Content area
Full text
Aliens in science fiction and fantasy do not always speak any of our human languages, and unless there is a mode of translation involved (such as the Babel fish in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or the translation circuit of the TARDIS in Doctor Who), the languages these aliens speak have the function of contributing to their characterization. As these languages are made they are called 'constructed languages' (conlangs), as compared to most human languages which form naturally. Conlangs can range from just a few words in a novel (like the very sparse examples of Dothraki in A Game of Thrones, the first volume of the A Song of Ice and Fire saga) to more developed and reasonably functional languages like Klingon in Star Trek or the spoken version of Dothraki in the Game of Thrones television series. Regardless of how extensively these languages are developed, they all tend to be very carefully crafted to reveal certain qualities of their speakers.
The associations we make about characters through their conlangs are, in the first instance, caused by sounds and not necessarily by meaning, and therefore make use of sound symbolism. Sound symbolism is the mental connections caused by sounds (see Hinton et al 1994). This implies that any such characterization through conlangs cannot work unless there is some form of agreement between the author and the reader as to the qualities they assign to certain sounds. However, the view that certain sounds evoke certain attitudes is highly contested in linguistics, where evaluative responses are known to be caused by sociocultural or semantic meaning rather than by specific sounds alone (see, for example, studies in variationist sociolinguistics, such as Labov 1972, or Coupland and Bishop's 2007 study on ideologies in the perception of varieties of English).
In this article I will give an overview of some of the considerations that go into constructing the sound systems of conlangs, with particular reference to the role of sound symbolism, but I will also look beyond this concept to see what other decisions and processes influence language creators when they construct the sound systems of their languages. The focus for this initial discussion will largely be on fictional languages, but since they make up only a small part...