Beyond Celtic

By Valerie Comer
© 2005, Valerie comer

Looking through many of the favored fantasy novels of the past few years, I offer this assessment: Celtic names and culture have overtaken the fantasy market. They do sound pleasing to the ear, I admit. However, it is time to break out of the mold and explore other language styles and naming conventions for your next fantasy novel.

I looked up several conlang (constructed language) sites on the internet, and backed slowly away, hands in the air. I am not interested in taking the time or the energy to create a language from scratch. I want to write one book and then another one, not create one language and then another. If your hobby is building languages, I applaud you, but I don't want to join you.

Existing Languages

How then to come up with the feel of an authentic language? The World Book Encyclopedia has a thorough article on language families and there I found out which current languages are related to each other.

Nearly half the world's population (47%) uses languages found in the Indo-European family. This family includes eight branches: 1) Germanic, which includes English, German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages; 2) Romantic, which includes French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish; 3) Balto-Slavic, which includes many of the languages of central Russia and its satellite countries; 4) Indo-Iranian, which includes languages from the northern Indian peninsula area such as Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali; 5) Greek; 6) Celtic, which includes Gaelic and Welsh; 7) Albanian; and 8) Armenian.

These languages have much in common including inflection and a sentence structure that includes nouns, verbs, pronouns, etc. Many words might be similar. The English word 'mother' for example, is 'mata' in Sanskrit, 'meter' in Greek, 'mutter' in German, and 'mater' in Latin.

The second largest language family (22%) is called Sino-Tibetan. This includes Chinese with its many dialects as well as most, but not all, of the languages of south-eastern Asia. These languages differ from the Indo-European languages in two main ways: the words are single syllable, and otherwise identical words can be differentiated by change in tone.

Black African languages (8%) are spoken south of the Sahara and west of Sudan and Ethiopia.

The Malayo-Polynesian language family (5%) covers most of the Pacific Islands.

Another family is the Afro-Asian (4%). This includes Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, and the Berber tongues of North Africa.

The Japanese and Korean languages (4%) form their own language group.

The Dravidian family (4%) covers languages from southern India, such as Tamil and Telugu.

The Uralic-Altaic family (3%) consists of languages such as Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, and Turkish.

The Mon-Khmer language family (2%) covers Thailand, parts of Laos, and parts of southern India.

American Indian languages (1%), which exist in pockets throughout North, Central, and South America vary greatly from one another, but are classed as one language family even so.

Tweaking Languages

You may not wish to use any current languages in your fantasy; I know I don't. I want to use them as a foundation, to get a feel for naming conventions in my fantasy world.

What do individual languages sound like? I speak only English, but sometimes I've sat in a restaurant and listened to conversations around me in languages I could not understand. Somehow I knew they weren't speaking French, or German. What was it about the flow of words and the sounds in it that helped me come to that conclusion? I've decided to find out, and then see how I can use this information to give a feel of separate languages in my fantasy world. Perhaps the analysis that I've been doing will be helpful for you as well.

A stack of World Book Encyclopedias anchors my dining room table. I look up countries that have related languages, using the language families article as a guide, and answer questions about the languages. You may find these questions helpful. What do the names sound like? What are some common endings for towns? Rivers? Lakes? Which vowels are the most used? The least? Do the words sound soft (lots of Ls and Rs and Ns) or harsh (an abundance of Ks, Ts, Zs and Vs)? Are any letters, either vowels or consonants, often doubled? What letters are frequently used together? Do you like the range of sounds that are part of this language grouping?

If the sounds don't appeal to you after all, start over with another language group. If they do, proceed to baby name websites. In your search engine, type: baby names Hindi (or whatever language you are playing with). Glance through the names offered. The patterns shown in the map names are doubtless showing again. Are they still pleasing?

At this stage, I suggest looking at some of the common endings and giving them a twist. Many towns and cities in the Indo-Iranian subgroup of the Indo-European family end in suffixes such as: -pur, -ganj, -anga, -abad, -agh, -awar, -odha, and -alia. I decide to use similar but not identical endings for towns in my primary fantasy country: -jur, -bunj, -ojha. If I need more, I can adapt more. At the moment, though, I only have about five towns that need names.

Then I do something similar with given names. I note the common endings for female and male names, and which letters are commonly used together. What letters are used to begin many names, and which are rarely used? Based on this information I create a few names that I like the sound of, that seem basic to pronounce, and that are not too hard on the fingers to key in repeatedly.

Second Country

My land has enemies, and yours might, too. Have your two countries at some point in history been one united land, but now are torn apart by civil strife? Or were they once conquered by the same colonial political power? Answering questions of this sort may help you to determine if they speak the same language, and if so, why.

Think a little about what kinds of enmities exist between your cultures, as well as their physical proximity. If your people are sailing across the sea to conquer new lands, odds are great that the language will be totally different, so choose a different language group out of your encyclopedia to work with in this second creation. If both countries are well-established and next door to each other, they may have related languages. Only you can decide how closely related you want them to be.

Can your main character speak the secondary language? How did he or she come to know it? It's tedious to have an entire book where the folks don't understand a word the other party speaks. Make sure you build a believable background for your character as to how he or she has this knowledge.

If there is regular trade between the countries, it is likely that quite a few people, such as merchants, have knowledge of both languages. If slaves have been captured, some words will infiltrate into common usage. Accents may introduce differences in an otherwise common language. I would suggest using dialects and accents sparingly, as they can slow down the reading and thus jolt the reader out of the story. Are gestures, or sign language, going to play an important part in the story? How about misunderstood words?

If a country has been conquered in the past, it is likely that naming conventions will include samples from both cultures and language groups. Thus, in countries such as Guyana, a former British colony, you will find place names such as Georgetown and Fort Wellington not far from towns called Kwakwani and Dadanawa.

Culture

You have the option of choosing widely varying cultural idiosyncrasies. If you are having trouble thinking outside the box of your own culture or the Celtic fantasy norm, study the habits of the countries whose languages you have just warped to your own ends.

Does the real country have any similarities to the country you have drawn on your own map? Is the climate similar? Do they both have ample coastlines, or perhaps none at all? If these similarities exist, you may wish to adapt other ideas, such as common foods. Have a look at their religion, at their clothing, at their agricultural practices. Are these concepts that you can use as a springboard for your own created country?

If there are few similarities, look through your atlas until you find a different country that has topography and/or climate in common with yours. Read through the articles in your encyclopedia, and see what aspects of that land you can bring into your own. You don't need to copy the culture verbatim any more than you did the language.

The history and ways of a nation do not change much from year to year. Consider picking up an older set of encyclopedias at a garage sale if you don't already have one in your home. It will still offer you a rich mix of adaptable ideas, and help you break your dependence on the current fantasy norms. An encyclopedia of any vintage makes an excellent platform for your own leap into imagination.