Using Foreign langages in a fantasy world.

How much dialogue do these two characters have? And are they just speaking to each other, or to someone else who doesn't speak German? If it's to another character, then that character is going to have to somehow understand their meaning as well, either with gestures, or understanding a few words of German, or something like that.

There are several ways to handle very small amounts of dialogue in a foreign language. It's going to be a bigger problem if there is page after page of it. Remember, it's your story; you could have the characters at least speak a form of pidgin English if for some reason it was important that they not be able to speak English well.

Whatever you do, don't throw in a lot of important dialgoue in German that the typical reader won't be able to understand. Few things are more annoying than a book with a lot of foreign language and no way to understand it except by having to go and get it translated in some way.

It can work, though I'm not sure why you would do it. Is it just to avoid taking the time to create your own language (which btw doesn't have to have a full vocab, grammar etc, it can be total gibberish if you don't use it that often)? Or are you making a comment about our world by having countries similar to existing ones, but not exactly the same? Why German? Is it because you happen to know German? Or is it a choice that there is something about Germany and the German language that work well for these characters?

Basically, Blue, as ever, does it serve the story? Or is it a choice made because you didn't want to put in the work to create a new language?

(btw those were sincere questions, I can totally see where German could fit into a fantasy world, but for the right reasons)

For my fantasy novel, I created the skeletons of three conlangs which, in the text itself, I use only as naming languages. That is, they appear only in names of cities, rivers, people, animals, whatever.

However, few writers go to this trouble. It's much easier to just pick whichever names you like. Most of your readers won't notice inconsistent names.

BlueLucario said:

And the guards are germans. I can't say it serves the story, it's just for the characters. Some of my characters have accents, brittish, southern, french etc. I thought foreign languages just bring out the character.

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What kind of world is your fantasy set in?

Is it an alternate Earth, where you might find German-speakers, French-speakers, etc.?

Is it a setting with a world gate, where people from "real Earth" have traveled through to this other place?

Or is it an entirely made-up world?

In the first two, you could make a case for having German-speaking characters in your story. In the third case, not so much.

With worldbuilding, it helps if you think things through.

SPMiller said:

However, few writers go to this trouble. It's much easier to just pick whichever names you like. Most of your readers won't notice inconsistent names.

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I do.

In my world, I have partially developed conlangs for all my major races, focusing mainly on grammar and lexicon which shows differences in social structure and worldview. I use this very sparingly, although one POV character is a linguist, and she gets to say - and immediately translate - short phrases in two other languages.

There is no reason to have minor characters speak between them in a foreign language if the POV character does not understand it. If you hear a language you don't know, there is very little chance you will be able to reproduce it verbatim, unless you're a linguist trained in field methods. The POV character can just mention they "said something in German." If the POV character does know the language, then he/she can preface the dialogue with "they spoke in German..." and then give the exchange in English.

I second Beth Bernobich on the appropriateness of German in secondary worlds. This is something you need to think about.

Just a word of caution regarding the use of existing foreign languages:

Make absolutely sure that any foreign language you include is grammatically and syntactically correct. Even if you pick an obscure language, someone out there speaks it. Few things are more frustrating than seeing your own language butchered by some author who didn't bother getting it right.

I intentionally made one of my fantasy worlds bilingual. "English" is the dominant language but there's a sprinkling of French as well. This is mostly because I have a character named Clarence Beauvell and so I needed other French words mixed in.

French is basically their Latin.

Does it work? I think so. I wanted to have my world feel a little like Canada, anyway.

Esopha said:

I intentionally made one of my fantasy worlds bilingual. "English" is the dominant language but there's a sprinkling of French as well. This is mostly because I have a character named Clarence Beauvell and so I needed other French words mixed in.

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Oh, I didn't mean that a second world fantasy has to be monolingual. Far from it. One thing I love is when a world shows depth and texture and variety with languages. (And with everything else, too, but that's another topic.)

I'm just cautioning that tossing a modern language into a second world fantasy can sound fake if the writer isn't careful.

Yours sounds like a treat!

Gray Rose said:

I do.

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Well, me too. One of my biggest pet peeves is writers who arbitrarily throw together letters in whatever way looks "cool". You have to admit, though, that we're in the minority.

In my world, I have partially developed conlangs for all my major races, focusing mainly on grammar and lexicon which shows differences in social structure and worldview.

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Hmm. After creating the phonetic inventory (of course), I tend to focus on morphophonemics and phonotactics. And, yeah, after that the lexicon kind of goes without saying.

I took the grammar for one of the languages all the way to pragmatics, but for the other two I limited myself to rules for derivation and compounding... and only a few other things if absolutely necessary. Not much else really needed for a naming language, as far as I can tell.

And I did all three independently--without creating a protolanguage and applying sound shifts. Are you gonna crucify me?

/ahem. Pragmatics are a part of grammar? How embarrassing for me

SPMiller said:

I took the grammar for one of the languages all the way to pragmatics, but for the other two I limited myself to rules for derivation and compounding... and only a few other things if absolutely necessary. Not much else really needed for a naming language, as far as I can tell.

And I did all three independently--without creating a protolanguage and applying sound shifts. Are you gonna crucify me?

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I'm afraid not. I'm a linguist. You get extra points.

As I'm sure you know, pragmatics is a subdiscipline of linguistics which studies phenomena related to language use in social interaction. For example, the study of politeness falls under pragmatics. Whether or not pragmatics is a part of "grammar" depends on how you define grammar, and on the specific constructions in question.

Gray Rose said:

Whether or not pragmatics is a part of "grammar" depends on how you define grammar, and on the specific constructions in question.

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Well, I approach this subject from a computer scientist's perspective, so I tend to equate syntax with grammar. To me, semantics and pragmatics are separate (but related!) concepts.

But to be more on-topic: conlangs can be way too much fun to build, to the point that it can be easy to forget about the writing part. We must worry more about our stories than our details.

SPMiller said:

For my fantasy novel, I created the skeletons of three conlangs which, in the text itself, I use only as naming languages. That is, they appear only in names of cities, rivers, people, animals, whatever.

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I'm doing something similar, but I'm using Dutch-derived words in a particular region of my world. For example, I have a remote village called "Verlaten," which means lonely or desolate. Etc. (Why Dutch? Because...if ya ain't Dutch, ya ain't much. Actually, I come from a heavily Dutch-settled area of the US, and I thought it would be a nice homage. Maybe I'll be really cute and have an inn called "The Wooden Shoe," or something.)

I also have a society of mages who are the literati in my world, and I'm using Greek-derived words when I need to make up a word associated with them. I have amphorsophs and amphitope. Because Greek-derived words sound scientific and/or philosophical.

But I'm certainly no linguist, and I don't speak Dutch or Greek. I just have an internet connection, so I hope I'm not messing anything up too much, and that all of this doesn't end up sounding silly. My theory behind all this is that, if you're building a completely fictional fantasy world, the characters aren't speaking English, or German, or any other earthly language. They're speaking whatever language they speak, and all of the dialogue is "translated." So, I think using real-life foreign languages is as acceptable as writing the book in English in the first place.

BlueLucario said:

Some of my characters have accents, brittish, southern, french etc. I thought foreign languages just bring out the character.

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I'm curious how you're going about that. Are you spelling the dialogue out phonetically? Or are you saying something like, "Pepe spoke with a French accent"? I think it could work in some situations, but not others. I think if you're writing a traditional high fantasy novel, having characters speak in German or with French accents would seem odd. But it would probably work in something less traditional.

BlueLucario said:

It's going to be pretty hard to write in a Brittish Dialect.

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Just speak the Queen's English proper, like what I does.

It all depends which dialect tbh. I do a good southern yokel izznet, not so sure I could pull off a scouser or a geordie. It's all about word choice, for any accent.

I'm bastardizing foreign languages for my world. Six major cultural regions, separated by varying geographies, each with what I'm hoping amounts to a distinct cultural feel.

Of course I'm borrowing heavily from reality. I'm not nearly that clever.

For the most part, when any of the foreign languages are used, I describe the way it sounds to the untrained ear. For instance, I have one language that is basically a mutated mischmasch of Slavic languages, and in the POV of someone unfamiliar with the language, I described it like the rushing of wind through leaves, punctuated by the occasional consonant.

Sometimes I'll toss a word in there, to give the idea that there's a real spoken tongue behind it. But never more than a sentence, if that.

I am not sure.
If it is meant to be funny, it's absolutely okay. If not...

Now, in "Lord of the Rings" it would have been very strange to see a person who is speaking, for example, Spanish.

In the Discworld novels, most countries are like some country in the real world, and there would be absolutely no problem with people speaking the language of this country (or a made up fantasy version of it)


If you need help with the German...I think I am quite good at it.

Harry Turtledove's Darkness saga has an interesting take on this trope. The series is essentially a fantasy version of World War II. So, every nation taking part in the series fills the role of a power from the war. However, physically, culturally, and linguistically, these nations are also something of a mix-and-match of various world cultures. A better explanation: Algarve plays the role of Nazi Germany, but its people are Scots-Irish in appearance, and their language is based on Italian. Another good example is Kuusamo, which fills the role of the United States, but is populated by Finnish-speaking East Asians.

BlueLucario said:

It's going to be pretty hard to write in a Brittish Dialect. But Said in a french accent is a good idea.

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I don't know - if there's no France in the world of the story, then 'said in a French accent' is going to pull a lot of readers right out. The fact that the language exists in a fantasy world unrelated to earth is problematic, based on its lingusitic history, but can maybe be overlooked. But the very name of the language relates to the country it comes from, so if the word 'French' is used to describe it, readers may well expect there to be a France.

You might do better to describe the accent, based on how the POV character perceives it - does it strike him as sophisticated? Educated? Light and airy, or heavy and gutteral? Nasal? Awkward? Easy or difficult to understand? And so on.