More on Conlang Immersion

Avoiding the bad, boring stereotypes

Suppose you heard orcs speaking in a game or a show, and listened in to see if you could maybe pick out a few words. Imagine how offended and deeply disappointed you would be if you found out that they were just repeating “Unga Bunga Orca Dunga lalalalala.” Or some such hacked-up garbage. The transparent unimaginative artificiality of that “language” would wrench you back into reality with the sour real-world savor of lazy racism. What is “unga bunga” doing in your fantastic world? It’s unbelievable!“Unga Bunga” is an example of bad, racist conlanging from the primary world. English-Speakers deploy it to make fun of anyone (particularly people of color), who speaks a language other than their own. “Unga Bunga,” isn’t a fictional language at all--it’s just...English. When a conlang can’t stand up to scrutiny, and clearly shows its real-world origins, then the entire spell is lost. The world is a bust. As Tolkien reminds us, “The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.”

Orcs get a bad rap, but they sound badass

And even Tolkien, whose comments on the Orcs’ physiology are rather racist, (You can look them up, if you’re curious) didn’t stoop to making them speak hacked-up garbage. He did characterize their language as “harsh,” but he backed that claim up, by actually inventing words that he considered to have a “harsh” quality. He used lots of voiced stop consonants, as well consonant clusters. Gagh, which means “fire,” and Azgar, which means “war,” for example. He also gave some consideration to how the Orcs’ social situation would be reflected in their speech, their languages lacking structure in a way that sounds remarkably like a pidgin language. Now a pidgin (not a pigeon) is a communication system that emerges when Adult speakers of different languages each try to learn the other’s speech. Since Orcs are either mutated elves, or drawn fully-grown straight from the earth, with no maturation period, it would make sense for their language to lack organized structure.

It is not sufficient, therefore, merely to deploy foreign-sounding syllables or to scrawl out snaky glyphs. Remember that believability in a story is achieved when all of its constituents work together to justify each other. A constructed language is believable  when all the building blocks of that language, including the grammar, the vocabulary, the history, the pronunciation, the social-cues, are explicitly present and work together to provide a systematic account of its world.  To be believable as a real language a conlang must be detailed like a real-world language, must be able to do similar work to a real-world language, must be structured like a real-world language, must have a history and speakers like a real-world language.