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
As others have said, it depends on how the writer feels. You can go from simply having words that mean x, y, or z; work on grammar structure and how a sentence is created (e.g. in what order your subject-object-verb is).
Maybe you delve into what sounds are commonly used, and what are infrequent or never found. Maybe a harsh people use a lot of words with D, K, T in them, while languages with high amounts of S and L are considered gentler or more refined.
Do you add in accents? How do they impact the sound of a word? Does using a different inflection change the meaning (e.g. kézì with a rise on the e and a decline on the i means something totally different than kĕzi where you have the fall-rise inflection just on the e).
Are there any things where one language will have a word (or multiple words) and another might lack it? A war focused culture may have many words relating to battle – dying with honor vs. dying in childbirth vs. dying in your sleep; another may revere something so much that they have a dedicated word for it, e.g. “our summer begins when the swallows come home to roost” being condensed down into Ōmùnīwāká (which in and of itself contains roots for summer, swallow, and home from that language).
Then you get the ones who are dedicated and do create at least a conversational amount of words for a language.
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