As promised, this post will begin a look at creating a conlang for aliens. By “alien”, I mean any intelligent, non-human species, not just those living on other planets. A race of uplifted cats in a far-future science fiction story would be no less alien than an Area 51 Gray. Either way, we’re not dealing with the same structures that give humans the power of speech.
And that’s the first thing to think about when designing an alien conlang. How is this race different? It may not be as satisfying from an astrobiological standpoint, but readers (or players or viewers, depending on your chosen media) will tend to judge aliens contrastively. We’re only human, so we’ll look at aliens through human-tinted glasses. If you’re taking the “harder” design approach, then it’s your job to please those anthropocentric sensibilities and build the creatures that express what you’re trying to say. At the same time.
It’s a difficult, thankless task. I can’t help you earn recognition and praise, but I can make things a little easier. Just as our interminable series on creating human languages began with sounds, so will our look at alien conlangs. But first, we’re going to see what makes human language, well, human.
The ability of speech
Human beings have a vast capability for making sounds. Developed over countless generations through the slow, gradual process of evolution, our speech organs are far and away our primary means of communication. Other species can create sound. Dogs bark, cats meow, and so on. Some of them even have a small capacity for rudimentary language.
What makes humans different is a matter of speculation, but one thing we have over “lesser” animals is our larger brain. Among its many other useful properties, it gives us a greater grasp on the abstract. Language, at its core, can be described as a system of logical relations, and humans are equipped—uniquely so, on this planet—to consider these relations in an abstract context.
For aliens, brainpower will be of utmost importance. How capable are they of this “higher” thought? The better they are able to comprehend the abstractions of language, the more complex that language can become.
The vocal tract
Higher thought wouldn’t be very useful without a way to express it, so we have a well-developed means of creating a vast array of sounds: the vocal tract. Put simply, sounds are produced in the larynx, then modified in various ways on their journey into and out of the mouth and nose. If, for example, the vocal cords vibrate, then the effect is to create a “voiced” sound. A phoneme produced with the back of the tongue placed against the soft palate (or velum, hence velar) will sound different from one made when the front of the tongue touches the teeth (a dental consonant). It’s these distinctions—and many others—that combine to give us the IPA chart.
If you know anything about conlanging in general, you probably already have a good understanding of this part of phonetics, so let’s switch our focus to how it affects alien races. Here, physiology will play a role. The human body’s linguistic implements are not a given. They are by no means universal. We have a mouth, a nose, a tongue, a set of teeth, and so on, but there’s no guarantee that aliens will have all of those…or only those.
It’s always easier to take away, so we’ll start with that. “Humanoid” aliens without noses, for instance, will obviously find nasal phonemes impossible. Those with less dextrous tongues would have a hard time with a retroflex consonant. Without our level of conscious control over the vocal folds, voicing distinctions are out of the question. If the lips can’t round, you can’t have rounded vowels. Basically, any part of the vocal tract you remove obliterates an entire series of potential phonemes.
On the other hand, each new area will add whole classes of phonemes that are beyond human capabilities. A race with a larger, more complex mouth would have more points of articulation. One with extra tongue muscles might have whole new manners of articulation.
Mental and sensory development can come into play here, too. An alien species with poor pitch detection (in other words, a tone-deaf race) won’t be speaking something like Chinese, while one with evolved perfect pitch might be more likely to speak a tonal language. Races with better hearing may have an entire class of “whispered” phonemes. Anything you can think of, as long as it makes sense for the body and brain of your alien creation, is in play here.
Other cues
But language isn’t all about generating and shaping sound. There’s more to it than that, even in the realm of phonology and phonetics. Tone, as mentioned above, can be integral to a race’s language. Stress and rhythm also play a role. Add in syllabic constraints like the sonority hierarchy (which may be different for aliens), and you’ve got an enormous playground for creation.
For the truly alien, though, it’s not entirely clear that they’ll speak with words as we know them. Some species might also use other auditory cues, from grunts to whistles to whatever else you can think of. Others may have a complex secondary language of gesture and sign, which could accompany spoken language or even replace it under certain circumstances. It’s even possible that the other senses may come into play. It’s been said that if they could write, dogs’ stories would mostly be about smells. Aliens with advanced senses of smell and the means to generate a small range of scents could incorporate those into their language as a suprasegmental component, an olfactory counterpart to tone.
In the end, it comes down to this: how do your aliens work? Once again, that contrast between human and alien helps us. Find the ways they’re different, and you’ll know where to begin. From there, the sky really is the limit.
A final word
Lastly, I’d like to make a note about orthography, because I don’t have the slightest idea how it would work. Alien languages with similar sounds can be transcribed into something resembling human tongues. If the biology works out, it might even be the right thing to do.
But how do we represent new points (or manners) of articulation? How do you indicate that this syllable is spoken at a pitch so high it’s above the range of human hearing? Or say a word means “mother” if you speak it while holding your left hand up, but it’s “death” if you raise your right eyebrow. How would you write that? Figuring out how to represent alien language might be just as hard as communicating in it, and that’s before we even start looking at the differences in grammar and lexicon.
In case you haven’t noticed, I’m on a bit of an alien kick right now, and this is the conlang portion of that. Later on, I hope to explore the other dark corners of xenolinguistics, a word I may have made up this very moment. If you like that, be sure to check out my sporadic Monday posts about creating the aliens themselves.