Also, let's not forget lower jaw mobility: the ability to not simply hinge ones jaw or having restricted jaw movement has a huge effect on the number of sounds that can be produced.
reptiles don't unhinge/dislocate their jaw. The bottom jaw of snakes just aren't fused together at the chin. also most reptiles don't have this skeletal feature at all. Like crocodiles, komodo dragons, frogs, etc. But a snake race would have some interesting language given that they have a really limited range of hearing (40hz to 2000hz) due to their ears being internal and connected directly to their jaw bone.
@@Bp1033 Something like Parseltongue in Harry Potter then? In the books, Parseltongue sounded like a snake hissing, so it's probably safe to say that any potential snake language would be highly monotone and rely a lot on context.
@@theflamingphoenix6986 The ‘snake’ in harry potter was not a snake, it was a leg less lizard. Due to the jaw being fused and the tip, it was blinking (snakes don’t have eyelids) and the ‘top scales’ scales wrapping across the whole body (unlike snakes that have top scales and bottom scales separate). this could have been a mistake on jk rowllings behave, but i think because of the movie who changed it for some reason. i do think that it was a snake in the books (but it’s been a while since i’ve read the second book, so i might be forgetting stuff)
@@CryosphereSubToMe “legless lizard” is actually a very good way to describe a basilisk as originally presented in classical Greco-Roman mythology/folklore.
For those that want to make an even more alien language: take a look at the 'linguistics' and 'culture' of ants. Ants communicate with a combination of movement, touching, and (most interesting imo) a fascinating combination of odours and scents, almost with syntax like humans have too.
I love how alien their communication is imo, one of my favorites. Scent actually has some weird quirks, like working as a sort of temporary written language too which i find fascinating
also, take cephalopods. i don't know if they are really communicate this way, but their colour (and texture) changing ability has a possibility to create some sort of visual language
This was actually explored in Bernard Werber's book trilogy Empire of the Ants, where a group of humans managed to build a translator that interprets these scents, allowing for communication between the two species.
@@elaiej I've seen people remix chirping birds into lofi music (Bird Boy - Robin), but not yet transcribing bird songs, though I guess most bird sounds are mating calls, so it probably wouldn't be appropriate.
On the vocabulary note, animacy/humanness distinctions could get interesting. Like a lot of human languages divide the world into humans and non humans, so cats might divide it into cats and non cats, and lizards into lizards (or maybe just their species of lizard) and non lizards
Some research into how cats perceive the world has shown that the same area of the brain that activates when seeing another cat activates when seeing a human (but doesn't for dogs or other animals), so some cat langs might actually use the same word(s) to refer to humans in their company as they refer to themselves!
@@addisonmartin3200 this probably has something to do with cats being domesticated, right? So if your cat species isn’t like that, it might be different?
Something like a chamelion might even be able to incorporate colour changes into their speech. A word spoken with green skin might mean something different when spoken with red. A written language based on that would have to incorporate colour right from the beginning.
I did make a cipher when i was younger where the symbols for both halves of the alphabet were the same but if the color was different it was the other half letter. abcdefghijklm [red] nopqrstuvwxyz [green]
their colour changing ability is a bit too slow for speaking (but they are quite slow anyway). cephalopod would be interesting since they can also change their skin texture almost instantaneously, they could have fully visual language since they are under water
@@orbismworldbuilding8428 That sounds cool, let me see if I'm understanding it right. (^=red, *=green). a^ is a, but a* is n, and n* is n, but n^ is a. So you could write "anna" like a^a*a*a^ or n^n*n*n^ or a^a*n*n^. So you have a mix of the letter being itself or not itself.
Video: here, have some strange cat noises from the internet. My cat (who was asleep): WHAT THE WTF IS THIS!? I HEAR CATS! MAKING NOISES! THIS IS IMPORTANT! WHERE'S THE CATS!? Video: And now we're gonna talk about lizards My cat: Lol, false alarm, I'm gonna go back to my nap :)
@@Ggdivhjkjl Question: Does this comment, right here and now, contain a Link? A Link leading to someone who insults random strangers and should therefore be reported? ua-cam.com/channels/-QmN3iF9lORMn8BxkqeB4w.htmlabout
@estebanco Ah, yes, but that user is a Cybermobbing Ph0bic that uses youtube-comments to randomly harass people at Random Intervalls. Hence why i asked people once to flag him. Nice to see that he still exists, showing not many flagged him to help youtube become healthier, despite it being literally cost-free.
Not sure if anyone's mentioned this yet, but Children of Time utilizes a conlang where the sentient spiders don't even talk, but speak through a mix of sign language and patting the ground to cause vibrations, like plucking webs, etc.
That's basically what I did for a sentient spider race in the pen and paper Dawn of Worlds some years back. You can even have messengers that travel via silk parachute. But also they started out not even recognizing other sentient races. Everything was either food or geographic feature to attach webs to. Annoy their neighbors by covering a city in webs. Being pests without realizing it. So I went beyond just language but also world view.
Yeah it's kinda weird the fact we have corvids who are speaking pretty clear and decent English that you could study and I thought they are pretty decent at mimicking vowels
For every thing a human can possibly imagine there are people on the internet that already thought it out and brought it to another level. That's why I love the internet.
It's just a matter of finding it - I'm writing a fantasy novel involving merfolk and I don't know how to go about underwater conlangs without excessive research. I don't know what could even be vocalized underwater, if anything, because sound is so distorted. Right now I'm just magicking everything away.
@@WasatchWind You could let you inspire by dolphins. Their high pitched sounds do not only resonate perfectly in water and enable sonar. They can even recreate the sonar sounds and send other individuals "pictures" of what they saw directly by producing sound.
@@wihatmi5510 I think I'm sadly just going to have to wave it away - I am doing some basic conlanging to get me consistent names, but I've just found that the more I try to dip into more realistic depiction of merfolk, I just end up realizing how humans really weren't made for living underwater, and that someone has already done something like it before and far better - Like someone I talk with occasionally online is also writing a merfolk story, and their merfolk communicate via sign language. It's a very effective interesting solution... but they got to it first, and are doing it way better. I feel like I'd just be stealing it. This is why I've decided to lean into other things like a more interesting underwater world, which I feel like has not been done as much.
@@WasatchWind just a random thought, but, you could take a look at the game subnautica and one of the artists behind it, Alex Ries, who is excellent in world building and adapting earth aquatics into truly alien creatures.
Children of Time. It doesn’t go very indepth but it shows how these spiders would learn to communicate. Using their 2 color pedipalps for almost semaphore style emotional and context clues, and then tapping their legs for the main language.
I mean crows and parrots and some other birds are extremely good at mimicking actual human speech (and just about any other sound) Afaik they don't really do this with their mouths though. Their vocalizations start deeper down and are often related to how their lungs work, I think. As such they absolutely do have sounds that are much harder on them than they are on humans (and vice-versa) but they can closely approximate just about anything. IIRC African Greys have a really hard time doing k-sounds, for instance. They can pull it off with a lot of training but it doesn't come natural to them. Meanwhile, lyrebirds are naturally wired to near perfectly mimic just about *any* sound. What kind of vocalization would you have them do? Other mammals are rarely as sophisticated in their sound production as many birds. Some of the biggest genetic differences between other primates and humans lie specifically in speech capabilities on a physiological level.
Another thing to note about mimicking birds, a lot of their proto-languages might have mimicry of specific or particularly distinct sounds a certain object makes in some situation. The word for hitting rocks together could be just that: the sound to rocks make when hit together. "Clack". Or for specific animals and encounters with them: "Hiss": A hostile or threatening encounter with a reptile or a cat. A fight between two cats, two reptiles, or a reptile and a cat. This also leads to a vastly different information structure aswell.
@@orbismworldbuilding8428 I'm pretty sure hissing sounds are semi-universally made by creatures to warn. Like, animals on the hunt are largely as quiet as possible. Hissing tends to be a "I'm here don't mess with me leave me be" - a pre-hostile noise, strictly speaking. That said, yeah, the sheer ability of many birds to replicate pretty arbitrary sounds often better than humans can would surely mean onomatopoeia are gonna be a particularly prominent language feature.
@@Kram1032 cows don't hiss, horses don't hiss. If monkeys hiss it's likely the smaller ones, bigger monkeys snarl. Wolves don't hiss. But you're right it could be a sort of "That thing is warning or threatening" word
@@Kram1032 yeah (god that word is long) it would be pretty common. I actually really like it as a way of language (Like the only way to say "hitting to hard things together" is "clack" it makes for some pretty alien language and makes translation weird, which i love
Question: Does this comment, right here and now, contain a Link? A Link leading to someone who insults random strangers and should therefore be reported? ua-cam.com/channels/-QmN3iF9lORMn8BxkqeB4w.htmlabout
As someone whose first exposure to conlangs was Watership Down, and whose biggest languages (mainly Kajnjama) are all spoken by anthropomorphic cats, I went through this in spades. *No labial stops. Loanwords with B, P, etc. are done implosively, which cat lips ARE slightly more capable of. *The tongue can fold far wider and floppier than a human. *The roof of the mouth is ridged. And it has to have a flehmen organ in there. So there's no real Alveolar-Palatal distinction. I analyzed all those sounds Apical-Laminal. *Its ancestors were Tonal. It comes more easily to them. *So much of this language is body language that it's assumed you would only use words if someone can't see you. The word for "Yes" is "I'm nodding." (EXCEPT a cat nod is a slow blink and a dip of the head straight down.) So I'm curious to see what y'all think up now that we have this!
@@dafoex It doesn't have a properly grammatical conlang, but Lapine is a Naming Lang that sees recurring use in the story, and has a very consistent, fluffy aesthetic, as well as concepts apparently unique to the rabbit mind (they can't count higher than Four, so five, Hrair, is translated as "many" or "thousand"). And they use it very well. Fiver's original name, Hrairoo, means "last child" or "runt," the predators of rabbits are U Hrair, "the thousand," and the legendary rabbit prince El-Ahrairah come from Elil-hrair-rah, "the prince of a thousand enemies." Adams made up words as needed, but the "fluffy, wuffy" aesthetic is so perfectly fitting you wouldn't even notice. Of course a car is a Hrududu, of course grazing is to Silflay... watershipdown.fandom.com/wiki/Lapine
I've been working on a dragon language for a while and that's been an interesting challenge. One of the big things to consider for non-humans is why they develop language in the first place and what they would use it for. So with my dragons, I realized that because I'd written them as being very territorial, with their social structures arising from conflicts and bargaining over the allocations of their territories, they would actually have an evolutionary pressure _against_ developing a spoken language, because they're most likely to use its earliest forms in territorial disputes where they'd be incentivized to lie to each other, but they'd have a bit more pressure to develop a _written_ language, because they still need to teach their hatchlings how to use incredibly complicated stellar navigation (the night sky in the world they live in doesn't work like ours, it's a lot more complicated and weird). So rather than evolving a spoken language with sounds that are then represented with symbols, they would first develop symbolic star charts, which could be adapted into symbols for conveying specific meanings about other things, eventually forming a full written language, at which point they might develop vocalizations that reflect the symbols they write in order to communicate them over long distances. So now I gotta go back and figure out how their star charts, and by extension the weird night sky of their setting works, I guess. Maybe then I'll be able to get back to phonology.
True. For certain animals like say parrots, it'd probably be like an extended human IPA diagram but with the sounds being on different places and having different names. Birds like that can do sounds like [p] or [a] but with different organs than us humans.
As cool as these are, I also love to look into non-human languages that are less based on vocalization. For example, I was making a species of plant-like people, but then had to think about the fact that plants can't vocalize. So I designed a sort of "color-based" language, where their species can change their skin tones at will and can even produce bioluminescence, however glowing too brightly can be considered rude, as it is the equivalent of talking over someone or yelling.
This is very interesting, 'cause I did somewhat the opposite. In the language of my cave dwelling species evolved from salamanders, the glowing intensity of the bioluminescent antenna on their forehead plays an important role in communication, as it's the equivalent of our emotion, facial expression and can be also used to express abstract concepts. Living in the dark, the act of emitting light and making one's face clearly visible during a conversation is seen as a sign of friendliness and openness to communication, so in this case turning the antenna off is seen as rude and hostile, ultimately signifing anger and aggression
I think something that should be also considered as an option is that, while plants can’t vocalize, plants can make sound; we can even hear it if amplified enough.
@@AirashiiTiayou I didn't know plants did that! I originally had them make clicking sounds and it was used almost like morse code, but I scrapped that idea for a more realistic one.
@@WyrmRoots Yeah! It's super cool. I learned about it from this video: ua-cam.com/video/RpwW9Lw2Ku4/v-deo.html I highly recommend you watch it, super interesting.
Fun facts: crows can be taught how to speak like humans (or rather, like parrots) and a recent study has shown they might be smart enough to understand the concept of zero.
An idea I had that's somewhat similar to this but different is if there were humans that made a language based on mimicking birds. The culture in my world worships birds, so it makes sense that they'd have a liturgical language based on birdsong.
@@ShankarSivarajan Yeah silbo gomero is one of my inspirations but it's not really a language by itself. It's more of a translation of Spanish sounds into equivalent whistles, but they're still basically speaking Spanish.
@@obviativ123 im aware they have a psuedolanguage, my project is if elephants were the ones to evolve civilization building intelligence instead of our chimp like ancestors. So i have to sort out possible linguistic abilities, how they would make tools, how their bodies changed to acomedate these features, like how our hands and mouths changed for tool making and speech.
If anyone's interested in some fiction that explores some of these concepts I'd recommend the manga "Heterogeneous Linguistics/Heterogenia Linguistico", it's about a young researcher in some fantasy world tasked by his mentor to survive in the "demonlands" for awhile and continue his studies on the languages and cultures of the diverse animal-like species. There's werewolves (bipedal wolves, sorta), harpies (big smart birds), lizardmen (bipedal crocs/gators), lamia (average sized snakes, with small arms, very cute), a centauros (literally a horse, presumably sapient but MC never really figured out clear communication), and more with a variety of different languages, some verbal but mostly limb flailing and various other methods of communication. It's basically a wander through the author's monster linguistics worldbuilding project
4:46 that's how natural cats speak, it's how they actually commicated. They only meow for humans, it's developed treat just for humans, to well be cute and get stuff out of us.
@@squeakboy3666 More like they talk like babies because they never mature. City cats lose a lot of their killer traits and pretty much consider themselves babies their entire lives, while rural cats that actually hunt, while they also enjoy petting and humans in general, are way, way less vocal.
I think most simple thing would be define by the sound they make, this would be particularly true for animals species «word» (they could probably imitate the sound of a baby prey asking for help, which would help them hunt with trap)
This reminds me of the book Watership Down, where the rabbits have their own language and terms, like how “tharn” means to be paralyzed by fear. It’s really interesting, and I’ve actually been thinking about including it in my own writing! Side note: Watership Down is a great example for how to make a vocabulary for your animal’s language. Richard Adams included many different words to describe things that the rabbits do, or that it would make sense for them to have a word for. Examples include: Elil- Enemies of rabbits, e.g. predators Flay- grass and other green foods Flayrah- good food, like lettuce Hlessi- a rabbit that doesn’t live in a warren Silflay- to go outside the warren to eat I have no idea if when making Lapine, Richard Adams researched actual sounds rabbits made or could make, but it’s a good example of how to create a vocabulary.
That book inspired me to conlang for the first time. Adams said he just wanted it to sound "wuffy, fluffy" and made up the words as he needed them, but maybe that's why it works, it feels so simple, like it was made by rabbit brains. watershipdown.fandom.com/wiki/Lapine
I like the idea of rabbits communicating via thumbing their feet-- but this has no scientific basis or anything-- its just entirely based off of Thumper from Bambi. LOL
I had a cat that learned to mimic "I don't feel very well" (and when to use it) that she used a few times toward the end of her life. I don't remember well because it was years ago, but I think it was articulated something like /aɪ nõː iːl ɛɯi ɯɛːl/. So yeah, no sounds involving teeth.
Interesting, yeah I've noticed cats will mimic words if they know generally what they mean too. I had 2 cats, one would call for the other with a tone/pitch specific 2-sylable word: "Mat-mat". She did this after we started calling the other "Crow-crow"
@@thatperson9842 this sounds all sage-like or something but: when you go into something with expectation, you can be dissapointed. But even without expectation, you can feel surprise, but never shock. I'm sad for their cat too
I think something to bear in mind is that a species might not necessarily communicate using vocalisations. For example, if chameleons evolved sapience, the would probably communicate using colour.
To be fair, most inter species interactions are vocal and posture. The color acts more like a mood ring more so than a sign allowing males specifically to brighten up when angry, happy, content, basking. Or darken when stressed, cooling, annoyed but not thinking they can contest the threat.
Chameleons already communicate using color though. Also, they don't have vocal chords (most reptiles don't have them), but they can still make some hissing noises and other low sounds. That would most likely be the basis for their conlang in addition to using colors to indicate tone.
@@andreah9587 there is also the simple fact of the motivations to do it if you're literally at the point of sentience are relatively easy. I believe bull snakes, a subspecies within North American colubrids have something more similar to vocal cords which allows them a larger variety or noises. I'd more reasonably assume they'd be able to listen to English well. Mimic certain easy words relatively poorly. And mostly communicate through posture and hints of mood through color shifts. Like I said before. The actual color change as language is exceptionaly limited. If you wanted language through color you'd go squids and maybe octopus. Humboldt squid already have a insanely varied possible language through their patterns and locations of coloring.
Also: really like the stylised animal drawings, they fit in so well with the animations I forgot you don't normally have animals on your vids. Very seamless.
Currently creating a world with lizardmen as a common species, so this episode is well timed and has given me a lot to consider. Thank you very much, keep up the good work!
One important detail you didn't mention about birds is that they have *two* independent syrinx (voiceboxs), so they can make two different sounds at the same time. If they subsequently shape the sound using their mouth, it will be common to both seed notes. Another thing is that a greater variety of phoneme types can be sounded in a quiet voice, compared to what it can comfortably render at a normal to loud volume. And a select few sounds can be *very* loud; the latter will be synchronized to wing flapping in flight, and if still you can see how the entire body acts as a bellows.
While i'v never given this idea a serious look, but now that i think about it i would probably start with setting up my own Deep Squeak for my parents, sisters, friends and own cats. So that i could have their whole natural vocabulary. Then probably create 2 languages, one for cat/cat speech and another for cat/human speech.
Wow, I'm trying to do a very similar thing for my own feline family-member, this is so cool! You mention trying to make two languages, one for cats with each other and another for cats with humans... Any idea on how you'd teach the former? I'm just beginning and progress has required a lot of repetition, so clues on how encourage them to use words in more circumstances would be great if they were available! Also, what's your stance on the inclusion of fricative consonants? They seem (so far) to be sounds that cats can make, but I don't want to sound like hissing just to have a normal bit of back and forth, which may send the wrong message!
@@hoppybirdy6967, honestly still got no clue on that front, most of my reasoning for the idea is based on how the majority of the sounds our Furry Over Lords use to communicate with each other are too high of a frequency for us to either hear or replicate.
They already kind of do have cat/cat and cat/human speech. Cats only meow at humans, like how dogs only bark at humans - dogs barking "at" wild animals is them alerting us to the animal while keeping its eyes locked onto it.
@@hoppybirdy6967 When I crafted the phonology for a language spoken by an anthropomorphic feline species, it was *very* fricative- and affricate-heavy. Also had 4 different rhotics and more than one lateral, due to the fact that the had a muzzle instead of these deep cheeks like humans do.
Adrian Tchaikovsky wrote some interesting non-verbal animal conlangs for spiders (vibrations and essentially semaphore) and cephalopods (colour, shape, pattern and texture) in his children of time/children of ruin books. When verbalised, though, they were really just humans cosplaying spider/cephalopod suits
@Awe Sean an evolution of the Portia family of spider, the pedipalps were used like semiphore flags to signal with angles and rotation. They are lighter on one side and dark on the other so contrast can be seen easily. The spiders also use vibration in their webs as a means for communication. One can step onto the web of another and move it precisely to talk to them.
I tried making a cat conlang way back when but I couldn't find any good diagram of a cats mouth and articulatory organs so I gave up but this could respark it
That moment when a video by a favorite creator slaps another layer of things to consider onto an already dense strata of things to consider for a story. Thank you, but also damn it.
I’m kind of fond of the idea of an avian race having a universal “base” language of mimicking sounds to relate ideas, kind of like C3PO when he’s telling his story to the Ewoks. Such a language would be simple enough for avians of other dialects and even humans to have some grasp of what is being talked about.
I have a race of pseudo-gastropods, who vocalise by tapping and scraping their radula against the roof of their mouth. This is my first conlang! WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!
@@thatperson9842 sounds means you've gotten and impression of something but aren't certain, and interesting is often used to describe stuff you want to know more about.
@@thatperson9842 Gastropods are the snail/slug family of mollusks. Radula: (in a mollusk) a structure of tiny teeth used for scraping food particles off a surface and drawing them into the mouth Maybe it might be similar to a language built around a wood-block scraper?
For some non human language I’ve wondered for a while if trill speeds could be used similarly to tones. Like an insectoid or frog like species with a fast, slow, accelerating, and decelerating trill. If you really wanted to go nuts you could put a tone system ON TOP of that and make something that’s just barely maybe reproducible by humans and super alien.
As a native Slovak speaker (although very rusty due to mostly speaking Czech and English) this sounds like an interesting challenge. Never really tried to vary the speed of the long ŕ...
Crocodilians are known for being incredibly vociferous, with possibly dozens of different vocalizations from chirps and hisses, to deep bellows. I've always liked the idea of a language where the phonology is incredibly limited - in this case by an anatomy lacking any lips or a larynx. I've imagined a crocodilian language to impart meaning through both expiration and inspiration, and with the length of vowels being crucial, with multiple varying lengths of the "same" words for different meaning - kinda like tones, but based on duration of vocalization.
I'm making a humanoid language based on a non-humanoid language, as humans have been worshipping dragons in my world, and I need to figure out what language the (highly intelligent) dragons would be using and how humans would adopt that for their own ability to speak, and their different linguistic needs.
Fun discussion! Another thing to remember when considering anatomy is breath control. Chimps can't control their exhalation like humans can, and this has a real impact on the nature of their vocalizations.
One of the things to consider is that another species may not have the same mental machinery as us, and as such may have wholly different sets of constraints on their grammars; even if they may end up alike to us in many ways (path of least resistance languagewise may be pretty akin from species to species) there may still be syntactic and pragmatic constraints that simply don't and CAN'T compute between species, not to even bring up between languages.
i actually made a 'catlang' for fun once. it featured a click (cats often make noises like clicks while watching birds), and a three vowel system with 4 tones for each, as well as a syllabic trill that could *also* take 3 different tones (based on the range of tones a simple 'mrow' can go through, haha). grammatically, it used ergative/absolutive alignment and VOS as a default word order, inspired by the idea that cats use vocalisations mostly to communicate with humans, and that cats communicate with other cats more through body language - as a result, the language was initially developed to issue commands to humans, hence the verb-initial word order and the treating of the lone subject like the patient in transitive sentences ('cause the default assumption is that you're ordering someone else to do something; 'feed me, human')
In reality, most of cats' language is silent signal language and the formation of different signal combinations. It would make a good silent fantasy species whose comlang is signal language.
Oh, this is super handy. I've been worldbuilding a culture of bongo antelope-inspired humanoids for a while now, and have wanted to dip my toes in making a conlang that would fit their anatomy.
Another difference between humans and a lot of animals is if they even talk to eachother. Cats especially hardly ever meow to eachother for communication, and work primarily in body language. So maybe if you were doing a more realistic catfolk, or other animal like this, they'd have a spoken language, and supplement it with body language. Honestly, I've been waiting for this video for as long as I've been watching this channel! And I'm so, so glad this video finally exists! My primary worldbuilding project actually has no humans, but five races of dragon-based animals. So obviously, they don't sound anything like humans, and sound very different from eachother. In fact, all but two are physically incapable of speaking eachothers' languages. But since they all still have to communicate, they did manage to make a common language.
This makes me think you could use a lot of studies in gesture and sign languages. Of course, we humans have hands and other non-animal stuff, but once you get the gist of how do sign languages work, you could extend that into other anatomies! That seems quite cool!
Yeah same! Very few of my worlds really focus on humans or if they do they are posthuman or so culturally divergent from us that they speak by tapping wooden blocks together, or they speak with their mouths closed or somthing. Most of my worldbuilding is nonhumans though, and so this is helpful
At the same time it's thought that cats meow at us humans because they think we're big dumb-dumbs that don't understand their subtle body language. So it might be fun if cat folk amongst each other are very quiet, but when talking to other species do the thing certain English speaking people do when encountering someone that doesn't speak English; JUST.. SPEAKING... LOUDER! AND... SLOWER!
4:52 oh no.. See this is where you could play with it, have the Meow language for communication between cat and human, but the chitter for cat to cat or other animal speech
So a while back I trying to build a few languages for Elementatals. I more or less settled on Fire Elementals having an entirely non auditory language, instead basing it of of varying flashing patterns of different colors.
You would also end up with specific species wording or sounds. Crows for example work alongside wolves where the 2 species live in proximity. Crows circle a corpse that has hide too thick for them to pierce calling out to the wolves to come and tear into the kill, opening up the hide for the crows to get at the softer meat beneath (ergo if crows developed sentience and civilisation, they are rather likely to have domesticated wolves or dogs. This shapes a civilisation, its culture and language as a result. The 3 feed into each other. ME2 Mordin Solas does a brief explanation whilst talking about lack of creator art.
In "The Secret Language of Cats" we get a bit of info from a linguist who also loves cats, and see a few pieces of info about how cats vocalize: lots of nasals, trills and approximants in the onset of a meow, fricatives and affricates are possible, but plosives are more constrained. Voiced bilabial plosives can exist, voiceless cannot. No front rounded vowels, and no high back unrounded vowels.
Your videos are VERY underrated. Thank you so much for this information, it really helps. As someone who creates worlds based on quadrupedal animals who have human intelligence/communication, it is a relief to find information geared toward this. A lot of helpful information for writing/story creation seems to assume all of your characters are human or humanoid, and not animals. Thank you again for investing in providing tips on intelligent animal communication.
Idea: a language that uses physicality as an integral part of the language. I'd imagine that many animals that have less options with their mouth, but the ability to incorporate a tail, might use that, not just as a way to add emphasis, but as a core part of dialogue.
Wooo this is some great advice! been trying to think of ways to make my fantasy languages and just the thought of elephant long ranged communication is giving me chills
If you watch "Billi Speaks", a UA-cam channel for a cat that speaks with English word buttons, it could be guessed that cats would take a very, _very_ long time between words, and Billi will often think for several minutes about how exactly to word what they want to say.
Birds have a syrinx to produce sounds instead of the vocal folds of mammals. It's been mentioned elsewhere but it is extremely important in understanding their vocal anatomy. They actually do have a larynx -- but that's not what they use to make noise. The syrinx branches, so many bird species can make two entirely different noises at once -- imagine working that into a conlang! When I create a non-human species that needs to have a more complex vocal range than their mouth anatomy would allow them, a syrinx-like organ is the way to go. Birds do use their beaks and tongues to modify sounds, but not how we would. When you watch a parrot speak, their beak and tongue movements do *not* match up to how we would form the same sounds, and it's honestly hilarious to watch. Also different birds have vastly different beak anatomy; psittacines (parrots) have a "floating" mandible which means their top mandible is hinged and can move independently. Some bird species have surprisingly flexible beaks, which can look a little creepy when captured by a photograph. Unfortunately, many people stop at mouth anatomy when they discuss animal language and conlangs. I've seen this at panels at conventions as well. You'll miss out on a lot of sound-making physiology if you do so. Especially in birds, but in many other animals as well. I've met ravens that spoke very understandable English, and my African grey frequently fools people into thinking she's the person she's imitating. The first language I learned was American Sign Language, because my dad is Deaf. With conlangs for animals it would be a shame to ignore their non-vocal language. Smells, body language, non-vocal sounds, and other non-vocal aspects could all be represented in a conlang textually with different markers, for example. An insect might make sounds with various other body parts (leggies, timbal membranes, spiracles, etc.) and also release chemical communication markers. Animals like chameleons and octopuses would likely incorporate color changing as an aspect of their language. Snakes have their rattles, and many birds also have non-vocal sound producing apparatus (such as feather-created sounds in hummingbirds and woodcocks, drumming and booming produced by many grouse by air sacs, and so on). The thump of rabbits (actually a two-legged maneuver, unlike the one legged version used by Thumper in Bambi), the sneeze of dogs (used as a de-escalating sound in dog interactions), and countless more. I love the inclusion of animal culture in influencing the language, those are some great observations!
All of it well said! Also, as for ways to try and speak some of those two-sound/two-note sounds in a language, look into how to do overtone singing and how to practice it. It's something i learned how to do and people i know have said they aren't shre if I'm playing something on my phone until i show them that i do make the sounds with my voice, also it's very pretty and alien!
I was giving it a go at creating a language for Octopus. They are incredible. To be honest, I was trying for sentient Aquatic and my first try was Dolphins. But they lacked a better tool use, so I picked Octopus for that and boy, I was proud of that decision. The thing is, dophin already have a good system of comunication, but octopus doesn't. They live alone and they are one of the few species that develop some rational thinking without the need for social group interaction. The great thing is that Octopus don't create sound, but they are great at camouflage, so they should have a completely VISUAL type of language, where it can change its color, shape and texture to deliver a message. Right now, my language is really rough, just some basic notions of sentiments. They have sight really different from ours, but I based on the fact they have 3 kind of pigments in their body. It is not RGB, rather it is Yellow Red and Blue. It can show white to show it is relaxed, Red to catch attention, etc... Also mixture of things like a black line and white all around. The texture is used as some sort of tone. Of course, the purpose of comunication is that they develop group hunting. They actually ended up with a very similar evolution compared with humans. They were fragile but very inteligent. They were not at the top of the food chain so they had to work cooperatively. One bad thing is that they don't live long and they are pretty well as it is. But just like we are not as strong as a gorilla. I created a "nerfed" octopus that lived longer and had larger brain, so they had a need to comunicate to hunt together. Also developing tool use such as spikes of urchins and so forth. Of course they would only have discovered fire after conquering the land. But they would need a lot more technology to adventure on those areas. About writing system, I invented a really intuitive base-8 positional system. Maybe there were more primitive systems before, but I'm quite okay with how it is. All the numbers and letters are made with circles and points. This happens because they can use their own ink (pretty cool) and use their suckers and point of tentacles to write. I tried to develop some sort of language but it was pretty difficult. Basically some sort of the same idea, but using symbols to describe each color (since the ink is always black). That is a little bit how much I got so far. Of course there is a lot more on their architechture, domesticating animals and etc... But for the purpose of this video. I only wanted to show an example where it was purely visual and aquatic.
This was a video I didn't know I needed and it makes me feel very vindicated for prohibiting rounding in my canine-based conlang I started in high school
Nice to see that the conlang I've been working on, where I stopped because I wanted more realistic sound selection... Not only has it been done before several times, one of those are being used *as* the example
The A E B C Dh D sequence thing is cool, also humans _kinda_ have that except it's not for grammar but for phonology... It reminds me of the specific order phonemes have to follow within a syllable, am I the only one? Either way, super dope.
i think you’re referring to the sonority sequencing principle? sounds are sequenced according to sonority (idk a good definition- perceived ‘loudness’ ig), with vowels the most sonorous and stops (i.e. /p/ /g/) the least. a common violation of this is /s/ (stop, space, smart), at least in english afaik.
In my fantasy setting there's two races of avian humanoids called angels and harpies. They have wings and hollow bones so they can fly and they use their flight when they hunt and migrate. In order to be heard over the wind at high altitudes and across large distances they developed a code that involves whistling a series of six notes. I took inspiration from Carolina chickadee calls here. Basically, these notes go from B to D or la to do, each representing a different register. B/la denotes the "intent" register and is used to communicate the level of danger or urgency. 1 note means safe, two notes mean low alert, three mean high alert, and four mean danger. A/sol denotes the "location" register. 1 = N/^ 2 = E/> 3 = S/v 4 = W/< G/fa denotes the "subject" register. 1 = me 2 = you 3 = us 4 = them F/mi denotes the "command" register. 1 = go 2 = find 3 = attack/kill/acquire 4 = stop/immobilize E/re denotes the "object" register. 1 = predator 2 = prey 3 = food 4 = shelter 5 = people D/do denotes the "identify" register. In hunting parties, each hunter is assigned a number. When refer to an individual, this note is called out according to their number. Likewise, most flocks are comprised of up to four families, each family usually has up to six members. Thus 1-4 and 1-6 are combined when communicating during a migration. This is rarely done however as there's rarely a need. So if you wanted to say something like "I spotted danger to the north" you might signal B4A1G1F2 or simply B4A1. You could add some context by adding E1 if it's a predator or E5 if it's a enemy flock or even E3 if it's something poisonous. Since children are taught this code before they learn to speak, they often will use the B register to communicate level of need, two being want, three being need. They also tend to do clever things like mixing two numbers in the same register to communicate something specific. Like if a child wanted their mother they might say B2G1E3-5, E3-5 basically meaning "food person", or if they want their father they might say B2G1E4-5, E4-5 meaning "shelter person". They're also taught identifiers for their siblings if they have any (they probably have at least one) which are numbered by order of birth. So like say you were the second of your clutch to hatch and your parents had a clutch before you (terminology only applies to harpies), your two oldest siblings would be D1 and D2, your clutch-mate would be D3, and you would be D4.
Thank you so much you two. I've actually had to think about language making for a story of mine, and aside from basic things I could look up or think of, I didn't really know where to start or what to do.. or how to let it seem realistic! This showed the process really well. (ed: there were so many double words for some reason!! Wow oops. Welp... thank you so so much much you two. Haha!)
Another thing about creating animal language is that who can speak or understand the language will depend not only on the language expression body parts, but also on the body parts involved in language reception. Many birds communicate in sound ranges partially too high for people to hear. Cats are always leaving scent markers when they rub against things that human noses can't smell or interpret in any way and, while dogs are even better at smell detection than cats are, both animals are miles ahead of humans in smell and hearing, where cats often pull ahead of dogs with their long-range-capable ears with numerous intricate muscles that swivel toward sound. Whiskers are a whole other sensory organ with their own sensitivity to atmosphere and close-range objects. Then there are raccoons. They evolved as food pickers in rivers and can essentially taste with their hands. Elephants can and do send vibration to one another over vast expanses through careful foot vibrations.
I'm studying linguistics and this channel makes me feel like I want to fully dedicate to linguistics, especulative linguistics or even fictional lingustics.
A group of intelligent Carolina Chickadee would likely create a polysynthetic language since it's six different calls each have a single morpheme that can be used in combination with the others. As a result, they would likely assign morphemes that can be combined into words.
What about conlangs for other types of non-humans? Some of the species in my world don't really have good real-world analogs. For a few examples, I have: -Suuzta: Creatures with 3 mouths and no arms. They use their really long tongues to pick things up. -Bangu (Working on a name): A floating gasbag that's basically a cross between a hawk and a blimp. -Monetans: A race of sentient machines with no discernable mouth (Though they can communicate via the internet) -Sonogai: Picture a cross between a praying mantis and a saber-toothed cat. -Isoma: Radially-Symmetrical creatures with a flower mouth at the bottom of their body. -Tezt'ki: Hammerhead slugs with chin tentacles. -Estians: Flying Dolphins with no mouth, instead gaining their energy by attracting lightning from their planet's stormy weather. -Ti'Tikaa: Silicon-Based Crystal Monsters.
Sound's cool! I'd start by figuring out what's their natural way of producing sounds and working from there. If they don't make noices at all, maybe they have flexible parts that they can use for signing, or communicate by dancing like bees.
Un punto interesante a considerar es que la mayoría de las especies vocales son increíblemente buenas distinguiendo tono/notas con precisión, los humanos no, al ser los humanos mucho más generalistas podemos considerarlo una ventaja para el desarrollo del lenguajes ya que podemos dar sentido a frase de niños mal articuladas, hombres adultos con voces muy gruesas, o mujeres muy agudas o muchedumbres sin perder información, los animales simplemente no podrían distinguir esto porque cada individuo estaría diciendo algo diferente para ellos. Yo llevo 5 años desarrollado un lenguaje de ficcion para plantas, pensé que con mis conocimiento en química seria fácil, pero usar moléculas aromáticas para algo mas que señales básicas se esta volviendo un desafió.
This video is SO INCREDIBLE!!!! I love it so much and I'll be referencing it a lot!!! I've been interested in languages of creatures both real and in fiction and this video helps a lot with that! I'm so glad this exists, this will help a lot of people both already farther along in this field and people just entering it that don't know how to start!
Was reading a book called blue core (great book 1 and 2 are available highly recommended (NSFW)) and in it there are multiple non-human races. Magical and not. The dragons as they grow older become more magic than flesh and as such bend the rules. However when talking amongst each other they take alot of social ques from body language (namely the tip of the tail and head position) but it is very subtle and difficult for a non-human to pick up. The avian species there had a basically unpronounceable language, but the leader was able to use wind magic to speak in the human tongue. Telepathy was mostly images and concepts, but could use "words" as well. And the leviathans were big low frequency rumbles that meant you didn't want one to shout near buildings.
Surprised you only talked about phonetic languages, and not even mentioned languages based on sight, smell, touch, or taste. All of which are widely used in nature. Many animals use vocal communication, but I feel like too many authors fall into the trap of making every single race rely solely on it.
I think it's just very hard to say much about what something like an Octopus language would be like. Almost anything you do would be "plausible." Could changing colors be used for verb conjugation? I dunno, sure. Could also be used for any other element of communication. Would an octopus have some sort of 8 symbol sentence structure where each tentacle signs a word in parallel? I dunno, sure. Or would they use the tentacles to make a serialized structure more like spoken speech? Also seems plausible. It's just harder to put useful limits on what they'd do, and harder to express it as a human, so you'd just wind up with a lot of description of something fairly arbitrary. Personally, I think it's an interesting topic. My own interest in conlangs kind of stems from imaging what alien languages might be like. But it's hard to say much specific about such things that are so removed from our understanding of language.
@@guaposneeze Or maybe instead of putting a description, for a visual language at least, you’d put a picture of the part that is communicating something, such as with human sign languages.
my cat was in the room while I watched this video and his ears perked up and eyes went wide when the weird cat sounds started playing. He was probably concerned that the brand new laptop I've been watching this on started screaming in agony for seemingly no reason.
Can you do a video about how the transmissibility of different media would affect languages? If, for example, I wanted to make an amphibious race of merfolk, they'd need a language that can carry as well underwater as in the air.
This is really helpful! I plan on writing a Watership down/warrior cats inspired book on mustalids in the future and I've been stuck trying to create some words or languages for them that work and are understandable by most of the different species that are characters within it. I have two ferrets of my own so I always imagined that the main ferret characters would be more loud and expressive then the other creatures, dooking and chirping when expressing emotions compared to the wild animals who probably communicate more in nips, stares, and quiet chitters or battle squeals. I've been stuck coming up with a more specific language for them though using the natural sounds they make to immerse the readers more like Watership down compared to warrior cats (where their specific vocabulary is just calling things different then a human would like cars being called monsters). I guess I'm gonna go down a deep rabbit hole of research into vocalizations over the next few weeks and observe my ferrets on how they communicate and interact with each other and their environments to hopefully come up with a language that will do them justice!
This is just what I needed for goat languages. I've seen that their mouth cavities are somewhat similar to human's, exceot that they don't have alveolar ridge and their lips can't round as well and they have 2 sets of teeth, due to being rumiants. How would that play out?
Amazing video ! I am quite intrigue by the possibility to make a non human conlang using sample of the species noise and not just a human approximation sounding like the animals. Don't know if it had already been done but I am gonna look for it ^^
This was really excellent, thanks! -- You might want to do a video on dog vocalizations, or more on cats, or hmm, what about speculation on early hominid language? Just imagine if we could understand whatever dolphins, orcas, and whales are singing. Is it speech? It seems like there's some evidence they could have words or even personal names, but we basically still have no idea of any of it, despite years of trying. At least, as far as I understand the talks I've heard on it. Lots of cool stuff out there for conlanging and world-building. Thanks, Artifexian and friends!
YES YES THANK YOU AAAA This is something I've been working on forever, for several worlds of mine: one with wolves (cuz...I like wolves) and one with an alien species that is not human-like whatsoever. Some of this I figured already and knew, like how cats certainly wouldn't be able to make rounded vowels and how their number systems may work, which is great for confirmation. Some I didn't know, which I am thankful to know! Thank you so so muchhh People don't seem to remember that most animals don't have uvulas. I never thought to name the categories (i.e. "rostral"); that's great, I love it.
I suggest looking at ethology and the study of animal communication, there's a fun book to start with named Animal Languages by Eva Meijer. You'll learn that a lot of animals communicate with nonverbal signals and learn about a few exemple of animal grammars. I find the exemple in the video extremely interesting and cool, I never thought of fictional language for animals, that's brilliant!
David J. Peterson did a couple of animal conlangs on the LangTime Studio channel. In fact, he and his collaborator Jessie Sams stream their process on Thursdays.
Also, let's not forget lower jaw mobility: the ability to not simply hinge ones jaw or having restricted jaw movement has a huge effect on the number of sounds that can be produced.
reptiles don't unhinge/dislocate their jaw. The bottom jaw of snakes just aren't fused together at the chin. also most reptiles don't have this skeletal feature at all. Like crocodiles, komodo dragons, frogs, etc. But a snake race would have some interesting language given that they have a really limited range of hearing (40hz to 2000hz) due to their ears being internal and connected directly to their jaw bone.
@@Bp1033 Something like Parseltongue in Harry Potter then? In the books, Parseltongue sounded like a snake hissing, so it's probably safe to say that any potential snake language would be highly monotone and rely a lot on context.
@@theflamingphoenix6986 The ‘snake’ in harry potter was not a snake, it was a leg less lizard. Due to the jaw being fused and the tip, it was blinking (snakes don’t have eyelids) and the ‘top scales’ scales wrapping across the whole body (unlike snakes that have top scales and bottom scales separate).
this could have been a mistake on jk rowllings behave, but i think because of the movie who changed it for some reason. i do think that it was a snake in the books (but it’s been a while since i’ve read the second book, so i might be forgetting stuff)
@@CryosphereSubToMe 🤓
@@CryosphereSubToMe “legless lizard” is actually a very good way to describe a basilisk as originally presented in classical Greco-Roman mythology/folklore.
For those that want to make an even more alien language: take a look at the 'linguistics' and 'culture' of ants. Ants communicate with a combination of movement, touching, and (most interesting imo) a fascinating combination of odours and scents, almost with syntax like humans have too.
I love how alien their communication is imo, one of my favorites. Scent actually has some weird quirks, like working as a sort of temporary written language too which i find fascinating
Bees are similar with little dances performed to communicate nectar sources(flowers).
also, take cephalopods. i don't know if they are really communicate this way, but their colour (and texture) changing ability has a possibility to create some sort of visual language
Ant: *twerks, touches my shoulder, then farts*
Me: Dude, same!
This was actually explored in Bernard Werber's book trilogy Empire of the Ants, where a group of humans managed to build a translator that interprets these scents, allowing for communication between the two species.
As an avid conlanger whose conlangs are nearly entirely for non-humans, I'm pleased to see I've already been approaching them in a similar fashion.
with the content of this video i wasn't sure how to pronounce "avid" at first XD
@@trinity_null There is such profession? How do i get there?
There's got to be someone out there transcribing bird songs into text
@@elaiej I mean... can't say I haven't tried...
@@elaiej I've seen people remix chirping birds into lofi music (Bird Boy - Robin), but not yet transcribing bird songs, though I guess most bird sounds are mating calls, so it probably wouldn't be appropriate.
On the vocabulary note, animacy/humanness distinctions could get interesting. Like a lot of human languages divide the world into humans and non humans, so cats might divide it into cats and non cats, and lizards into lizards (or maybe just their species of lizard) and non lizards
perhaps distinguish prey or predator and other animals, so dividing it cats/prey/non cats can be cool
@@zazonfz7929 that would be cool!
Some research into how cats perceive the world has shown that the same area of the brain that activates when seeing another cat activates when seeing a human (but doesn't for dogs or other animals), so some cat langs might actually use the same word(s) to refer to humans in their company as they refer to themselves!
having other closely rellated species could have alot of cultural and philosophical questions
@@addisonmartin3200 this probably has something to do with cats being domesticated, right? So if your cat species isn’t like that, it might be different?
Something like a chamelion might even be able to incorporate colour changes into their speech. A word spoken with green skin might mean something different when spoken with red. A written language based on that would have to incorporate colour right from the beginning.
I did make a cipher when i was younger where the symbols for both halves of the alphabet were the same but if the color was different it was the other half letter.
abcdefghijklm [red]
nopqrstuvwxyz [green]
In Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky there is a race of octopod that communicate in colour and pattern
their colour changing ability is a bit too slow for speaking (but they are quite slow anyway). cephalopod would be interesting since they can also change their skin texture almost instantaneously, they could have fully visual language since they are under water
@@rakeantl6730 actually, yes now that you mention it, I recall that texture was included in the communication methods in the book. It was fascinating!
@@orbismworldbuilding8428 That sounds cool, let me see if I'm understanding it right. (^=red, *=green). a^ is a, but a* is n, and n* is n, but n^ is a. So you could write "anna" like a^a*a*a^ or n^n*n*n^ or a^a*n*n^. So you have a mix of the letter being itself or not itself.
Video: here, have some strange cat noises from the internet.
My cat (who was asleep): WHAT THE WTF IS THIS!? I HEAR CATS! MAKING NOISES! THIS IS IMPORTANT! WHERE'S THE CATS!?
Video: And now we're gonna talk about lizards
My cat: Lol, false alarm, I'm gonna go back to my nap :)
You should've seen my old cat when a sound test for an online survey played a dog barking.
this is exactly what happened with my cat!
@@Ggdivhjkjl Question: Does this comment, right here and now, contain a Link? A Link leading to someone who insults random strangers and should therefore be reported?
ua-cam.com/channels/-QmN3iF9lORMn8BxkqeB4w.htmlabout
@estebanco Ah,
yes, but that user is a Cybermobbing Ph0bic that uses youtube-comments to randomly harass people at Random Intervalls. Hence why i asked people once to flag him. Nice to see that he still exists, showing not many flagged him to help youtube become healthier, despite it being literally cost-free.
Not sure if anyone's mentioned this yet, but Children of Time utilizes a conlang where the sentient spiders don't even talk, but speak through a mix of sign language and patting the ground to cause vibrations, like plucking webs, etc.
Spiders are very intelligent for their size as well
I love that approach! Spiders have no means of vocalization, so that makes perfect sense
Have you read the sequel children of ruin? It has some octopi with an emotion based language.
That's basically what I did for a sentient spider race in the pen and paper Dawn of Worlds some years back. You can even have messengers that travel via silk parachute. But also they started out not even recognizing other sentient races. Everything was either food or geographic feature to attach webs to. Annoy their neighbors by covering a city in webs. Being pests without realizing it. So I went beyond just language but also world view.
@@123TeeMee why're they running away towards me most of the time then, huh?
Formor: I made up a corvid language in accurate corvid sounds.
Crow, in perfect English: Ya did what, now?
Yeah it's kinda weird the fact we have corvids who are speaking pretty clear and decent English that you could study and I thought they are pretty decent at mimicking vowels
I read that as covid...
It might be a lot easier to teach a crow a language that'd be easier for it to pronounce.
Probably something someone should research into one day
@@worstnightmareee2900 When the virus starts speaking, that's it. Humans are definitely done for.
For every thing a human can possibly imagine there are people on the internet that already thought it out and brought it to another level. That's why I love the internet.
It's just a matter of finding it - I'm writing a fantasy novel involving merfolk and I don't know how to go about underwater conlangs without excessive research. I don't know what could even be vocalized underwater, if anything, because sound is so distorted. Right now I'm just magicking everything away.
@@WasatchWind You could let you inspire by dolphins. Their high pitched sounds do not only resonate perfectly in water and enable sonar. They can even recreate the sonar sounds and send other individuals "pictures" of what they saw directly by producing sound.
@@wihatmi5510 I think I'm sadly just going to have to wave it away - I am doing some basic conlanging to get me consistent names, but I've just found that the more I try to dip into more realistic depiction of merfolk, I just end up realizing how humans really weren't made for living underwater, and that someone has already done something like it before and far better -
Like someone I talk with occasionally online is also writing a merfolk story, and their merfolk communicate via sign language. It's a very effective interesting solution... but they got to it first, and are doing it way better. I feel like I'd just be stealing it.
This is why I've decided to lean into other things like a more interesting underwater world, which I feel like has not been done as much.
@@WasatchWind just a random thought, but, you could take a look at the game subnautica and one of the artists behind it, Alex Ries, who is excellent in world building and adapting earth aquatics into truly alien creatures.
Children of Time. It doesn’t go very indepth but it shows how these spiders would learn to communicate. Using their 2 color pedipalps for almost semaphore style emotional and context clues, and then tapping their legs for the main language.
They pulled some cool shenanigans with chemical crafting
love that book so much its so good
@@misterrioter3575 there’s a sequel. Reading it now. There are cephalopods.
@@MRCOLOURfilld OH I KNOW I LOVE THAT ONE TOO!!!!
Yes!! That's the first book I thought of!
I mean crows and parrots and some other birds are extremely good at mimicking actual human speech (and just about any other sound)
Afaik they don't really do this with their mouths though. Their vocalizations start deeper down and are often related to how their lungs work, I think.
As such they absolutely do have sounds that are much harder on them than they are on humans (and vice-versa) but they can closely approximate just about anything.
IIRC African Greys have a really hard time doing k-sounds, for instance. They can pull it off with a lot of training but it doesn't come natural to them.
Meanwhile, lyrebirds are naturally wired to near perfectly mimic just about *any* sound. What kind of vocalization would you have them do?
Other mammals are rarely as sophisticated in their sound production as many birds. Some of the biggest genetic differences between other primates and humans lie specifically in speech capabilities on a physiological level.
Another thing to note about mimicking birds, a lot of their proto-languages might have mimicry of specific or particularly distinct sounds a certain object makes in some situation.
The word for hitting rocks together could be just that: the sound to rocks make when hit together. "Clack".
Or for specific animals and encounters with them:
"Hiss": A hostile or threatening encounter with a reptile or a cat. A fight between two cats, two reptiles, or a reptile and a cat.
This also leads to a vastly different information structure aswell.
Because of the location of their sound-making organs, some birds can make two different sounds at the same time, like two people singing together.
@@orbismworldbuilding8428 I'm pretty sure hissing sounds are semi-universally made by creatures to warn. Like, animals on the hunt are largely as quiet as possible. Hissing tends to be a "I'm here don't mess with me leave me be" - a pre-hostile noise, strictly speaking.
That said, yeah, the sheer ability of many birds to replicate pretty arbitrary sounds often better than humans can would surely mean onomatopoeia are gonna be a particularly prominent language feature.
@@Kram1032 cows don't hiss, horses don't hiss. If monkeys hiss it's likely the smaller ones, bigger monkeys snarl. Wolves don't hiss. But you're right it could be a sort of "That thing is warning or threatening" word
@@Kram1032 yeah (god that word is long) it would be pretty common. I actually really like it as a way of language
(Like the only way to say "hitting to hard things together" is "clack" it makes for some pretty alien language and makes translation weird, which i love
Just when you thought Artifexian couldn't possibly be more awesome, this video happens
Question: Does this comment, right here and now, contain a Link? A Link leading to someone who insults random strangers and should therefore be reported?
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As someone whose first exposure to conlangs was Watership Down, and whose biggest languages (mainly Kajnjama) are all spoken by anthropomorphic cats, I went through this in spades.
*No labial stops. Loanwords with B, P, etc. are done implosively, which cat lips ARE slightly more capable of.
*The tongue can fold far wider and floppier than a human.
*The roof of the mouth is ridged. And it has to have a flehmen organ in there. So there's no real Alveolar-Palatal distinction. I analyzed all those sounds Apical-Laminal.
*Its ancestors were Tonal. It comes more easily to them.
*So much of this language is body language that it's assumed you would only use words if someone can't see you. The word for "Yes" is "I'm nodding." (EXCEPT a cat nod is a slow blink and a dip of the head straight down.)
So I'm curious to see what y'all think up now that we have this!
The last point is really cool!
@@ingridschmitt4391 Agreed. Not just considering the sound itself, but also the wider context of language and communication.
I wasn't even aware that watership down had conlangs. I should read it some time.
watership down has conlangs??
@@dafoex It doesn't have a properly grammatical conlang, but Lapine is a Naming Lang that sees recurring use in the story, and has a very consistent, fluffy aesthetic, as well as concepts apparently unique to the rabbit mind (they can't count higher than Four, so five, Hrair, is translated as "many" or "thousand"). And they use it very well. Fiver's original name, Hrairoo, means "last child" or "runt," the predators of rabbits are U Hrair, "the thousand," and the legendary rabbit prince El-Ahrairah come from Elil-hrair-rah, "the prince of a thousand enemies." Adams made up words as needed, but the "fluffy, wuffy" aesthetic is so perfectly fitting you wouldn't even notice. Of course a car is a Hrududu, of course grazing is to Silflay... watershipdown.fandom.com/wiki/Lapine
I've been working on a dragon language for a while and that's been an interesting challenge. One of the big things to consider for non-humans is why they develop language in the first place and what they would use it for. So with my dragons, I realized that because I'd written them as being very territorial, with their social structures arising from conflicts and bargaining over the allocations of their territories, they would actually have an evolutionary pressure _against_ developing a spoken language, because they're most likely to use its earliest forms in territorial disputes where they'd be incentivized to lie to each other, but they'd have a bit more pressure to develop a _written_ language, because they still need to teach their hatchlings how to use incredibly complicated stellar navigation (the night sky in the world they live in doesn't work like ours, it's a lot more complicated and weird). So rather than evolving a spoken language with sounds that are then represented with symbols, they would first develop symbolic star charts, which could be adapted into symbols for conveying specific meanings about other things, eventually forming a full written language, at which point they might develop vocalizations that reflect the symbols they write in order to communicate them over long distances. So now I gotta go back and figure out how their star charts, and by extension the weird night sky of their setting works, I guess. Maybe then I'll be able to get back to phonology.
if you ever post more about this I'm really interested in hearing more!
This sounds so interesting! Good luck ^^
This is literally so interesting
Dovahzul, anyone?
fascinating
Interestingly, in Swiss German we've mostly dropped the difference between smell and taste as well. Promise we're not lizards though.
I don't believe you, reptilian ;)
Schweizer Echsenmenschen 👹👹
Suuuuuuuuuuuure.....
Can you give an example of this?
I bet Obama's actually from Switzerland
Now I kind of want to see various species' IPAs. Little diagrams of all the sounds they _can_ make for communication.
True. For certain animals like say parrots, it'd probably be like an extended human IPA diagram but with the sounds being on different places and having different names. Birds like that can do sounds like [p] or [a] but with different organs than us humans.
As cool as these are, I also love to look into non-human languages that are less based on vocalization. For example, I was making a species of plant-like people, but then had to think about the fact that plants can't vocalize. So I designed a sort of "color-based" language, where their species can change their skin tones at will and can even produce bioluminescence, however glowing too brightly can be considered rude, as it is the equivalent of talking over someone or yelling.
This is very interesting, 'cause I did somewhat the opposite. In the language of my cave dwelling species evolved from salamanders, the glowing intensity of the bioluminescent antenna on their forehead plays an important role in communication, as it's the equivalent of our emotion, facial expression and can be also used to express abstract concepts. Living in the dark, the act of emitting light and making one's face clearly visible during a conversation is seen as a sign of friendliness and openness to communication, so in this case turning the antenna off is seen as rude and hostile, ultimately signifing anger and aggression
I think something that should be also considered as an option is that, while plants can’t vocalize, plants can make sound; we can even hear it if amplified enough.
@@AirashiiTiayou I didn't know plants did that! I originally had them make clicking sounds and it was used almost like morse code, but I scrapped that idea for a more realistic one.
@@WyrmRoots Yeah! It's super cool. I learned about it from this video: ua-cam.com/video/RpwW9Lw2Ku4/v-deo.html I highly recommend you watch it, super interesting.
They communicate with chemicals.
Fun facts: crows can be taught how to speak like humans (or rather, like parrots) and a recent study has shown they might be smart enough to understand the concept of zero.
An idea I had that's somewhat similar to this but different is if there were humans that made a language based on mimicking birds. The culture in my world worships birds, so it makes sense that they'd have a liturgical language based on birdsong.
look up SILVO
@@silversoul21000 *Silbo Gomero.
@@ShankarSivarajan Yeah silbo gomero is one of my inspirations but it's not really a language by itself. It's more of a translation of Spanish sounds into equivalent whistles, but they're still basically speaking Spanish.
@@ShankarSivarajan depedns where xD in france in called both silvo/silbo depending the regions XD but yes that is whati was reffering to :D
Ah yes, the key to making my elephant language.
In fact, they produce normally many different sounds with simple meanings like 'ouch!', 'danger!' or 'food!'.
@@obviativ123 im aware they have a psuedolanguage, my project is if elephants were the ones to evolve civilization building intelligence instead of our chimp like ancestors. So i have to sort out possible linguistic abilities, how they would make tools, how their bodies changed to acomedate these features, like how our hands and mouths changed for tool making and speech.
@@MrBlack0950 Interesting. Good luck!
i want to make an elephant language but i don't know enough and I am bad at motivation
doot
If anyone's interested in some fiction that explores some of these concepts I'd recommend the manga "Heterogeneous Linguistics/Heterogenia Linguistico", it's about a young researcher in some fantasy world tasked by his mentor to survive in the "demonlands" for awhile and continue his studies on the languages and cultures of the diverse animal-like species. There's werewolves (bipedal wolves, sorta), harpies (big smart birds), lizardmen (bipedal crocs/gators), lamia (average sized snakes, with small arms, very cute), a centauros (literally a horse, presumably sapient but MC never really figured out clear communication), and more with a variety of different languages, some verbal but mostly limb flailing and various other methods of communication. It's basically a wander through the author's monster linguistics worldbuilding project
Commenting here to remember about this later, this sounds really interesting!
This sounds super fascinating
4:46 that's how natural cats speak, it's how they actually commicated. They only meow for humans, it's developed treat just for humans, to well be cute and get stuff out of us.
Kittens also meow to their mothers, IIRC.
@@Galactipod cats talk to us in baby talk??? 🥺
@@squeakboy3666 More like they talk like babies because they never mature. City cats lose a lot of their killer traits and pretty much consider themselves babies their entire lives, while rural cats that actually hunt, while they also enjoy petting and humans in general, are way, way less vocal.
@@999mi999 Though that's not necessarily bad.
@@Galactipod Well, yeah, it isn't. They adapted to their environment and we humans really like taking care of babies, so it worked out perfectly.
Birds have a lyrebird - basically a real-life organic tape recorder. How will your language look if you can pronounce _any_ sound you can think of?
I think most simple thing would be define by the sound they make, this would be particularly true for animals species «word» (they could probably imitate the sound of a baby prey asking for help, which would help them hunt with trap)
This reminds me of the book Watership Down, where the rabbits have their own language and terms, like how “tharn” means to be paralyzed by fear. It’s really interesting, and I’ve actually been thinking about including it in my own writing!
Side note: Watership Down is a great example for how to make a vocabulary for your animal’s language. Richard Adams included many different words to describe things that the rabbits do, or that it would make sense for them to have a word for.
Examples include:
Elil- Enemies of rabbits, e.g. predators
Flay- grass and other green foods
Flayrah- good food, like lettuce
Hlessi- a rabbit that doesn’t live in a warren
Silflay- to go outside the warren to eat
I have no idea if when making Lapine, Richard Adams researched actual sounds rabbits made or could make, but it’s a good example of how to create a vocabulary.
That book inspired me to conlang for the first time. Adams said he just wanted it to sound "wuffy, fluffy" and made up the words as he needed them, but maybe that's why it works, it feels so simple, like it was made by rabbit brains.
watershipdown.fandom.com/wiki/Lapine
I like the idea of rabbits communicating via thumbing their feet-- but this has no scientific basis or anything-- its just entirely based off of Thumper from Bambi. LOL
@@lizzy532 If I’m not mistaken, I’m pretty sure they do sometimes. Like as a warning. Still a pretty great idea though 😂
@@liimlsan3 I remember that actually- my print of the book has an author’s note at the end and I read it. I found it pretty interesting, actually!
I had a cat that learned to mimic "I don't feel very well" (and when to use it) that she used a few times toward the end of her life. I don't remember well because it was years ago, but I think it was articulated something like /aɪ nõː iːl ɛɯi ɯɛːl/. So yeah, no sounds involving teeth.
Interesting, yeah I've noticed cats will mimic words if they know generally what they mean too. I had 2 cats, one would call for the other with a tone/pitch specific 2-sylable word: "Mat-mat". She did this after we started calling the other "Crow-crow"
A cat i have now, says "hey" and "yeah" too
That story would be better, if it wasn’t just so sad
@@thatperson9842 this sounds all sage-like or something but: when you go into something with expectation, you can be dissapointed. But even without expectation, you can feel surprise, but never shock.
I'm sad for their cat too
my cat often says “hello” but it sounds more similar to “ewwo”
I think something to bear in mind is that a species might not necessarily communicate using vocalisations. For example, if chameleons evolved sapience, the would probably communicate using colour.
To be fair, most inter species interactions are vocal and posture. The color acts more like a mood ring more so than a sign allowing males specifically to brighten up when angry, happy, content, basking. Or darken when stressed, cooling, annoyed but not thinking they can contest the threat.
Chameleons already communicate using color though. Also, they don't have vocal chords (most reptiles don't have them), but they can still make some hissing noises and other low sounds. That would most likely be the basis for their conlang in addition to using colors to indicate tone.
@@andreah9587 there is also the simple fact of the motivations to do it if you're literally at the point of sentience are relatively easy.
I believe bull snakes, a subspecies within North American colubrids have something more similar to vocal cords which allows them a larger variety or noises.
I'd more reasonably assume they'd be able to listen to English well. Mimic certain easy words relatively poorly.
And mostly communicate through posture and hints of mood through color shifts.
Like I said before. The actual color change as language is exceptionaly limited.
If you wanted language through color you'd go squids and maybe octopus.
Humboldt squid already have a insanely varied possible language through their patterns and locations of coloring.
Also: really like the stylised animal drawings, they fit in so well with the animations I forgot you don't normally have animals on your vids. Very seamless.
A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one
Currently creating a world with lizardmen as a common species, so this episode is well timed and has given me a lot to consider.
Thank you very much, keep up the good work!
If they are quite human then they must have semi-dexterous hands, if so, they should speak sign language!
@@Dragon_Fire_2468 Not a bad idea. I'm making my Orcs do that already, but its more for convoluted backstory reasons than biological morphology.
One important detail you didn't mention about birds is that they have *two* independent syrinx (voiceboxs), so they can make two different sounds at the same time. If they subsequently shape the sound using their mouth, it will be common to both seed notes.
Another thing is that a greater variety of phoneme types can be sounded in a quiet voice, compared to what it can comfortably render at a normal to loud volume. And a select few sounds can be *very* loud; the latter will be synchronized to wing flapping in flight, and if still you can see how the entire body acts as a bellows.
While i'v never given this idea a serious look, but now that i think about it i would probably start with setting up my own Deep Squeak for my parents, sisters, friends and own cats. So that i could have their whole natural vocabulary. Then probably create 2 languages, one for cat/cat speech and another for cat/human speech.
Wow, I'm trying to do a very similar thing for my own feline family-member, this is so cool!
You mention trying to make two languages, one for cats with each other and another for cats with humans... Any idea on how you'd teach the former? I'm just beginning and progress has required a lot of repetition, so clues on how encourage them to use words in more circumstances would be great if they were available!
Also, what's your stance on the inclusion of fricative consonants? They seem (so far) to be sounds that cats can make, but I don't want to sound like hissing just to have a normal bit of back and forth, which may send the wrong message!
@@hoppybirdy6967, honestly still got no clue on that front, most of my reasoning for the idea is based on how the majority of the sounds our Furry Over Lords use to communicate with each other are too high of a frequency for us to either hear or replicate.
They already kind of do have cat/cat and cat/human speech. Cats only meow at humans, like how dogs only bark at humans - dogs barking "at" wild animals is them alerting us to the animal while keeping its eyes locked onto it.
Oooh I’d say I’ve already got the real life cat sounds down lmao
@@hoppybirdy6967 When I crafted the phonology for a language spoken by an anthropomorphic feline species, it was *very* fricative- and affricate-heavy. Also had 4 different rhotics and more than one lateral, due to the fact that the had a muzzle instead of these deep cheeks like humans do.
Adrian Tchaikovsky wrote some interesting non-verbal animal conlangs for spiders (vibrations and essentially semaphore) and cephalopods (colour, shape, pattern and texture) in his children of time/children of ruin books. When verbalised, though, they were really just humans cosplaying spider/cephalopod suits
The spiders were a lot like humans with minor differences but the octopuses were truly alien imo. Fantastic books though.
@Awe Sean an evolution of the Portia family of spider, the pedipalps were used like semiphore flags to signal with angles and rotation. They are lighter on one side and dark on the other so contrast can be seen easily.
The spiders also use vibration in their webs as a means for communication. One can step onto the web of another and move it precisely to talk to them.
I tried making a cat conlang way back when but I couldn't find any good diagram of a cats mouth and articulatory organs so I gave up but this could respark it
Same. I've tried this before, but finding a mouth intersection of a llama or whatnot is quite tricky
That moment when a video by a favorite creator slaps another layer of things to consider onto an already dense strata of things to consider for a story. Thank you, but also damn it.
I’m kind of fond of the idea of an avian race having a universal “base” language of mimicking sounds to relate ideas, kind of like C3PO when he’s telling his story to the Ewoks.
Such a language would be simple enough for avians of other dialects and even humans to have some grasp of what is being talked about.
I have a race of pseudo-gastropods, who vocalise by tapping and scraping their radula against the roof of their mouth.
This is my first conlang!
WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!
Sounds interesting (I wish I knew what any those words meant though)
@@thatperson9842 sounds means you've gotten and impression of something but aren't certain, and interesting is often used to describe stuff you want to know more about.
@@thatperson9842
Gastropods are the snail/slug family of mollusks.
Radula: (in a mollusk) a structure of tiny teeth used for scraping food particles off a surface and drawing them into the mouth
Maybe it might be similar to a language built around a wood-block scraper?
@@BonaparteBardithion that is exactly correct and much more helpful than my answer
The hardest part about conlanging for me is being able to pronounce difficult sounds in my own conlangs, but this guy over here making it sound easy 😂
For some non human language I’ve wondered for a while if trill speeds could be used similarly to tones. Like an insectoid or frog like species with a fast, slow, accelerating, and decelerating trill. If you really wanted to go nuts you could put a tone system ON TOP of that and make something that’s just barely maybe reproducible by humans and super alien.
As a native Slovak speaker (although very rusty due to mostly speaking Czech and English) this sounds like an interesting challenge. Never really tried to vary the speed of the long ŕ...
Okay,
I’m gonna need a video on Artifexian’s take on a lizard-speak.
I mean, yeah… this.
Crocodilians are known for being incredibly vociferous, with possibly dozens of different vocalizations from chirps and hisses, to deep bellows.
I've always liked the idea of a language where the phonology is incredibly limited - in this case by an anatomy lacking any lips or a larynx. I've imagined a crocodilian language to impart meaning through both expiration and inspiration, and with the length of vowels being crucial, with multiple varying lengths of the "same" words for different meaning - kinda like tones, but based on duration of vocalization.
I wonder how useful this could be for Biblaridion’s alien biospheres project. XD
Long, long time away 😅
@@WasatchWind It's going to be the final episode
I'm making a humanoid language based on a non-humanoid language, as humans have been worshipping dragons in my world, and I need to figure out what language the (highly intelligent) dragons would be using and how humans would adopt that for their own ability to speak, and their different linguistic needs.
Fun discussion! Another thing to remember when considering anatomy is breath control. Chimps can't control their exhalation like humans can, and this has a real impact on the nature of their vocalizations.
That guys bird language sounds like a bunch of ways to say "Aww" around cuteness or disappointment lol
One of the things to consider is that another species may not have the same mental machinery as us, and as such may have wholly different sets of constraints on their grammars; even if they may end up alike to us in many ways (path of least resistance languagewise may be pretty akin from species to species) there may still be syntactic and pragmatic constraints that simply don't and CAN'T compute between species, not to even bring up between languages.
Shaka, when the walls fell.
When in 4.5 billion years I feel confident enough to make proper languages for my aliens I surely keep this noted down somewhere to go back to it.
i actually made a 'catlang' for fun once. it featured a click (cats often make noises like clicks while watching birds), and a three vowel system with 4 tones for each, as well as a syllabic trill that could *also* take 3 different tones (based on the range of tones a simple 'mrow' can go through, haha). grammatically, it used ergative/absolutive alignment and VOS as a default word order, inspired by the idea that cats use vocalisations mostly to communicate with humans, and that cats communicate with other cats more through body language - as a result, the language was initially developed to issue commands to humans, hence the verb-initial word order and the treating of the lone subject like the patient in transitive sentences ('cause the default assumption is that you're ordering someone else to do something; 'feed me, human')
I was thinking alot about this. Let's give the gift of language to our fellow animals
had you seen Billi the cat and Bunny the dog?
Have you heard of studies with teaching language to chimps, Koko the Gorilla, or Alex the African grey parrot?
In reality, most of cats' language is silent signal language and the formation of different signal combinations. It would make a good silent fantasy species whose comlang is signal language.
Now, this seems to be mostly applicable to vertebrates, since invertebrates have wildly different anatomies of their respiratory systems
Oh, this is super handy. I've been worldbuilding a culture of bongo antelope-inspired humanoids for a while now, and have wanted to dip my toes in making a conlang that would fit their anatomy.
I have smth similar but with Gazelles (and other kinds of antelope too) instead, what are your ideas?
Another difference between humans and a lot of animals is if they even talk to eachother. Cats especially hardly ever meow to eachother for communication, and work primarily in body language. So maybe if you were doing a more realistic catfolk, or other animal like this, they'd have a spoken language, and supplement it with body language.
Honestly, I've been waiting for this video for as long as I've been watching this channel! And I'm so, so glad this video finally exists! My primary worldbuilding project actually has no humans, but five races of dragon-based animals. So obviously, they don't sound anything like humans, and sound very different from eachother. In fact, all but two are physically incapable of speaking eachothers' languages. But since they all still have to communicate, they did manage to make a common language.
This makes me think you could use a lot of studies in gesture and sign languages. Of course, we humans have hands and other non-animal stuff, but once you get the gist of how do sign languages work, you could extend that into other anatomies! That seems quite cool!
I want to know more!
Yeah same! Very few of my worlds really focus on humans or if they do they are posthuman or so culturally divergent from us that they speak by tapping wooden blocks together, or they speak with their mouths closed or somthing. Most of my worldbuilding is nonhumans though, and so this is helpful
At the same time it's thought that cats meow at us humans because they think we're big dumb-dumbs that don't understand their subtle body language. So it might be fun if cat folk amongst each other are very quiet, but when talking to other species do the thing certain English speaking people do when encountering someone that doesn't speak English; JUST.. SPEAKING... LOUDER! AND... SLOWER!
@@TheMrVengeance we are literally big dumb-dumbs to them because we are bigger than them
I'm so happy this video now exists!
4:52 oh no.. See this is where you could play with it, have the Meow language for communication between cat and human, but the chitter for cat to cat or other animal speech
5:35 personally I quite like the pharyngeal fricative for a human approximation. Close enough to glottal, but it sounds more like hissing.
So a while back I trying to build a few languages for Elementatals. I more or less settled on Fire Elementals having an entirely non auditory language, instead basing it of of varying flashing patterns of different colors.
You would also end up with specific species wording or sounds. Crows for example work alongside wolves where the 2 species live in proximity.
Crows circle a corpse that has hide too thick for them to pierce calling out to the wolves to come and tear into the kill, opening up the hide for the crows to get at the softer meat beneath (ergo if crows developed sentience and civilisation, they are rather likely to have domesticated wolves or dogs. This shapes a civilisation, its culture and language as a result. The 3 feed into each other. ME2 Mordin Solas does a brief explanation whilst talking about lack of creator art.
In "The Secret Language of Cats" we get a bit of info from a linguist who also loves cats, and see a few pieces of info about how cats vocalize: lots of nasals, trills and approximants in the onset of a meow, fricatives and affricates are possible, but plosives are more constrained. Voiced bilabial plosives can exist, voiceless cannot. No front rounded vowels, and no high back unrounded vowels.
Your videos are VERY underrated. Thank you so much for this information, it really helps. As someone who creates worlds based on quadrupedal animals who have human intelligence/communication, it is a relief to find information geared toward this. A lot of helpful information for writing/story creation seems to assume all of your characters are human or humanoid, and not animals. Thank you again for investing in providing tips on intelligent animal communication.
Idea: a language that uses physicality as an integral part of the language.
I'd imagine that many animals that have less options with their mouth, but the ability to incorporate a tail, might use that, not just as a way to add emphasis, but as a core part of dialogue.
Wooo this is some great advice! been trying to think of ways to make my fantasy languages and just the thought of elephant long ranged communication is giving me chills
Oh hell yes
If you watch "Billi Speaks", a UA-cam channel for a cat that speaks with English word buttons, it could be guessed that cats would take a very, _very_ long time between words, and Billi will often think for several minutes about how exactly to word what they want to say.
That's a normal cat trained to expect reactions from certain sounds, not a cat with the brains for building a culture with a full language, though
It might take these supercats a long time to *translate* their words to other species' languages, nonetheless
And thereby showing far greater wisdom then most humans on the Internet.
Birds have a syrinx to produce sounds instead of the vocal folds of mammals. It's been mentioned elsewhere but it is extremely important in understanding their vocal anatomy. They actually do have a larynx -- but that's not what they use to make noise. The syrinx branches, so many bird species can make two entirely different noises at once -- imagine working that into a conlang! When I create a non-human species that needs to have a more complex vocal range than their mouth anatomy would allow them, a syrinx-like organ is the way to go.
Birds do use their beaks and tongues to modify sounds, but not how we would. When you watch a parrot speak, their beak and tongue movements do *not* match up to how we would form the same sounds, and it's honestly hilarious to watch. Also different birds have vastly different beak anatomy; psittacines (parrots) have a "floating" mandible which means their top mandible is hinged and can move independently. Some bird species have surprisingly flexible beaks, which can look a little creepy when captured by a photograph.
Unfortunately, many people stop at mouth anatomy when they discuss animal language and conlangs. I've seen this at panels at conventions as well. You'll miss out on a lot of sound-making physiology if you do so. Especially in birds, but in many other animals as well. I've met ravens that spoke very understandable English, and my African grey frequently fools people into thinking she's the person she's imitating.
The first language I learned was American Sign Language, because my dad is Deaf. With conlangs for animals it would be a shame to ignore their non-vocal language. Smells, body language, non-vocal sounds, and other non-vocal aspects could all be represented in a conlang textually with different markers, for example. An insect might make sounds with various other body parts (leggies, timbal membranes, spiracles, etc.) and also release chemical communication markers. Animals like chameleons and octopuses would likely incorporate color changing as an aspect of their language. Snakes have their rattles, and many birds also have non-vocal sound producing apparatus (such as feather-created sounds in hummingbirds and woodcocks, drumming and booming produced by many grouse by air sacs, and so on). The thump of rabbits (actually a two-legged maneuver, unlike the one legged version used by Thumper in Bambi), the sneeze of dogs (used as a de-escalating sound in dog interactions), and countless more.
I love the inclusion of animal culture in influencing the language, those are some great observations!
All of it well said!
Also, as for ways to try and speak some of those two-sound/two-note sounds in a language, look into how to do overtone singing and how to practice it. It's something i learned how to do and people i know have said they aren't shre if I'm playing something on my phone until i show them that i do make the sounds with my voice, also it's very pretty and alien!
The thumbnail:
Damn bro you got the whole squad laughing...
😶 😐 😶
Everybody gangsta until the animals develop actual written language system and begin their own Stone Age.
9:10 me when I have bread stuck at the roof of my mouth
I was giving it a go at creating a language for Octopus. They are incredible.
To be honest, I was trying for sentient Aquatic and my first try was Dolphins. But they lacked a better tool use, so I picked Octopus for that and boy, I was proud of that decision.
The thing is, dophin already have a good system of comunication, but octopus doesn't. They live alone and they are one of the few species that develop some rational thinking without the need for social group interaction.
The great thing is that Octopus don't create sound, but they are great at camouflage, so they should have a completely VISUAL type of language, where it can change its color, shape and texture to deliver a message.
Right now, my language is really rough, just some basic notions of sentiments. They have sight really different from ours, but I based on the fact they have 3 kind of pigments in their body. It is not RGB, rather it is Yellow Red and Blue.
It can show white to show it is relaxed, Red to catch attention, etc... Also mixture of things like a black line and white all around. The texture is used as some sort of tone.
Of course, the purpose of comunication is that they develop group hunting. They actually ended up with a very similar evolution compared with humans. They were fragile but very inteligent. They were not at the top of the food chain so they had to work cooperatively. One bad thing is that they don't live long and they are pretty well as it is. But just like we are not as strong as a gorilla. I created a "nerfed" octopus that lived longer and had larger brain, so they had a need to comunicate to hunt together. Also developing tool use such as spikes of urchins and so forth. Of course they would only have discovered fire after conquering the land. But they would need a lot more technology to adventure on those areas.
About writing system, I invented a really intuitive base-8 positional system. Maybe there were more primitive systems before, but I'm quite okay with how it is. All the numbers and letters are made with circles and points. This happens because they can use their own ink (pretty cool) and use their suckers and point of tentacles to write. I tried to develop some sort of language but it was pretty difficult. Basically some sort of the same idea, but using symbols to describe each color (since the ink is always black).
That is a little bit how much I got so far. Of course there is a lot more on their architechture, domesticating animals and etc... But for the purpose of this video. I only wanted to show an example where it was purely visual and aquatic.
Holy- You put a huge a amount of thought into this
This was a video I didn't know I needed and it makes me feel very vindicated for prohibiting rounding in my canine-based conlang I started in high school
Nice to see that the conlang I've been working on, where I stopped because I wanted more realistic sound selection...
Not only has it been done before several times, one of those are being used *as* the example
The A E B C Dh D sequence thing is cool, also humans _kinda_ have that except it's not for grammar but for phonology... It reminds me of the specific order phonemes have to follow within a syllable, am I the only one?
Either way, super dope.
What does "Dh" mean?
i think you’re referring to the sonority sequencing principle? sounds are sequenced according to sonority (idk a good definition- perceived ‘loudness’ ig), with vowels the most sonorous and stops (i.e. /p/ /g/) the least. a common violation of this is /s/ (stop, space, smart), at least in english afaik.
@@axlemiraflor1408 Exactly!
In my fantasy setting there's two races of avian humanoids called angels and harpies. They have wings and hollow bones so they can fly and they use their flight when they hunt and migrate. In order to be heard over the wind at high altitudes and across large distances they developed a code that involves whistling a series of six notes. I took inspiration from Carolina chickadee calls here. Basically, these notes go from B to D or la to do, each representing a different register.
B/la denotes the "intent" register and is used to communicate the level of danger or urgency. 1 note means safe, two notes mean low alert, three mean high alert, and four mean danger.
A/sol denotes the "location" register. 1 = N/^ 2 = E/> 3 = S/v 4 = W/<
G/fa denotes the "subject" register. 1 = me 2 = you 3 = us 4 = them
F/mi denotes the "command" register. 1 = go 2 = find 3 = attack/kill/acquire 4 = stop/immobilize
E/re denotes the "object" register. 1 = predator 2 = prey 3 = food 4 = shelter 5 = people
D/do denotes the "identify" register. In hunting parties, each hunter is assigned a number. When refer to an individual, this note is called out according to their number. Likewise, most flocks are comprised of up to four families, each family usually has up to six members. Thus 1-4 and 1-6 are combined when communicating during a migration. This is rarely done however as there's rarely a need.
So if you wanted to say something like "I spotted danger to the north" you might signal B4A1G1F2 or simply B4A1. You could add some context by adding E1 if it's a predator or E5 if it's a enemy flock or even E3 if it's something poisonous. Since children are taught this code before they learn to speak, they often will use the B register to communicate level of need, two being want, three being need. They also tend to do clever things like mixing two numbers in the same register to communicate something specific. Like if a child wanted their mother they might say B2G1E3-5, E3-5 basically meaning "food person", or if they want their father they might say B2G1E4-5, E4-5 meaning "shelter person". They're also taught identifiers for their siblings if they have any (they probably have at least one) which are numbered by order of birth. So like say you were the second of your clutch to hatch and your parents had a clutch before you (terminology only applies to harpies), your two oldest siblings would be D1 and D2, your clutch-mate would be D3, and you would be D4.
Thank you so much you two.
I've actually had to think about language making for a story of mine, and aside from basic things I could look up or think of, I didn't really know where to start or what to do.. or how to let it seem realistic!
This showed the process really well.
(ed: there were so many double words for some reason!! Wow oops. Welp... thank you so so much much you two. Haha!)
Another thing about creating animal language is that who can speak or understand the language will depend not only on the language expression body parts, but also on the body parts involved in language reception. Many birds communicate in sound ranges partially too high for people to hear. Cats are always leaving scent markers when they rub against things that human noses can't smell or interpret in any way and, while dogs are even better at smell detection than cats are, both animals are miles ahead of humans in smell and hearing, where cats often pull ahead of dogs with their long-range-capable ears with numerous intricate muscles that swivel toward sound. Whiskers are a whole other sensory organ with their own sensitivity to atmosphere and close-range objects. Then there are raccoons. They evolved as food pickers in rivers and can essentially taste with their hands. Elephants can and do send vibration to one another over vast expanses through careful foot vibrations.
Senses are heckin cool
I'm studying linguistics and this channel makes me feel like I want to fully dedicate to linguistics, especulative linguistics or even fictional lingustics.
A group of intelligent Carolina Chickadee would likely create a polysynthetic language since it's six different calls each have a single morpheme that can be used in combination with the others. As a result, they would likely assign morphemes that can be combined into words.
What about conlangs for other types of non-humans? Some of the species in my world don't really have good real-world analogs. For a few examples, I have:
-Suuzta: Creatures with 3 mouths and no arms. They use their really long tongues to pick things up.
-Bangu (Working on a name): A floating gasbag that's basically a cross between a hawk and a blimp.
-Monetans: A race of sentient machines with no discernable mouth (Though they can communicate via the internet)
-Sonogai: Picture a cross between a praying mantis and a saber-toothed cat.
-Isoma: Radially-Symmetrical creatures with a flower mouth at the bottom of their body.
-Tezt'ki: Hammerhead slugs with chin tentacles.
-Estians: Flying Dolphins with no mouth, instead gaining their energy by attracting lightning from their planet's stormy weather.
-Ti'Tikaa: Silicon-Based Crystal Monsters.
Sound's cool! I'd start by figuring out what's their natural way of producing sounds and working from there. If they don't make noices at all, maybe they have flexible parts that they can use for signing, or communicate by dancing like bees.
Un punto interesante a considerar es que la mayoría de las especies vocales son increíblemente buenas distinguiendo tono/notas con precisión, los humanos no, al ser los humanos mucho más generalistas podemos considerarlo una ventaja para el desarrollo del lenguajes ya que podemos dar sentido a frase de niños mal articuladas, hombres adultos con voces muy gruesas, o mujeres muy agudas o muchedumbres sin perder información, los animales simplemente no podrían distinguir esto porque cada individuo estaría diciendo algo diferente para ellos.
Yo llevo 5 años desarrollado un lenguaje de ficcion para plantas, pensé que con mis conocimiento en química seria fácil, pero usar moléculas aromáticas para algo mas que señales básicas se esta volviendo un desafió.
I hope your plant conlang is going well! I've dabbled a bit in chemical conlang, and I haven't dared pick it up again.
Normally I'm not into conlang, but this, this has my attention.
This video is SO INCREDIBLE!!!! I love it so much and I'll be referencing it a lot!!! I've been interested in languages of creatures both real and in fiction and this video helps a lot with that! I'm so glad this exists, this will help a lot of people both already farther along in this field and people just entering it that don't know how to start!
I actually once wrote down a phonetic alphabet of all the sounds my cat could do to talk
Well aren't cha gonna share it?
intelligent fish with the touch conlang
What about squids? I want to see a conlang constructed entirely out of colour patterns made on chromatophores
Was reading a book called blue core (great book 1 and 2 are available highly recommended (NSFW)) and in it there are multiple non-human races. Magical and not. The dragons as they grow older become more magic than flesh and as such bend the rules. However when talking amongst each other they take alot of social ques from body language (namely the tip of the tail and head position) but it is very subtle and difficult for a non-human to pick up. The avian species there had a basically unpronounceable language, but the leader was able to use wind magic to speak in the human tongue.
Telepathy was mostly images and concepts, but could use "words" as well.
And the leviathans were big low frequency rumbles that meant you didn't want one to shout near buildings.
Surprised you only talked about phonetic languages, and not even mentioned languages based on sight, smell, touch, or taste. All of which are widely used in nature. Many animals use vocal communication, but I feel like too many authors fall into the trap of making every single race rely solely on it.
I think it's just very hard to say much about what something like an Octopus language would be like. Almost anything you do would be "plausible." Could changing colors be used for verb conjugation? I dunno, sure. Could also be used for any other element of communication. Would an octopus have some sort of 8 symbol sentence structure where each tentacle signs a word in parallel? I dunno, sure. Or would they use the tentacles to make a serialized structure more like spoken speech? Also seems plausible. It's just harder to put useful limits on what they'd do, and harder to express it as a human, so you'd just wind up with a lot of description of something fairly arbitrary.
Personally, I think it's an interesting topic. My own interest in conlangs kind of stems from imaging what alien languages might be like. But it's hard to say much specific about such things that are so removed from our understanding of language.
@@guaposneeze Or maybe instead of putting a description, for a visual language at least, you’d put a picture of the part that is communicating something, such as with human sign languages.
Oh hell yes I've been awaiting this and needed this
4:12 admiti it guys, ya'll recognized at least half of these
my cat was in the room while I watched this video and his ears perked up and eyes went wide when the weird cat sounds started playing. He was probably concerned that the brand new laptop I've been watching this on started screaming in agony for seemingly no reason.
🤣
Can you do a video about how the transmissibility of different media would affect languages? If, for example, I wanted to make an amphibious race of merfolk, they'd need a language that can carry as well underwater as in the air.
This is really helpful! I plan on writing a Watership down/warrior cats inspired book on mustalids in the future and I've been stuck trying to create some words or languages for them that work and are understandable by most of the different species that are characters within it.
I have two ferrets of my own so I always imagined that the main ferret characters would be more loud and expressive then the other creatures, dooking and chirping when expressing emotions compared to the wild animals who probably communicate more in nips, stares, and quiet chitters or battle squeals. I've been stuck coming up with a more specific language for them though using the natural sounds they make to immerse the readers more like Watership down compared to warrior cats (where their specific vocabulary is just calling things different then a human would like cars being called monsters). I guess I'm gonna go down a deep rabbit hole of research into vocalizations over the next few weeks and observe my ferrets on how they communicate and interact with each other and their environments to hopefully come up with a language that will do them justice!
This is just what I needed for goat languages. I've seen that their mouth cavities are somewhat similar to human's, exceot that they don't have alveolar ridge and their lips can't round as well and they have 2 sets of teeth, due to being rumiants. How would that play out?
I'd go for more of a sign/body language thing, supplemented by sound. Use their whole capabilities.
My preferred creature simply has a Tesla Coil built into it for making sound, dettering predators, sensing it's environment, and moving through it.
Amazing video ! I am quite intrigue by the possibility to make a non human conlang using sample of the species noise and not just a human approximation sounding like the animals. Don't know if it had already been done but I am gonna look for it ^^
"Here's cats making strange noises"
Cats: "n**ga n**ga n**ga"
Oh man, this is exactly what I've been wrapping my head around for months now. Thank you!!
Hope to see more non-human topics in the future!
This was really excellent, thanks! -- You might want to do a video on dog vocalizations, or more on cats, or hmm, what about speculation on early hominid language? Just imagine if we could understand whatever dolphins, orcas, and whales are singing. Is it speech? It seems like there's some evidence they could have words or even personal names, but we basically still have no idea of any of it, despite years of trying. At least, as far as I understand the talks I've heard on it. Lots of cool stuff out there for conlanging and world-building. Thanks, Artifexian and friends!
My cat did not like the weird cat noises...
YES YES THANK YOU AAAA
This is something I've been working on forever, for several worlds of mine: one with wolves (cuz...I like wolves) and one with an alien species that is not human-like whatsoever. Some of this I figured already and knew, like how cats certainly wouldn't be able to make rounded vowels and how their number systems may work, which is great for confirmation. Some I didn't know, which I am thankful to know! Thank you so so muchhh
People don't seem to remember that most animals don't have uvulas.
I never thought to name the categories (i.e. "rostral"); that's great, I love it.
Did you know that "Pika-Pi" is Pikachu for "Ash". I don't know where I learned that.
Yeah! Its literal translation is Satoshi, which is Ash's Japanese name.
2:30 the click denotes by [!] is NOT palatal (that is the one denotes by the |= sign at
I suggest looking at ethology and the study of animal communication, there's a fun book to start with named Animal Languages by Eva Meijer. You'll learn that a lot of animals communicate with nonverbal signals and learn about a few exemple of animal grammars.
I find the exemple in the video extremely interesting and cool, I never thought of fictional language for animals, that's brilliant!
David J. Peterson did a couple of animal conlangs on the LangTime Studio channel. In fact, he and his collaborator Jessie Sams stream their process on Thursdays.