How do you use linguistics in world-building?

[pawsplay]

Here's an easybake method for creating a fake language for naming purposes.

Step One: Pick a real language to steal from
This is a pretty easy step. It is important, because it is going to help you decide quickly what sounds to include or not include.
Step Two: Decide what phonemes are present in the language
For instance, Japanese does not make a meaningful distinction between "r" and "l" using various sounds halfway in between, so a fake fantasy language would use only "r" or "l" (or maybe one at the beginning of words only and the other in the middle of words, or whatever). Feel free to add or subtract a few sounds from the language you have stolen.
Step Three: Look for patterns
How many syllables? Where do stresses usually fall, at the beginning of words, or the end (or is it a mostly unstressed language)?
Step Four: Apply linguistic drift
Pick similar sounds, and see what happens if you start replacing one sound with another. Adjust to taste. For instance, a hard "C" is similar to a hard "G." What if took Spanish and started replacing hard Gs with hard Cs? Guillermo would become... Kiyermo. That's pretty fantasy sounding. Let's keep going. Guido -> Kido. Gonzalez -> Konsales. Ta-da!
Step Four: Regularize spellings
Since you probably aren't going to invent a new alphabet to go with it, standardize spellings, hardcore. For instance, in our fake Spanish language, hard Cs are always spelled K, and the "i" is always a Spanish "i." Feel free to add weird apostrophes or dashes, but decide what those marks mean and stick to it.
Step Five: Invent a grammar
Loosely, this means figure out how to pluralize, and how to use the name of the country or the language as an adjective. In English, you would say one Spaniard, two Spaniards, Spanish, and Spanish. In Japanese, the same word is frequently used without an explicit pluralization and as a compound word, rather than distinctly what English would consider an adjective or noun. In Arabic, djinni is singular, djinn is plural. Pick a few simple rules, and stick to them.
Step Six: Make Stuff Up
Using the available phonemes, other words as examples, and our invented grammer, add a few unique words.

The result will be a usable fake language. Keep in mind I am assuming a non-tonal language, and it's up to you whether you want to use rules that transform words rather than using suffixes and prefiexes to conjugate them or make them into different parts of speech. For a standard fantasy world, I wouldn't bother with anything fancy.

 

[Heathen72]

Read about how the Lord of the Rings was conceived. Seriously. Tolkien was a linguist before he was a writer and Middle Earth is THE world to look to when considering building a world based on it's languages. IIRC Middle Earth was created as a place in which Elen síla lumenn’ omentielvo - A star shines on the hour of our meeting - might be said as a greeting, and it all grew from there.

Edit: this link might be of interest.

 

[Hand of Evil]

there are a couple of factors I take in:

• Ancient Civilizations - Was there one and how much did it expand and how long was it around. This can become your root or common tongue.
• The Alignment of a land - Yes, there is an alignment, it is just the three; lawful, neutral, & chaotic, this is the amount of change a place may go through in a period of time. Some places like trade centers and ports can have a lot of change. Mountain kingdoms, maybe slow.

Now for the math rule of thump - anything -5 is a different language:

• for every 500 miles linguistics change: -1 to checks
• for every 100 years of lost civilzation: -1 to checks
• for Lawful: +1
• for Neutral: 0
• for Chaotic: -1

So, a kingdom 1500 miles away from the campign area, 600 years after the fall of the Dwarven Empire, that is a chaotic land would be a different language with -10.

 

[Jasperak]

Here is another link to a resource that I tried to use years ago.

Language Construction Kit

 

[AeroDm]

In this thread I posted a few generators that help introduce linguistics to the world. The general idea is that you'd create a tab for each region of the world and settle upon a lexicon. So Region A could create names by a composite of words, Region B could use harsh syllables, and Region C could blend the two with harsh syllables blending into traditional words.

The tool is designed to facilitate customization so it is pretty easy to introduce your preferences. Not all names are perfect, but they present a decent foundation that, with a little polish, can become some excellent names leading to excellent linguistics.

The selling point is that the system is premised on linguistics. This is how names were created in the real world: conventions were created and they repeated often enough that patterns emerged. Spreadsheets help patterns emerge more quickly.