For as much as I love good fantasy, there is little I can't stand as much as the really bad variety. You know the kind. Where it's the very opposite of good, often times veering wildly into the terrytory of god awful. One of the first things you can't help but notice when opening up a new book in this genre is the authours use of make believe names and terms. Some authours sprinkle these colorful words liberally throughout their works, almost Tolkien-esque in their excitement, while others stick to English, but mix and match words until they're satisfied. Neither one of these choices is necessarily wrong, depending on your tastes, but it is in the implementation where folks sometimes run into trouble. Tolkien-sounding words, hyphens, apostrophes (really, any impossible to pronounce words with copious uses of punctuation), and strange combinations of vowels and consonants all can add up to bad fantasy. They can leave your reader trying to wrap their tongues around impossible syllables, interrupt the flow of your paragraphs, and, worst of all, leave your reader confused and unable to understand what is happening. This entry isn't just to make you think about how to make your own fantasy language, but about why it should be done. If there is no purpose behind it, your time can be better used in creating the other aspects of your world.

Firstly, let's get some of your fears and trepidations out of the way. If you're thinking of building your own language, you probably are looking at J.R.R Tolkien's elfish creation, or the thousands of people out there that speak Klingon of the Star Trek universe, and wondering how in the world will I ever create something as intricate and complex as that. Well, you don't have to. Tolkien was a professional linguist who created fantasy languages as a young boy for fun. The languages he created weren't simply tools to assist you in your immersion within a fantastical world, but also as a completely separate hobby! Now, if you are actually a linguist, and you want to create a new language for your fantasy work, you probably won't need to read past this, because you'll have a pretty good idea of what to do already. But, if like me, you just want to create a language in order to further expand your writing, and to further immerse your reader in the world you created, than all it will require is a little time and effort on your part. Oh, and yes, imagination, too.

Are you creating a language, or are you writing a story? This is what you will need to keep asking and reminding yourself throughout the process. Your language is only useful so far as it serves the purposes of the greater story (unless you truly are just creating a language). Why am I building this language should be another important question you ask yourself. World building can be a daunting task, and if what you are working on isn't necessary, your time and energy can be better spent working on another aspect of it. Will the vocabulary of your language be used in place names, or even in sentences that your reader will be able to read? Will character's names be derived from it? Or is it just for verisimilitude (which, in fantasy, can be very important, not just for the reader, but even the writer)? Immersion is the first and foremost reason behind my own language creations, and on many occasions I've found myself cutting words that didn't help this, but only served the interests of the language itself. Knowing why you want to build your language is as important as the actual building stage, for its the difference between spending months or even years in creating a complex alphabet, vocabulary, and grammar rules, compared to only a few days or weeks in developing a base vocabulary. My techniques and philosophy are quite simple, and once you've determined why you're creating your language, you will be ready to tackle the actual meat and potatoes of it!

Creating an entirely new alphabet (and maybe even runes, or symbols, instead) may work well in a medium outside of the simple written word, but within a story it can be distracting and impossible to decipher without a chart. This is especially true if used widely throughout your writing, in sentences, or even as town names. As a result, I recommend sticking with the English alphabet.

The easiest, and most widely used, method of fantasy language creation is to find an existing language and "adapt" it as necessary to suit your needs. Choosing the language that sounds right for your fantasy culture is the tough part, and it may take some research to find what you like. It is important, though, that once you've found a language that you like, you stick with it for that specific culture or race. You want to create a unifying feel for those people, so that when your readers pick up your book, they will eventually be able to distinguish a word of Culture 1's language from that of a word of Culture 2's. A real world example of this would be the difference between a French word and a German word. Two separate languages that you can quite easily distinguish from one another. You don't need to understand the words or the context they are being used in, at least not right away, to be able to tell the two apart.

I should also add here that George Lucas, when creating the alien languages of Star Wars, would mix and match more than one language together in order to create what he wanted. Don't consider yourself limited to a single language, or to its exact feel and sound, but treat it simply as a guideline.

Now that you have found the language, or languages, you want to adapt and use for your own purposes, it is time to identify certain consonants, vowel groupings, or suffixes that you want to use to "identify" your language with, and to use in your specific words. It's great that you've found a language that you can see your new culture speaking, but you still have to make it your own! Without getting into the definitions or reasons behind it, it is fairly easy to tell Latin words, for example, apart from those of other languages because of the common usage of the "-ia" suffix ("Raetia", "Liguria:", "Encyclopaedia," "Britannia"), or the plethora of U's in our modern translations of some words: "Lugdunum", "Mediolanum",  "Julius". While you may not be able to pronounce the words right off the bat, you can recognize them as belonging to the same language, and likely the same culture, and that's what you want your reader to be able to do. People are visual by nature, and your reader being able to easily pick out words and accurately identify them as belonging to one particular culture or another will be a great boon to you as a world builder. Not only that, but it will cause your reader to relate to these strange words much quicker.

You may also want to avoid the cliche of your "good" race languages consisting of lots of soft sounds, such as S's, and -TH diphthongs, with your "evil" races having hard sounds, such as K's, and P's. It worked great for Tolkien, but it's been used as the basis for many, many fantasy languages since.

Nothing screams bad fantasy to me louder than hyphens and apostrophes. I HATE gratuitous punctuation in a fantasy vocabulary. Nothing can make a reader stumble and stop in mid-paragraph like an impossible to pronounce, garbled mess of a word. In fact, I follow the practice of almost P'Ngher-Lok - Aha! Made you look twice, didn't it? Not only does it look ugly, causing it to stick out like the strange bondage scene in Terry Goodkind's first book, but good luck pronouncing it. Unless you enjoy totally messing up the flow of your sentences and paragraphs, I would leave punctuation within fantasy words at the wayside. There are three things the words of your fantasy language should strive for:

1. Cultural distinction. 
2. Clarity.
3. Ease of pronunciation.

My method is to make all the words of my created languages easy to pronounce phonetically. If your readers speak English, they should be able to pronounce your fantasy words by simply sounding them out. This makes for a far easier reading experience, and doesn't require your reader to disconnect himself from your fantasy world in order to decipher every word. Remember, are you writing a story, or creating a language?

Creating fantasy languages as you world build isn't a waste of time, it can be extremely useful in immersing your reader into your story, but it is up to you how much time you put into it. If you feel you want to create an entire language, syntax, grammar, and all, than have it, but don't do so just because you feel that you can't go "half-way." Not every fantasy authour follows the Tolkien route. Robert Jordan, for instance, of the Wheel of Time series, created a "partial" language for his books. Personally, I create a language only so far as my story requires it. My town names, character names, and even some sentences may require a base vocabulary, but beyond that, it simply isn't necessary. To keep track of these base words, you may want to create a chart to show how they all interrelate, or simply keep a scribbler full of them. However you decide to go about creating your fantasy language, just remember that there are no right or wrong ways of doing it, and these techniques I expressed above are simply guidelines that I follow (and not even all the time, at that).

I didn't go into the best ways of implementing these fantasy languages within your actual writing, because I want to leave that for a future entry. Should you have actual sentences in your stories using these languages? If you create a language, should all your towns on your map be in it, or should you mix English names along with it? These questions and more demand their own article, and so I'll leave them for a later date!

Maintenance post

So, I'm still working on getting the look of the blog right. It's appearing nice and neat and tidy so far, if I do say so myself. Just a few more images to make, and I can get under way with the fun stuff - the world building! There will be regular to semi-regular updates made once I get going, so don't forget to bookmark and visit from time to time to share your ideas.

World Building

Hey folks (or dust balls, if no one's reading)! My name's Matt, and I've been creating my fantasy world for over three (yes, that's 3) years now, off and on. It's for the purpose of writing a series of novels set in it, but this blog concerns that process I've gone through and am still going through - CREATION! Although I may deal primarily with creating for the purposes of writing, if all you're interested in is drawing a map or creating a fantasy language, you'll find this blog will still help you in your world building enterprises.

At times the absolute funnest thing to do, and at others the most frustrating and worrisome, to have a believable and interesting world, world building must be done. In the end, whether it takes you a single week, or a decade to finish, it's an amazing, and, I suppose, exclusive feeling to look at everything you've created and think of all the little people or beasties that are going about their lives down there on the face of that map or worshiping one or more of your gods in that pantheon.

I am a detail oriented guy. I can spend a couple of hours just coming up with the PERFECT name for a little, insignificant village that will never be mentioned in my stories, and I'm a true believer in that as long as YOU are happy with your creation, 100%, than it is right. I can't describe the feeling for you when you know that what you created IS right, but I can tell you that you will know. That name just feels right. That river coming down out of that mountain just feels right. That history behind that race just feels right. Even if you choose to use the biggest cliche in the genre (although I won't encourage that!), if you feel that that is what goes best with your fantasy creation, than that is what you should use. I suppose this is just a reflection of how I approach my writing - you write for yourself, no one else. Everyone wants people to read their work, for obvious reasons, but if you are just writing (or creating) to please others, you will end up pleasing no one, least of all yourself. If you don't believe in what you are writing (or creating!), neither will those you expect to love it.

Anyways! I will be talking about that particular topic at a later date, as I could go on all day about it, and I think it would serve best as its own entry here. So, this is my blog. If you want to write or create something fantastical, follow along, and express your own ideas, too, as I am always learning. These methods and ideas I will express won't work for everyone, and they aren't necessarily the best ways to go about something. Creativity is funny that way. You can try to make it into a process, but it likes to often times rebel and do things its own way. So, if you disagree with something, don't be afraid to let me know. It will likely help us all create and write better in the end.