Sounds, foreign.
Sounds, Foreign.
Often when discussing bias in worldbuilding media, discourse focuses on representation of race in fictional settings — usually pertaining to Fantasy, Historical Fiction, and Sci-Fi. On her website, Fantasy and Sci-Fi writer N. K. Jemisin points out that the implementation of orcs in many Fantasy settings serves as a way to create one-dimensional, mindless, evil characters against whom violence has no moral repercussions. For WIRED, games industry and gaming culture writer Cecilia D’Anastasio elaborates on the prevalence of such racism in worldbuilding. Citing Helen Young, author of Race and Popular Fantasy Literature, she reflects on decidedly white depictions of elves in archetypal Fantasy narratives, and the “anti-Black, antisemitic, and Orientalist stereotypes” that are prevalent in the works of genre heavyweights such as Tolkien.
“I like to pronounce it…”
Jemisin published her post in 2013, while D’Anastasio’s article was written in 2021, demonstrating that this discourse has existed for around a decade if not longer, however it seems rare that this conversation touches on an integral aspect of worldbuilding — the conlanging community, a group of linguists and non-linguists alike who create languages for fun, for study, or for works of media. However, one controversy was able to break through and elucidate the prevalence of this problem among conlangers. American Fantasy author Rebecca Yarros published Fourth Wing, the first novel in her The Empyrean series, in May 2023. In anticipation of the book’s sequel, a TIME article by Moises Mendez II lays out the author’s rise to fame facilitated by online communities on TikTok. However with this rise came a wave of criticism, which arose in response to an interview where Yarros was asked to clarify the pronunciation of several common phrases in her novel — which took clear inspiration from Gàidhlig/Scots Gaelic. Among the examples are “Basgiath” (a military school the characters attend) which Yarros pronounces as buzz-guy-eth, as well as “Teine” (the name of a character’s dragon) which she pronounces as “tine”.
As pointed out by user Muireann (@ceartguleabhar), both of these terms are based off of real Gàidhlig words or compounds — “bàs” + “sgiath” and “teine”. Besides mispronouncing both terms, which would more accurately be “bahs-skee-uh” and “cheyn-yuh”, Yarros also mispronounces the name of the language she derived these terms from, as Gàidhlig is pronounced “gaa-lick”. Yarros’ pronunciation refers to Gaeilge, the endonym of the Irish language. As Muireann puts it, “She’s just sprinkling Gaelic words in there to add a bit of spice to a Fantasy book.”
While this may be the most recent and salient example of linguistic malpractice in Fantasy worldbuilding, it is by no means the only one. Several other, much more severe examples fly under the radar of many conlangers and consumers of fiction media alike.
Sounds, Mystical
Yarros’ wholesale implementation of Gàidhlig words in her worldbuilding is the strategy of a non-linguist, however there are several ways by which a writer can go about creating a language for their work. Two very common methods, both involving phonology or sounds, are “reduction/modification” and “blending”. “Reduction” was the strategy of Fantasy forefather J.R.R. Tolkien, who listed the Cymraeg (Welsh) language as the influence for Sindarin, the language of the Elves. While Tolkien did engage in similar tit-for-tat lexical influence that Yarros did, most of his influence is found in the sounds of Sindarin. While slashing 9 of the language’s 31 consonants, he maintained ones that were characteristically absent from British English (RP), such as “lh” /ɬ/, “rh” /r̥/, and “ch” /χ/. The second strategy, “Blending”, was used by linguist David J. Peterson, who has constructed languages for Game of Thrones and the CW’s The 100. In an interview for Reactor, Peterson describes Dothraki (the language of a nation of nomadic warriors) as sounding like a mix of Arabic and Spanish, citing various features taken from either language.
We’ve established “who” is being borrowed from in many of these cases. This is the conversation most present in spaces where conlang discourse occurs. However, the unexamined question remains — the “why”.
Tolkien has been regarded as the architect of a deep, polylingual, polycultural world — claims that I support. However, I think it remains important to consider the implications of an English author employing the aesthetics and sounds of Cymraeg to construct a world that would appear mythical (see: fictional) to his audience. (It should be noted, unlike Yarros, Tolkien possessed a thorough understanding of Welsh phonology and phonotactics — the language’s sounds and how they worked. Unfortunately, the possession of this background knowledge has become less common in contemporary works. If you’d like to learn more about it, Welsh YouTuber TheWelshViking recently put out a video that expounds on the way this trend has evolved from Tolkien into modern ‘romantasy’.
The Dothraki are depicted as aggressive pillagers, raiders who take what they want by force, enslavers who put little value on human life. Peterson has said that he ignored this characterization when fleshing out the Dothraki language for the show, meanwhile author of the show’s source material, George R.R. Martin, states the Dothraki nation was inspired by “several plains cultures such as the Alans, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other various Amerindian tribes”, along with the Mongols and Huns. Though he makes clear that similarities to Arab cultures is coincidental, the use of Arabic as an inspiration for the Dothraki language, especially in juxtaposition to the world’s other languages such as Valyrian (inspired partially by and functions similarly to Latin) draws on a historic perspective on these cultures by the West, even if unintentionally.
Sounds, Alien
This phenomenon is not only present in Fantasy, but in Sci-Fi as well. Everyone’s favorite, might we say ‘space orcs’, the Klingons of Star Trek present a similar conundrum. “tlhIngan Hol”, or “Klingon”, boasts one of the largest fan communities outside of the conlang community — possessing its own moderating body and several published works. However, the origin of the language is often left unexamined.
Prior the creation of Klingon, American linguist Marc Okrand worked with Indigenous American languages, specifically now-dormant Mutsun. This context casts a shadow on much of what Okrand has said in regard to creating Klingon. In a 2009 Slate article, linguist and author Dr. Arika Okrent describes Okrand’s task for Star Trek as creating a language that “was supposed to be “tough-sounding, befitting of a warrior race” with characteristics such as “rough”, “crude”, and “violent”. It’s clear that the goal was to create a language that came across as foreign — inhuman. Okrand himself acknowledges this. Having admitted that his background working with various minoritized and/or indigenous languages contributed to his design for Klingon leaves a sour taste in the mouth once you see the languages Okrent associates with Klingon — Hindi, Arabic, Tlingit, Yiddish, Japanese, Turkish, and Mohawk. The author of an article describing a UC Santa Cruz course designed to examine constructed languages comments that “By learning common features of spoken languages, Okrand devised a language with distinctly alien characteristic.” What does it mean to categorize /t͡ɬ/ (featured in Nahuatl, Cherokee, Tlingit, Ladin, and Tswana), or /q͡χ/ (featured in Adyghe, Uzbek, and Avar) as “alien”?
Another powerhouse Sci-Fi franchise that has recently re-entered the public’s eye is Frank Herbert’s Dune. I am by no means the first to point out the clear Islamic/Arabic influence on the worldbuilding in Dune. In knowing the narrative’s purpose as an allegory of Western dependence on oil, the connections are at least understandable. However, it's crucial to critically examine Herbert’s one-for-one use of the Caucasian language Chakobsa in his story. Words such as and are adopted for use unchanged, much in the way Yarros employs Gàidhlig. (Similarly to Game of Thrones, David J. Peterson was tasked with expanding this conlang for this novel’s transition to the silver screen — usually referred to as “Neo-Chakobsa”, which implemented additional influences.) This worldbuilding strategies is meant to provide the audience with recognizable archetypes that allow them to identify socio-political dynamics in the narrative. However, this implementation is not uni-directional. It's necessary to recognize what happens when these strategies start to operate in reverse — influencing our understanding of our own world.
Underpinnings
All of the examples described above were create in either the later end of the colonial era, or in the area of post-colonialism, which has undeniably influenced their constructions and implementations. In his article Unraveling Post-Colonial Identity through Language, Dr. Rakesh M. Bhatt explains that the function of language education in British colonial holdings was to alter the culture of those who were granted access to education. They believed that teaching English to those they deemed “less civilized” would alter the culture of the local inhabitants. This exposes the colonial philosophy that language is an arbiter of some “civilized” quality — simply, some languages are civilized, while others are not.
Even in what some may call more “neutral” examples of linguistic scholarship that came later, this line of thinking is still evident. In a 1940 article published through MIT titled Science and Linguistics, American linguistic anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf insisted that speakers of Inuit languages had an expanded understanding of snow compared to English speakers due to the variety of terms the languages used to refer to snow in different contexts. Similarly, he claimed speakers of Hopi could not perceive the passage of time due to their language’s lack of tenses. On page 28 of his 1950 text An American Indian Model of the Universe, Whorf even describes the Hopi perspective as being “mystical”. Mirroring the dehumanizing construction of orcs as mentioned by Jemisin, the narrativization of the Hopi in this way serves a similar purpose. The mythologizing of Indigenous and minoritized cultures serves the aims of white supremacy by reducing vast demographics of people down to one-dimensional, simpleminded beings against whom violence has no repercussions.
This weaponization of the link between language and culture is the exact mechanism being invoked when worldbuilders, authors, and conlangers carelessly craft their narratives. It is naive to claim that linguistic features such as phonology (sounds), grammar, and verbiage exist in a vacuum, when their relationship to us and the language we speak is clearly relational. The “common” language spoken by the protagonists found in many of these fictional settings is simply English reskinned. Just as Whorf neglects to examine the fact that English also lacks a grammatical future tense (and thus, by his logic, its speakers can’t conceive of the future either), these characters are written for a white, Western audience. Characters who speak “common”, such as in Game of Thrones, are not othered by their language — regarded as foreign or alien. Rather, they’re “just like you”.
The authors and linguists mentioned in the article above — Yarros, Tolkien, Martin, Okrand, Peterson, and Herbert — are either English or American. Regardless of their individual intention, their perspectives emanates from within the imperial cores of the post-colonial era. In their selective plucking of features from Indigenous and minoritized languages, they decontextualize them and display them as exemplars of the “foreign”, “alien”, and “mystical” to an often global audience. When viewers, readers, or fans interact with these languages in real life, there’s a risk that they’ll associate them with the dehumanized, magical, or vicious depictions they encountered in fictional narratives. This does considerable harm in contexts where Arabic may already be wrongfully associated with violence due to islamophobia, or bolster arguments that Cymraeg is a language of a forgotten past — when in reality it’s spoken by several hundred thousands of people. It is not only unjust, but dangerous, to draw on Indigenous and minoritized languages when seeking to depict something as foreign to your audience.
Moving Forward
So what is the point of acknowledging these systematic ties? Am I calling for the end of constructed languages in media? Certainly not. As a conlanger myself, I think conlangs add a rich way for audiences to engage with a text in-depth, and share that interest with a community. I’m not making any claims on the beliefs of the authors I mentioned in this article. This is a result of a systemic issue, and I believe the best way forward is to be aware of its presence and work against it.
When constructing a language, beyond asking “what” you are drawing inspiration from, it’s important to ask “why”. When seeking to depict a warring culture, what draws you to your influences? What implicit connections might your audience draw from that connection? Is this influence necessary in order to achieve your narrative end goal? As an audience member, I encourage you to ask similar questions of the media you consume. If a certain constructed language or description evokes a certain image, why is that? Is it due to your own experiences? Is it intentional on the part of the author? If the author lists a specific sources as an influence, how much do you know about that source? Is your knowledge of that culture being more influence by this fictional work than by non-fiction sources?
It’s important to keep in mind that life influences art AND art influences life. We face yet another instance in the United States where racial profiling, stereotypes, and deceptive narratives are being perpetuated to cause harms to specific communities. Media can reinforce such ideas that exist in our culture, and if we know that those ideas can/are racist or xenophobic, we should be swift to critique them. It is irresponsible to consume fantastical media uncritically once aware of how it contributes to the understanding of our own world.