Language Generator for Fantasy and Sci-Fi

I’ve talked about my fascination with language before, but sometimes writers need a little help creating words that make sense in their nascent worlds. I recently found something that streamlines that process.

Vulgar (pardon the terrible name) is a constructed language generator. The generator creates fully realized languages; if you were truly ambitious you could learn some of them. The program attempts to mimic real languages, so there are patterns to the words that develop. For instance, in 50% of generated languages, the word for “tongue” is the same as the word for “language”, and words often share roots as is the case for:

pson /pʂon/ n. paint; v. paint
psopru /ˈpʂopru/ n. painter

I’ve played around with the generator quite a bit and am highlighting a few sample languages below.

via Vulgar

via Vulgar

The above screenshots simply capture the summaries for the languages. The full pages, however, list information about grammar, noun morphology, pronouns, verb conjugation, sample dictionaries, and more. You can also customize the phonemes (sounds) that a language uses, so if you want to create something guttural, ethereal, or entirely alien, you can make that happen. If you go that route, prepare yourself to see lots of accent marks in your created words.

kl̝̊ẽkl̝̊ɞñ̟̊ /kʟ̝̊ẽkʟ̝̊ɞɲ̟̊/ n5. self
kl̝̊ũñ̟̊ /kʟ̝̊ʌ̃ɲ̟̊/ adv. tonight
kl̝̊ɞw /kʟ̝̊ɞw/ v. bring

All of this comes in the free 200-word demo version of the generator, but if you are a passionate randomized language lover, you can purchase the full version, complete with a 2000 word vocabulary per random language, for $19.95.

Because I’m cheap and have no real need for a program like this, I probably won’t be spending my pennies on it. I do, however, think the concept is swell and have spent far too much time seeing what languages Vulgar creates. If you have a chance, check it out, and tell me what you think! Stuff like this is absolutely fascinating.