How do people make up languages for films/books? Do they go through a dictionary word by word and make up a translation for each one? Or is it more of a pig-Latin type process?
In: Culture
Tolkien for example was an academic who specialized in languages. He actually invented his fictions languages and built the world around them first before starting to write a story to use all of that in.
Of course not everyone can be a Tolkien. Sometimes they just make up some random gibberish words that aren’t part of an actual language.
With Klingon the language of the Klingon aliens from Star Trek, they started out with a few random phrases that didn’t mean anything, before they got a professional to build a consistent and complete language based on the original meaningless throwaway lines.
The Language in Avatar was created from the ground up by a professional who tried hard to make more alien than most created and constructed languages.
Some movie makers go the other way and include actual real world languages. Star Wars fro example had multiple instances of actors being encourage to speak in their native tongue as the makers didn’t expect many movie goers to recognize exotic languages like Kalenjin and it sounded alien enough.
Sometimes writers who haven’t actually studied any of that want to try their hand at creating a language. this mostly ends in embarrassment for them. At worst they come up with a cypher that just replaces english words with their made up words but keeping all the other parts of the english. This is especially noticeable when the writer only speaks a single language themselves.
At best they make up a language based on what they know, but all they know are indo-european descended languages so their alien or fantastic tongue ends up being a lot more familiar than languages actually used here on earth.
Most readers of course won’t know the difference, but some writers like to go overboard in their world building and think having an actual language is neat.
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