How many fictional languages are there in TV and Movie land? And I mean languages where somebosy has taken the time to actually create vocabulary, grammar, syntax and such. Not just when some character says, “They were speaking in (language X)”
Right off hand I can think of:
The venerable Star Trek languages of Klingon and Vulcan.
Star Wars has Huttese
Tolkien is the grand daddy of all these with Elven, Numenorean, and “The Black Tongue of Mordor.” I think the Rohirrim also had their own language in the books.
What else is there? I’m sure I’ve missed a huge number.
Long before any of these Jonathan Swift had Lilliputian and Brobdinganagian languages, although I doubt if he created more than a few words. And Jules Verne had a fictional language spoken aboard the Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues. Again, little was spoken.
Edgar Rice Burroughs went a bit farther, creating bits of several languages for his Martian, Tarzan, Pellucidar, and other series. Bt I don’t think he ever wenty as far as Tolkien.
Also it was a nearly complete language, apparently the director/writer/language creator and Milla Jovovich could actually talk to each other in it. Or so I heard somewhere.
Created languages are a bit of a hobby of mine, there’s a big mailing list dedicated to them with a lot of linguists and language professionals on there. I remember hearing one of the guys who was a professor tell us when he was approached by the producers of Blade II.
There is a vampire language in Blade and it was a semi-full language written by a linguistics professor hired to come up with it. However she died and he was contacted to replace her. When she died all her notes were lost so for him to emulate the language he would have to carefully study what he could from the movie and the original script and try to basically reverse engineer the language. When he gave them his asking price they were astounded by how much he asked (the actual figure I don’t know), and found someone else to do it much cheaper (or maybe they cut the language - I don’t know).
As for other movies:
Disney’s Atlantis - the Atlantean in the movie was created by the same guy who created Klingon, Marc Okrand.
Some say that Parseltongue in the HP movies was a bit more developed than just sounds, though I don’t know for sure.
Stargate had some.
I’m drawing a blank on more, though if you give me some time I can come up with more for you.
I just finished watching Season 1 of Land of the Lost on DVD and was surprised to see that Vicky Fromkin was listed as the Linguistics Consultant in the credits. The late Dr. Fromkin was a professor at UCLA. I assume that she was responsible for Chukka’s language.
Quest for Fire was a fascinating movie with at least 2 fictional languages. The Neanderthals and Sapiens had invented languages. There was also a third type of hominid that appeard early in the movie which I assumed was some remnant Erectus population, but I can’t remember if they were given a language or not.
A very naked Rae Dawn Chong appears in the movie, too.
On the directors commentary track, the Zuckers talk about seeing the flick in Germany and wondering why the audience was laughing at it since it was all in German. Turns out the translators used a Bavarian accent for the black guys. Audiences ate it up.
Yes and no. The Rohirrim had their own language, but in the body of the work, it was rendered as (non-fictional) Anglo-Saxon (with which, of course, the good Professor was intimately familiar). Not that Tolkien meant to imply that the Rohirrim actually spoke Anglo-Saxon, any more than the Hobbits and Gondorians spoke modern English. The main characters actually spoke a language called Adunaic, which in English we would name “Westron” (“Language of the West”; compare Aragorn’s title “Dunedain”, “Man of the West”). Rohirrim was an ancestral language of Adunaic, in much the same way that Anglo-Saxon was an ancestral language of modern English, so in the process of “translating” the Lord of the Rings from the languages used in the Red Book, Tolkien translated the Rohirrim in the “original” into Anglo-Saxon. There are actually a few examples of Rohirrim and of Adunaic preserved in the Appendices (for instance, Meriadoc’s name in the original Adunaic was “Kalimac”), but not nearly enough to reconstruct them, as there is for the Elvish tongues.
But back to the topic of the thread, I think that Caveman was one of the best examples, since by halfway through the movie, you found yourself actually understanding it. I was frankly a bit disappointed with the scene where one of the characters explicitly translates for us.
