About: Indo-European Alien Language   Sponge Permalink

An Entity of Type : owl:Thing, within Data Space : 134.155.108.49:8890 associated with source dataset(s)

Most alien (or non-human of any kind) languages in media are simplistic and based on the language of the creators of the media. Provided the languages have some form of grammar established, be it languages from fantasy creatures or aliens, they will always look more like English than even Welsh looks like English. It seems that even when aliens aren't speaking English, they're speaking something like it. In the Con Lang community, these alien languages would be described as a "relexification" of English, or relex for short -- many of these may count as fictionaries.

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  • Indo-European Alien Language
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  • Most alien (or non-human of any kind) languages in media are simplistic and based on the language of the creators of the media. Provided the languages have some form of grammar established, be it languages from fantasy creatures or aliens, they will always look more like English than even Welsh looks like English. It seems that even when aliens aren't speaking English, they're speaking something like it. In the Con Lang community, these alien languages would be described as a "relexification" of English, or relex for short -- many of these may count as fictionaries.
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abstract
  • Most alien (or non-human of any kind) languages in media are simplistic and based on the language of the creators of the media. Provided the languages have some form of grammar established, be it languages from fantasy creatures or aliens, they will always look more like English than even Welsh looks like English. It seems that even when aliens aren't speaking English, they're speaking something like it. In the Con Lang community, these alien languages would be described as a "relexification" of English, or relex for short -- many of these may count as fictionaries. Some conlangs, however, go beyond that, and the author actually shows their work to some extent and creates a language with grammar that is different from that of English. Unfortunately, the result often still shows the typical features of Indo-European languages - similar inflection or conjugation patterns, similar use of copulae and auxiliary verbs, and so on. As most writers are not linguists, this trope crops up unsurprisingly often across fiction. Of course, you would have to be extremely dedicated to create an entire language not based on your own at all -- and even if you did, only the particularly dedicated would try to learn it. Thus, it follows that most fictional languages look like English, particularly from the perspective of native speakers of Basque, Turkish or Hebrew, for instance. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing though. What really counts is how an author uses their Con Lang in story. A story with a Con Lang that shares few similarities with an Indo-European language will still fail if it's a bad story. And remember that as much as authors can try to avert this trope, similarities to other languages is not a bad thing. And unless that particular Con Lang is going for The Unpronounceable, then all languages will share some very basic similarities. If the author invents a language designed to avoid similarities to any real language, that falls under Starfish Language. Re Lex is a subtrope for when the invented language has what amounts to a one-to-one correspondence with the language the work is written in. Examples of Indo-European Alien Language include:
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