prefix system that still uses powers of a thousand. 10^3 is still a thousand and 10^6 is a million, but 10^9 is a gillion and 10^12 is a tetrillion.
  • Another such proposal by Donald Knuth is to switch to a system with the base unit of the archaic English number the myriad based on the East Asian number systems. In this system, 1000 is "ten-hundred" (similar to saying "sixteen hundred" instead of "one thousand six hundred" for 1600) while 1,0000 is a "myriad", 1;0000,0000 is a "myllion", 1,0000;0000,0000 is a "myriad myllion", 1:0000,0000;0000,0000 is a "byllion", 1;0000,0000:0000,0000;0000,0000 is a "myllion byllion", and 1'0000,0000;0000,0000:0000,0000;0000,0000 is a "tryllion".
• Tom Scott invited Rikki Poynter onto his channel to speak, or rather sign, about the differences between American Sign Language and British Sign Language and how they and all sign languages are not universal.
• Duolingo now offers lessons in how to speak High Valyrian, Esperanto, and Klingon.

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