Inventing Languages in Settings

[Harry O'Gane]

As a student of linguistics and English language, I tend to spend a lot of time writing on subjects related to both fields, and when it comes to creating new worlds (especially fantasy ones), I invent a couple of new words.

A Dungeon Fantasy setting I have GM-ed for quite some time now has turned from a brutal H&S into a diplomacy-oriented campaign, where characters act like arbitrators between two countries in war.

Now, the two countries do not speak a common language, so a third language was necessary for them to communicate (It's a war between Dark Ones allied with Elder Spawn and an alliance consisted of Dwarves and Gnomes).

So, the players picked up a very simple "trade" language I developed. Its grammar is simple, and most of the vocabulary is a hybrid made of English, Latin and Croatian words.

There is no declination, except in singular->plural; there are no articles, I decided to simply use pronouns instead of them; verbs have three forms: past, present and infinitive: future is formed with a modal verb "vael" and infinitive, and that's pretty much the only form of expressing future, since the aim of the language is to be extremely simple. Long story short, I did not want to go into too many details with the grammar and make a vocabulary too difficult.

As sessions went by, the language grew bigger and bigger. It consists of 350 simple words now and the players have picked up more than 80% of these words. When arbitrating, I give them extra points if they actually manage to relay certain messages between the two warring sides.

Before, I simply mentioned a couple of words used in a certain race's language, but I have never actually devised an unique new language like this one. So tell me, what is your experience with inventing languages? How far did you go?